SPAM Talk: A Declarative Framework for Enterprise Systems

When & Where: 12:30pm, Friday, February 3, 2006, Room 200 AKW

Abstract:

This talk sketches some recent research toward a declarative process-based framework for ERP systems. In particular, the talk describes the following two areas:

• A declarative language for compositional specification of contracts governing the exchange of resources. The language extends Eber and Peyton Jones's declarative language for specifying financial contracts to the exchange of money, goods and services amongst multiple parties, and it complements McCarthy's Resources, Events and Agents (REA) accounting model with a view-independent formal contract model that supports definition of user-defined contracts, automatic monitoring under execution, and user-definable analysis of their state before, during and after execution.
• A pi-calculus encoding of common workflow control patterns, which leads to a pi-calculus-based macro language for workflow specification. The encodings presented here demonstrate some of the strengths and weaknesses of pi-calculus for business process formalization vis a vis Petri nets and concrete languages such as BPEL and YAWL.