Workflows are everywhere in service industry, scientific research, as well as daily life, such as the workflow of scientific experiments, customer service, problem solving, information searching, expert finding, and decision making. Technologies that effectively manage workflows are in high demand in order to accelerate scientific discovery and benefit the society.

In this project, we are developing techniques to manage diverse types of workflows. In terms of workflow characteristics, we manage

• Regular workflows: Regular workflows have specification (or policy) well-designed that defines workflow processes with input and output information and their execution orders, such as scientific experiments, a car manufacturing process, insurance claim handling, and credit checking.
• Ad-hoc workflows: Ad-hoc workflows are lack of specifications, and typically consist of impromptu processes and are executed on the fly toward high-level goals, such as help desk problem resolution, question answering in web forums, and information search on web.

In terms of application domain, we manage

• Scientific workflows, which describes "in-silico" experiments in various scientific domains, such as biology, chemistry, physics. One characteristic of scientific workflows is potentially huge datasets generated from workflow execution.
• Business workflows or business processes, such as Insurance Claims processing which are information-intensive and document driven workflows.

Our techniques address various aspects in workflow management, including provenance reasoning, workflow search, optimization, modeling and storage.

Workflow Privacy:We study the interaction between workflow queries, provenance analysis and privacy.

• Susan B. Davidson, Sanjeev Khanna, Sudeepa Roy, Julia Stoyanovich, Val Tannen, and Yi Chen. "On Provenance and Privacy.". Keynote Description. In Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Database Theory (ICDT), 2011.
• Susan B. Davidson, Sanjeev Khanna, Sudeepa Roy, Julia Stoyanovich, Val Tannen, Yi Chen, and Tova Milo. "Enabling Privacy in Provenance-Aware Workflow Systems.". Vision paper. In Proceedings of the 5th Biennial Conference on Innovative Data Systems Research (CIDR), 2011 ,

Provenance query and reasoning:Workflow views of specifications are widely used to provide abstractions, modularization, privacy or simplify provenance analysis. However, a casually designed view may not preserve the dataflow between tasks in the workflow, causing incorrect results for provenance queries. We initiate and tackle a novel research problem of generating sound views that can correctly preserve the dataflows.

• Ziyang Liu, Susan B. Davidson, and Yi Chen. "Generating Sound Workflow Views for Correct Provenance Analysis" , Transactions on Database Systems (TODS) 36(1): 6 .(2011).
• Peng Sun, Ziyang Liu, Susan Davidson and Yi Chen. "Detecting and Resolving Unsound Workflow Views for Correct Provenance Analysis.".In Proceedings of 27th ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data, 2009.
• Peng Sun, Ziyang Liu, SivaramaKrishnan Natarajan, Susan Davidson, Yi Chen. "WOLVES: Achieving Correct Provenance Analysis by Detecting and Resolving UnsoundWorkflow Views".Demo Description. Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment (PVLDB) 2(2): 1614-1617, 2009.

Workflow Search: We address the open problem of defining and generating results for keyword search on workflow specifications with multi-resolution views, and develop efficient algorithms for result generation.

• Ziyang Liu, Qihong Shao, and Yi Chen. "Searching Workflow Hierarchies".Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment (PVLDB) 3(1) (2010) (to appear).
• Qihong Shao, Peng Sun, and Yi Chen. "WISE: a Workflow Information Search Engine."Demo Description. In Proceedings of the 25th International Conference on Data Engineering (ICDE), 2009.

Workflow Optimization: We address the open problem of optimizing ad-hoc workflow execution by mining historical executions.

• Gengxin Miao, Louise Moser, Xifeng Yan, Shu Tao, Yi Chen, and Nikos Anerousis. "Generative Models for Ticket Resolution in Expert Networks".In Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Business Process Management (BPM 2010).
• Peng Sun, Shu Tao, Xifeng Yan, Nikos Anerousis, and Yi Chen. "Content-Aware Resolution Sequence Mining for Ticket Routing".In Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Business Process Management (BPM 2010).
• Qihong Shao, Yi Chen, Shu Tao, Xifeng Yan, and Nikos Anerousis. "Efficient Ticket Routing by Resolution Sequence Mining."In Proceedings of 14th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery & Data Mining, 2008.

Workflow Modeling and Storage

• Susan B. Dividson, Yi Chen, Peng Sun, and Sarah Cohen Boulakia. "On User Views in Scientific Workflow Systems".The First International Workshop on the role of Semantic Web in Provenance Management. (Co-located with the 8th International Semantic Web Conference, ISWC-2009), 2009.
• Qihong Shao, Peng Sun, Yi Chen. "Efficiently Discovering Critical Workflows in Scientific Explorations".Future Generation Computer Systems. 25(5): 577-585, 2009.
• Qihong Shao, Michel Kinsy and Yi Chen. "Storing and Discovering Critical Workflows from Log in Scientific Exploration."In Proceedings of the 2007 IEEE International Workshop on Scientific Workflows (SWF), 2007.
• Natalia Kwasnikowska, Yi Chen, and Zoe Lacroix. "Modeling and Storing Scientific Protocols." In Proceedings of International Workshop on Knowledge Systems in Bioinformatics (KSinBIT), 2006.

Faculty:

            Yi Chen < yi@asu.edu >

Students:

            Yunzhong Liu < liuyz@asu.edu >

Alumni:

            Peng Sun, Ziyang Liu, Sivaramakrishnan N, Qihong Shao, and Michel Kinsy

Collaborators:

            Susan Davidson(UPenn)