Automatic workflow verification and generation

  • Authors:

  • Shiyong Lu;Arthur Bernstein;Philip Lewis

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Computer Science, Wayne State University, Detroit, MI;Department of Computer Science, State University of New York, Stony Brook, NY;Department of Computer Science, State University of New York, Stony Brook, NY

  • Venue:
  • Theoretical Computer Science
  • Year:
  • 2006

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Abstract

Correctness is an important aspect of workflow management systems. However, most of the workflow literature focuses only on the modeling aspects and assumes that a workflow is correct if during the execution it respects the control and data dependency specified by the workflow designer. To address the correctness question properly we propose a new workflow model based on Hoare semantics that allows to: (1) automatically check if the desired outcome of a workflow can be produced by its actual implementation, (2) automatically synthesize a workflow implementation from the workflow specification and a given task library.In particular we: (1) formalize the semantics of workflows and tasks with pre-and postconditions, (2) for each control construct we provide a set of sound inference rules formalizing its semantics. While most of our workflow constructs are standard, two of them are new: the universal and the existential constructs. We then describe algorithms for automatically checking the correctness of workflows and for automatic workflow generation.