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Weak, Strong and Dynamic Controllability of Access-Controlled Workflows Under Conditional Uncertainty

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Business Process Management (BPM 2017)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 10445))

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Abstract

A workflow (WF) is a formal description of a business process in which single atomic work units (tasks), organized in a partial order, are assigned to processing entities (agents) in order to achieve some business goal(s). A workflow management system must coordinate the execution of tasks and WF instances. Usually, the assignment of tasks to agents is accomplished by external constraints not represented in a WF. An access-controlled workflow (ACWF) extends a classical WF by explicitly representing agent availability for each task and authorization constraint. Authorization constraints model which users are authorized for which tasks depending on “who did what”. Recent research has addressed temporal controllability of WFs under conditional and temporal uncertainty. However, controllability analysis for ACWFs under conditional uncertainty has never been addressed before. In this paper, we define weak, strong and dynamic controllability of ACWFs under conditional uncertainty, we present algorithmic approaches to address each of these types of controllability, and we synthesize execution strategies that specify which user has been (or will be) assigned to which task.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    SoD is a security policy saying that a subset of tasks must be carried out by different users, whereas BoD says that a subset of tasks must be carried out by the same user.

  2. 2.

    Two tasks with consistent labels must be considered in at least one WF execution.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Dipartimento di Informatica, Università di Verona, Verona, Italy

    Matteo Zavatteri, Carlo Combi & Roberto Posenato

  2. Department of Informatics, King’s College London, London, UK

    Luca Viganò

Authors
  1. Matteo Zavatteri
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  2. Carlo Combi
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  3. Roberto Posenato
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  4. Luca Viganò
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Matteo Zavatteri .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain

    Josep Carmona

  2. Department of Computer Science, University of Paderborn, Paderborn, Germany

    Gregor Engels

  3. Department of Supply Chain and Information Systems, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pennsylvania, USA

    Akhil Kumar

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Zavatteri, M., Combi, C., Posenato, R., Viganò, L. (2017). Weak, Strong and Dynamic Controllability of Access-Controlled Workflows Under Conditional Uncertainty. In: Carmona, J., Engels, G., Kumar, A. (eds) Business Process Management. BPM 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10445. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-65000-5_14

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-65000-5_14

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