The specification and design of secure context-aware workflows

作者：Zedan Hussein; Al Sultan Saif^*

来源：Expert Systems with Applications, 2017, 86: 367-384.

DOI：10.1016/j.eswa.2017.05.078

• Workflows
• Context-aware
• Security
• Specification

There are two major concerns in the development of current workflow system. The first is security considerations and the second is context awareness.
Modern workflow systems cross the boundaries of organisations, each may have its own security requirements, policies and constraints. Even within one organisation, activities in a workflow system may be executed, in one of its instances, within a platform, but in another instance it may be executed or performed on a different platform with completely different environment. Indeed it may not even be automated. This lends modern workflow systems to be security and context-critical. This is in addition to the fact that some of its activities must satisfy variety of hard timing constraints.
Current specification and design languages for workflow systems are inadequate in dealing with context aware secure workflows. This paper presents a sound wide-spectrum language, CS - Flow, for the specification and design of context-aware, secure workflow systems. As workflow systems have strong temporal aspects (e.g. activity sequencing, deadline, scheduling constraints, etc.), the proposed CS - Flow is equipped with a rich set of temporal constructs together with temporal proof rules which can be used to be integrated with temporal expert systems, hence enhancing the capabilities of current workflow software. In addition, CS - Flow is supported by a proof system which underpins the workflow engine that provides decision service using its state to make some decision and update the workflow state. CS - Flow therefore provides a sound linkage between expert systems and workflow engines.

• 出版日期2017-11-15