Principles for interactive acquisition and validation of workflows

Abstract

Workflows, also known as process models, are essential in many science and engineering fields. Workflows express compositions of individual steps or tasks that assembled together account for various aspects of an overall process. When workflows include dozens of components and many links among them, the creation of valid workflows becomes challenging since users have to track many interdependencies and constraints. This article describes principles for assisting users to create valid workflows that are based on two knowledge acquisition systems that we have developed. A shared goal in these projects was to enable end users who do not have computer science backgrounds, such as biologists, military officers or engineers, to create valid end-to-end process models or workflows. Our approach exploits knowledge-rich descriptions of the individual components and their constraints in order to validate the composition, and uses artificial intelligence planning techniques in order to systematically verify formal properties of valid workflows. Both systems analyse partial workflows created by the user, determine whether they are consistent with the background knowledge that the system has, notifies the user of issues to be resolved in the current workflow, and suggests to the user what actions could be taken to correct those issues.

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