Jianwen Su

University of California, Santa Barbara | UCSB · CCS - Department of Computer Science

A business process (workflow) is an assembly of tasks to accomplish a business goal. Real-world workflow models often demanded to change due to new laws and policies, changes in the environment, and so on. To understand the inner workings of a business process to facilitate changes, workflow logs have the potential to enable inspecting, monitoring,...

In existing deep learning methods, almost all loss functions assume that sample data values used to be predicted are the only correct ones. This assumption does not hold for laboratory test data. Test results are often within tolerable or imprecision ranges, with all values in the ranges acceptable. By considering imprecision samples, we propose an...

The Internet of Things (IoT) refers to a network of connected devices that collects and exchanges data through the Internet. These things can be artificial or natural and interact as autonomous agents that form a complex system. In turn, business process management (BPM) was established to analyze, discover, design, implement, execute, monitor, and...

Test data measured by medical instruments often carry imprecise ranges that include the true values. The latter are not obtainable in virtually all cases. Most learning algorithms, however, carry out arithmetical calculations that are subject to uncertain influence in both the learning process to obtain models and applications of the learned models...

A business process or workflow is an assembly of tasks that accomplishes a business goal. Business process management is the study of the design, configuration/implementation, enactment and monitoring, analysis, and re-design of workflows. The traditional methodology for the re-design and improvement of workflows relies on the well-known sequence o...

The Internet of Things (IoT) refers to a network of connected devices collecting and exchanging data over the Internet. These things can be artificial or natural, and interact as autonomous agents forming a complex system. In turn, Business Process Management (BPM) was established to analyze, discover, design, implement, execute, monitor and evolve...

In April 2016, a community of researchers working in the area of Principles of Data Management (PDM) joined in a workshop at the Dagstuhl Castle in Germany. The workshop was organized jointly by the Executive Committee of the ACM Symposium on Principles of Database Systems (PODS) and the Council of the International Conference on Database Theory (I...

A recent paper has proposed new ordering relations with uncertainty between the executions of tasks in acyclic process models. However, this approach cannot work for cyclic process models and those with silent transitions and non-free-choice constructs. In practice most non-trivial process models contain cycles and about 10 % to 20 % have also non-...

Current translation approaches from activity-centric process models to artifact-centric Guard Stage Milestone (GSM) models operate on the syntactic level. While such translations allow equivalent traces (behaviors) of executions, we argue that they generate poor GSM models for the intended audience (including business managers and process modelers)...

There exist two major modeling paradigms for business process modeling: The predominant activity centric one and the artifact centric paradigm. Both are suitable for modeling and for executing business processes. However, process models are typically designed from different perspectives. Current translation methods operate on the syntactic level, p...

In most BPM systems (a.k.a. workflow systems), the data for process execution is scattered across databases for enterprise, auxiliary local data stores within the BPM systems, and even file systems (e.g., specification of process models). The interleaving nature of data management and BP execution and the lack of a coherent conceptual data model fo...

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed proceedings of five international workshops held in Ljubljana, Slovenia, in conjunction with the 28th International Conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering, CAiSE 2016, in June 2016. The 16 full and 9 short papers were carefully selected from 51 submissions. The associated workshops were...

BPaaS, or Business Process as a Service, is an advanced model of SaaS in which the Business Process Management system is deployed as a hosted service and accessed over the Internet without the need for the user to deploy and maintain additional on-premise IT infrastructure. In this paper, we present an architectural design and implementation of a B...

DecSerFlow is a declarative language to specify business processes. It consists of a set of temporal predicates that can be translated into LTL but limited to finite sequences. This paper focuses on the “conformance problem”: Given a set of DecSerFlow constraints, is there an execution sequence that satisfies all given constraints? This paper provi...

In most business process management (BPM) systems, the interleaving nature of data management and business process (BP) execution makes it hard for providing “Business-Process-as-a-Service” (BPaaS) due to the enormous effort required on maintaining both the engines as well as the data for the clients. In this paper we formulate a concept of a self-...

A choreography models interoperation among multiple participants in a distributed environment. Existing choreography specification languages focus mostly on message sequences and are weak in modeling data shared by participants and used in sequence constraints. They further assume a fixed number of participants and make no distinction between parti...

An important omission in current development practice for business process (or workflow) management systems is modeling of data & access for a business process, including relationship of the process data and the persistent data in the underlying enterprise database(s). This paper develops and studies a new approach to modeling data for business pro...

This paper studies the following problem: given a relational data schema, a temporal property over the schema, and a process that modifies the data instances, how can we enforce the property during each step of the process execution? Temporal properties are defined using a first-order future time LTL (FO-LTL) and they are evaluated under finite and...

National Trauma Data Bank (NTDB) is the largest repository of statistically robust trauma data in the United States, assembled from trauma centers across the country. NTDB data has been commonly used in risk adjusted studies in the medical communities to describe patterns of injury, interventions and patient outcomes in order to better tailor traum...

Traditional approaches to Business Process Management (BPM) focus primarily on the process aspects, and treat the persistent data accessed and manipulated by the business processes as second class citizens. A recent approach to BPM, based on "business artifacts", is centered on a modeling framework that places data and process on an equal footing....

Data and its manipulation are essential in business processes (BPs). It is desirable to ensure within BP executions that every update to a database server guarantees to satisfy all relevant data integrity constraints (ICs). Furthermore, the earlier in a BP execution a violation is detected the more dependable the BP is. This paper studies the Proce...

A choreography models a collaboration between multiple participants. Existing choreography specification languages focus mostly on message sequences and are weak in modeling data shared by participants and used in sequence con-straints. They also assume a fixed number of participants and make no distinction between participant type and participant...

Business processes (BPs) can be designed using a variety of model-ing languages and executed in different systems. In most BPM applications, the semantics of BPs needed for runtime management is often scattered across BP models, execution engines, and auxiliary stores of workflow systems. The in-ability to capture such semantics in BP models is the...

For sequential processes and workflows (i.e., pipelined tasks), each enactment (process instance) only has one task being performed at each time instant. When a process allows tasks to be performed in parallel, an enactment may have a number of tasks being performed concurrently and this number may change in time. We define the “degree of paralleli...

Integrity constraints on data are typically defined when workflow and business process models are developed. Keeping data consistent is vital for workflow execution. Traditionally, enforcing data integrity constraints is left for the underlying database system, while workflow system focuses primarily on performing tasks. This paper presents a new m...

Being able to quickly respond to change is critical to any organizations to stay competitive in the marketplace. It is widely acknowledged that it is a necessity to provide flexibility in the process model to handle changes at both model level as well as instance level. Motivated by a business policy rich and highly dynamic business process in the...

Being able to determine the degree of similarity between process models is important for management, reuse, and analysis of business process models. In this paper we propose a novel method to determine the degree of similarity between process models, which exploits their semantics. Our approach is designed for labeled Petri nets as these can be see...

Data plays a fundamental role in modeling and management of business processes and workflows. Among the recent “data-aware” workflow models, artifact-centric models are particularly interesting. (Business) artifacts are the key data entities that are used in workflows and can reflect both the business logic and the execution states of a running wor...

The ability to compose existing services to form new functionality is one of the most promising ideas enabled by SOA and the framework of (web) services. A composition or a workflow often involves services distributed over a network and possibly many organizations and administrative domains. Nondeterminism could occur in a composition in at least t...

There is growing urgency in computer science circles regarding an impending crisis in parallel programming. Emerging computing platforms, from multicore processors to cloud computing, predicate their performance growth on the development of software ...

Artifact-centric business process models allow to describe artifacts (data objects) and their life cycles, which allow designers to focus on individual artifact in business processes, thus simplifies the design and analysis of business process model. However, this feature is a double-edged sword. The description of the relationships between artifac...

The finite field Kakeya problem deals with the way lines in different directions can overlap in a vector space over a finite field. This problem came up in the study of certain Euclidean problems and, independently, in the search for explicit randomness ...

In this paper we initiate a study on comparing artifact-centric workflow schemas, in terms of the ability of one schema to emulate the possible behaviors of another schema. Artifact-centric workflows are centered around “business artifacts”, which contain both a data schema, which can hold all of the data about a key business entity as it passes th...

Business workflow assembles together a collection of tasks or activities in order to accomplish a business objective. Management of business workflows is facing many significant challenges, including in particular design, making changes, interoperations, etc. A key step in addressing these challenges is to develop techniques for mapping logical wor...

Almost all medium- and large-scale businesses rely on electronic workflow systems to manage their business processes. A key ch al- lenge is to enable the easy re-use and modification of these wo rk- flow schemas and their piece-parts, so that they can be adapte d to new business situations. This paper describes an approach for auto- matic construct...

This chapter describes a design methodology for business processes and workflows that focuses first on “business artifacts”, which represent key (real or conceptual) business entities, including both the business-relevant data about them and their macro-level lifecycles. Individual workflow services (a.k.a. tasks) are then incorporated, by specifyi...

This chapter describes a design methodology for business processes and workflows that focuses first on "business artifacts", which represent key (real or conceptual) business entities, including both the business-relevant data about them and their macro-level lifecycles. Individual workflow services (a.k.a. tasks) are then incorporated, by specifyi...

The paradigm of automated service composition through the integration of existing services promises a fast and efficient development of new services in cooperative service (e.g., business) environments. Although the "why" part of this paradigm is well understood, many key pieces are missing to utilize the available opportunities. Recently "service...

Integrating service description, discovery, and invocation functionalities presents several fundamental problems in the management of web services and is a basic problem for composing web services over a network. In this paper, we present the design of a system called "Semantic service, Wrapper, and Invocation Manager" (SSWiM) which provides these...

WSDL web services are built around the request-reply framework, requiring service invocation to be bundled together with all relevant data in a single message. Inefficiency becomes evident as web service providers begin to offer more robust services that require massive datasets (e.g., multimedia and scientific data). Under the WSDL standards, thes...

An interesting issue in moving object databases is to find similar trajectories of moving objects. Previous work on this topic focuses on movement patterns (trajectories with time dimension) of moving objects, rather than spatial shapes (trajectories without time dimension) of their trajectories. In this paper we propose a simple and effective way...

A conversation protocol specifies the desired global behaviors of a Web service composition in a top-down fashion. Before implementing a conversation protocol, its realizability has to be determined-that is, can a bottom-up Web service composition be synthesized so that it generates exactly the same set of conversations as specified by the protocol...

A conversation protocol specifies the desired global behaviors of a Web service composition in a top-down fashion. Before implementing a conversation protocol, its realizability has to be determined—that is, can a bottom-up Web service composition be synthesized so that it generates exactly the same set of conversations as specified by the protocol...

A fundamental promise of service oriented architecture (SOA) lies in the ease of integrating sharable information, processes, and other resources through interactions among the shared components that are modeled as web services. It is expected that not only the participating services are complex and have observable states, but the number of interac...

Business process (BP) modeling is a building block for design and management of business processes. Two fundamental aspects of BP modeling are: a formal framework that well integrates both control flow and data, and a set of tools to assist all phases of a BP life cycle. This paper is an initial attempt to address both aspects of BP modeling. We vi...

SOA has influenced business process modeling and management. Re- cent business process models have elevated data representation to the same level as control flows, for example, the artifact-centric business process models allow the life cycle properties of artifacts (data objects) to be specified and analyzed. In this paper, we develop a specificat...

BPEL is used for specifying Web services. In spite of numerous recent efforts in both statically analyzing service specifications and support for service execution, there is still an urgent need for quality assurance for BPEL services in two aspects: (1) lack of tools, techniques to aid under-standing BPEL service specifications and execution in or...

The main objective of composing web services is to identify usable web services through discovery and to orchestrate or assemble selected services according to the goal specification. In this paper, we formulate and study a framework of composing web services through discovery from a given goal service. A general algorithm for composition with or w...

A goal of the service oriented paradigm/SOA is to facilitate automated service composition. Motivated by scenarios in e-business and e-science, the automated composition problem starts with a specification of a "goal" service and a set of searchable existing services. The composition problem relies on discovering relevant services at the semantic l...

Business artifacts are the core entities used by businesses to record information pertinent to their operations. Business operational models are representations of the processing of business artifacts. Traditional process modeling approaches focus on the actions taken to achieve a certain goal (verb-centric). Business artifact-centric modeling star...

In many advanced database applications (e.g., multimedia databases), data objects are transformed into high-dimensional points and manipulated in high-dimensional space. One of the most important but costly operations is the similarity join that combines similar points from multiple datasets. In this paper, we examine the problem of processing K-ne...

We develop a framework to compose services through discovery and orchestration for a given goal service. Tightening tech niques are used in composition algorithms to achieve "completeness".

Conversations provide an intuitive and simple model for analyzing interactions among composite web services. A conversation is the global sequence of messages exchanged among the peers participating in a composite web service. Interactions in a composite web service can be analyzed by investigating the temporal properties of its conversations. Conv...

A composite Web service consists of a set of individual services (or peers), which interact with each other via messages. A conversation is a global sequence of messages exchanged among peers participating in a composite Web service. Interestingly, conversation behavior differs significantly for synchronous and asynchronous communication, even if p...

In this paper, we describe SPiDeR, a peer-to-peer (P2P) based framework that supports a variety of Web service discovery oper- ations. SPiDeR organizes the service providers into a structured P2P overlay and allows them to advertise and lookup services in a com- pletely decentralized and dynamic manner. It supports three difierent kinds of search o...

We present a framework for analyzing interactions among Web services that communicate with asynchronous messages. We model the interactions among the peers participating in a composite Web service as conversations, the global sequences of messages exchanged among the peers. This naturally leads to the following model checking problem: Given an LTL...

A conversation protocol is a top-down specifica- tion framework which specifies desired global behav- iors of a web service composition. In our earlier work (6) we studied the problem of realizability, i.e., given a con- versation protocol, can a web service composition be synthesized to generate behaviors as specified by the pro- tocol. Several su...

A fundamental promise of the web services paradigm lies in the ease of sharing information and resources that are provided in the form of web processes. A common approach to support such sharing is to allow web processes to interact through an asynchronous messaging mechanism. This approach lies in the core of many web services standards (SOAP, WSD...

Let be a class of (possibly nondeterministic) language acceptors with a one-way input tape. A system of automata in is composable if for every string of symbols accepted by , there is an assignment of each symbol in to one of the 's such that for each , the subsequence of assigned to is accepted by . For a nonnegative integer , a -lookahead delegat...

Web service discovery is a key problem as the number of services is expected to increase dramatically. Service discovery at the present time is based primarily on keywords, or interfaces of Web services through the use of ontology. We argue that "behavior signatures" as operational level description should play an important role in the service disc...

The paradigm of automated e-service composition through the integration of existing services promises a fast and efficient development of new services in cooperative business environments. Although the "why" part of this paradigm is well understood, many key pieces are missing to utilize the available opportunities. Recently "e-service communities"...

Web services technologies enable flexible and dynamic interoperation of autonomous software and information systems. A central challenge is the development of modeling techniques and tools for eanbling the (semi-)automatic composition and analysis of these services, taking into account their semantic and behavioral properties. This paper presents a...

In main memory systems, the L2 cache typically employs cache line sizes of 32-128 bytes. These values are relatively small compared to high-dimensional data, e.g., >32D. The consequence is that existing techniques (on low-dimensional data) that minimize cache misses are no longer effective. We present a novel index structure, called Δ-tree, to spee...

An interesting issue in moving objects databases is to find similar trajectories of moving objects. Previous work on this topic focuses on movement patterns (trajectories with time dimension) of moving objects, rather than spatial shapes (trajectories without time dimension) of their trajectories. In this paper we propose a simple and effective way...

A critical issue in moving object databases is to develop appropriate indexing structures for continuously moving object locations so that queries can still be performed efficiently. However, such location changes typically cause a high volume of updates, which in turn poses serious problems on maintaining index structures. In this paper we propose...

Let \({\mathcal M}\) be a class of (possibly nondeterministic) language acceptors with a one-way input tape. A system (A; A 1, ..., A r ) of automata in \({\mathcal M}\), is composable if for every string w = a 1 ... a n of symbols accepted by A, there is an assignment of each symbol in w to one of the A i ’s such that if w i is the subsequence ass...

Web-based software applications which enable user interaction through web browsers have been extremely successful. Nowadays one can look for and buy almost anything online using such applications, from a book to a car. A promising extension to this framework is the area of web services, web-accessible software applications which interact with each...

A conversation protocol is a top-down specification framework which specifies desired global behaviors of a Web service composition. In our earlier work (Fu et al., 2003) we studied the problem of realizability, i.e., given a conversation protocol, can a Web service composition be synthesized to generate behaviors as specified by the protocol. Seve...

We adapt and optimize the BD-tree for main memory data processing. We compare the memory-based BD-tree against the B⁺-tree and CSB⁺-tree. We present cost models for exact match query for these indexes, including L2 cache and translation lookahead buffer (TLB) miss model and execution time model. We also implemented these struc...

This paper presents Web Service Analysis Tool (WSAT), a tool for analyzing and verifying composite web service designs, with the state of the art model checking techniques. Web services are loosely coupled distributed systems communicating via XML messages. Communication among web services is asynchronous, and it is supported by messaging platforms...

Since the new terms, “Semantic Web” and “Web services”, have been introduced, researchers have followed two different roads. Following one road, academia has focused on developing a new set of languages to enable the automation of Web services execution and integration based on the Semantic Web. On the other road, industry has taken the lead to pro...

This paper focuses on the realizability problem of a framework for modeling and specifying the global behaviors of reactive electronic services (e-services). In this framework, Web accessible programs (peers) communicate by asynchronous message passing, and a virtual global watcher silently listens to the network. The global behavior is characteriz...

The use of XML as the de facto data exchange standard has allowed integration of heterogeneous web based software systems regardless of implementation platforms and programming languages. On the other hand, the rich tree-structured data representation, and the expressive XML query languages (such as XPath) make formal specification and verification...

The use of XML as the de facto data exchange standard has allowed integration of heterogeneous web based software systems regardless of implementation platforms and programming languages. On the other hand, the rich tree-structured data representation, and the expressive XML query languages (such as XPath) make formal specification and verification...

This paper presents a set of tools and techniques for analyzing interactions of composite web services which are specified in BPEL and communicate through asynchronous XML messages. We model the interactions of composite web services as conversations, the global sequence of messages exchanged by the web services. As opposed to earlier work, our too...

There are two main challenges in the verification of composite web services: 1) Asynchronous messaging makes most interesting problems undecidable, and 2) rich data representation (XML) and data manipulation (e.g. XPath query) forbids direct application of model checking tools. In this paper, we present a top-down specification and verification app...