As an alternative to planning, an approach to high-level agent control based on concurrent program execution is considered. The language includes facilities for prioritizing the concurrent execution, interrupting the execution when certain conditions become true, and dealing with exogenous actions. The language di ers from other procedural formalisms for concurrency in that the initial state can be incompletely speci ed and the primitive actions can be user-de ned by axioms in the situation calculus. In a companion paper, a formal de nition in the situation calculus of such a programming language is presented and illustrated with detailed examples. In this paper, the mathematical properties of the programming language are explored. 1

As an alternative to planning, an approach to highlevel agent control based on concurrent program execution is considered. A formal definition in the situation calculus of such a programming language is presented and illustrated with a detailed example. The language includes facilities for prioritizing the concurrent execution, interrupting the execution when certain conditions become true, and dealing with exogenous actions. The language differs from other procedural formalisms for concurrency in that the initial state can be incompletely specified and the primitive actions can be user-defined by axioms in the situation calculus.

We propose Concurrent Transaction Logic (CT R) as the language for specifying, analyzing, and scheduling of workflows. We show that both local and global properties of workflows can be naturally represented as CT R formulas and reasoning can be done with the use of the proof theory and the semantics of this logic. We describe a transformation that leads to an efficient algorithm for scheduling workflows in the presence of global temporal constraints, which leads to decision procedures for dealing with several safety related properties such as whether every valid execution of the workflow satisfies a particular property or whether a workflow execution is consistent with some given global constraints on the ordering of events in a workflow. We also...

. At a workshop held in Toulouse, France in 1977, Gallaire, Minker and Nicolas stated that logic and databases was a field in its own right (see [131]). This was the first time that this designation was made. The impetus for this started approximately twenty years ago in 1976 when I visited Gallaire and Nicolas in Toulouse, France, which culminated in a workshop held in Toulouse, France in 1977. It is appropriate, then to provide an assessment as to what has been achieved in the twenty years since the field started as a distinct discipline. In this retrospective I shall review developments that have taken place in the field, assess the contributions that have been made, consider the status of implementations of deductive databases and discuss the future of work in this area. 1 Introduction As described in [234], the use of logic and deduction in databases started in the late 1960s. Prominent among the developments was the work by Levien and Maron [202, 203, 199, 200, 201] and Kuhns [1...

: We propose an extension of classical predicate calculus, called Transaction Logic, which provides a logical foundation for the phenomenon of state changes in logic programs and databases. Transaction Logic comes with a natural model theory and a sound and complete proof theory. The proof theory not only verifies programs, but also executes them, which makes this logic an ideal tool for declarative programming of database transactions and state-modifying logic programs. The semantics of Transaction Logic leads naturally to features whose amalgamation in a single logic has proved elusive in the past. These features include hypothetical and committed updates, dynamic constraints on transaction execution, non-determinism, and bulk updates. Finally, Transaction Logic holds promise as a logical model of hitherto non-logical phenomena, including so-called procedural knowledge in AI, and the behavior of object-oriented databases, especially methods with side effects. This paper presents the...

this paper. Similarly, we have shown that integrity constraints can apply to temporal conditions, but that there is no one uniform approach to handling temporal databases. Many areas of the use of integrity constraints still need investigating. Below, we discuss some aspects associated with this topic that require additional work. ffl Implement semantic query optimization and cooperative answering systems. Current relational and deductive database systems do not provide these capabilities, but the current 30 April 1997 ICs: Semantics and Applications---Godfrey, Grant, Gryz, & Minker p. 36 of 46 standards for SQL provide for the incorporation of some aspects of integrity constraints.

A requirements analysis in the emerging field of Semantic Web Services (SWS) (see

A workflow consists of a collection of coordinated tasks designed to carry out a welldefined complex process, such as catalog ordering, trip planning, or a business process in an enterprise. Scheduling of workflows is a problem of finding a correct execution sequence for the workflow tasks, i.e., execution that obeys the constraints that embody the business logic of the workflow. Research on workflow scheduling has largely concentrated on temporal constraints, which specify correct ordering of tasks. Another important class of constraints --- those that arise from resource allocation --- has received relatively little attention in workflow modeling. Since typically resources are not limitless and cannot be shared, scheduling of a workflow execution involves decisions as to which resources to use and when. In this work, we present a framework for workflows whose correctness is given by a set of resource allocation constraints and develop techniques for scheduling such systems. Our framework integrates Concurrent Transaction Logic (CTR) with constraint logic programming (CLP), yielding a new logical formalism, which we call Concurrent Constraint Transaction Logic, or CCTR.

Based on a rigorous analysis of existing workflow management systems and workflow languages, a new workflow language is proposed: YAWL (Yet Another Workflow Language). To identify the differences between the various languages, we have collected a fairly complete set of workflow patterns. Based on these patterns we have evaluated several workflow products and detected considerable differences in their ability to capture control flows for non-trivial workflow processes. Languages based on Petri nets perform better when it comes to state-based workflow patterns. However, some patterns (e.g. involving multiple instances, complex synchronisations or non-local withdrawals) are not easy to map onto (high-level) Petri nets. This inspired us to develop a new language by taking Petri nets as a starting point and adding mechanisms to allow for a more direct and intuitive support of the workflow patterns identified. This paper motivates the need for such a language, specifies the semantics of the language, and shows that soundness can be verified in a compositional way. Although YAWL is intended as a complete workflow language, the focus of this paper is limited to the control-flow perspective.

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