IJCAR 2012 Workshop
AREIS: Automated Reasoning for Enterprise Information Systems

Call for Papers

http://users.cecs.anu.edu.au/~baumgart/AREIS/

General Information
--------------------
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 modeling 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 May 3, 2012
Notification of acceptance May 24, 2012
Final version due May 31, 2012
Workshop July 1, 2012

Programme Committee
--------------------
Rafael Accorsi Universitaet Freiburg
Peter Baumgartner (Co-Chair) NICTA and ANU
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 (Peter.Baumgartner@nicta.com.au and/or ranise@fbk.eu).