AREIS 2012 - The Workshop on Automated Reasoning for Enterprise Information Systems (AREIS)

The Workshop on Automated Reasoning for Enterprise Information Systems (AREIS) will be held on July 1st, 2012 in Manchester, UK. AREIS will be associated with the 6th International Joint Conference on Automated Reasoning (IJCAR-2012), part of the Alan Turing Year 2012, and collocated with The Alan Turing Centenary Conference.
Background
The ultimate goal of Enterprise Information Systems (EIS) is the seamless integration of all the information flowing through a government agency or private enterprise, ranging from finance and accounting to human resources, supply chain, and customers. The promises of EISs are enticing for managers who struggle against incompatible information systems within or across organizations. In an ideal world, EISs would help to execute business processes efficiently and demonstrably compliant with legal and other regulations in place.
Unfortunately, the EIS approach comes with a variety of problems by itself. EISs are highly complex software systems whose design, validation, and deployment require large investments of money, time, and expertise. An EIS should support the flexible specification, management, and execution and monitoring of legal and operational constraints, all non-trivial issues. In addition, these problems are amplified by a gap between those who model the business (business analysts) on the one hand, and those who have to implement it with EIS on the other hand.
For example, security requirements should be specified in a natural and high-level way so that referring to information resources is independent of where the information is stored and the accesses to the information can either be direct or indirect. Also the enforcement of the security constraints may be complex because it may depend on a variety of security mechanisms, such as firewalls, host login permissions, file permissions, DBMS access control, and application-specific security mechanisms. Again, there is a huge gap between security officers and managers deciding what level of business-unit segregation should be enforced.
Due to the lack of flexible techniques to design and analyze the seamless and secure integration of information resources, it seems particularly interesting to investigate logical or, more in general, formal approaches to such problems which can be effectively supported by state-of-the-art automated reasoning systems or other verification tools.
In analogy to software/hardware development, say, one may ask to what extent the chain from business modelling to deployment and execution with EISs is supported by formal methods. Indeed, well-known approaches like Petri nets, temporal model checking, description logics, deontic logic and (to a lesser degree) first-order theorem proving have been proposed to address specific aspects. In general, however, it seems that automated reasoning techniques logical methods have not been exploited to their full potential so as to come up with richer models, more expressive specification languages, and more precise (automated) analysis techniques, which are needed for building more robust EISs with respect to the integration of their many facets.
Workshop Topics
Analysis of business rules for logical errors (inconsistencies, redundancies etc)
Combining business rules, business processes and their languages
Semantics of and reasoning with existing modelling techniques (e.g. BPMN)
Logical analysis of existing EIS
Compliance reasoning
Data-intense process reasoning
Executing, planning, analyzing, and monitoring business processes
Security policies and mechanisms (authentication, authorization, obligation etc)
User-end tools and techniques for formal modeling (e.g. controlled natural language)
Constraint-based reasoning
Business decision modeling and execution
Novel applications of model checking techniques for business modeling
Projects reports (success stories and failures)
The goal of the AIRES workshop is to foster the exchange of new ideas, methodologies, specification and analysis techniques on the above topics with a relevance for "Automated Reasoning".
Submission
Beside mature work, we also solicit preliminary work or work in progress to be presented. Submissions must not exceed 12 pages (Springer LLNCS format) and will be reviewed by the programme committee for inclusion in the workshop program. To submit a paper, please go to the EasyChair AREIS page and follow the instructions there. The final versions of the selected papers will be collected in a volume to be distributed at the workshop and made accessible on the web.
Important Dates
Paper submissions deadline April 16, 2012
Notification of acceptance May 7, 2012
Final version due May 28, 2012
Workshop July 1, 2012
Programme Committee
Rafael Accorsi Universitaet Freiburg
Peter Baumgartner (Co-Chair) NICTA and ANU
Giampaolo Bella Università di Catania
Nikolaj Bjorner Microsoft Research
Luca Compagna SAP Research
Jacob Feldman OPENRULES
Guido Governatori NICTA
Michael Huth Imperial College London
Silvio Ranise (Co-Chair) Fondazione Bruno Kessler (FBK-Irst)
Christophe Ringeissen LORIA-INRIA
For further information on the workshop, please contact any of the organisers.