Mario Eduardo Sánchez Puccini

I am funded by the Vlaamse Interuniversitaire Raad in the context of a project named Caramelos. The project consists of a close collaboration between the Universidad de los Andes (Bogotá, Colombia) and the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (Brussels, Belgium). My research is closely related to workflow and process execution and is part of the Cumbia project.

As a result I perform my PhD research at the following labs:
System and Software Engineering Lab (VUB-SSEL)
Programming Technology Lab (VUB-PROG)
Software Construction Group (Uniandes)

Workflow languages and applications are currently used in a lot of contexts where there is a need to coordinate the work performed by humans or the execution of several applications. The problem with current languages to describe workflows, is that each one has certain limitations in its expressiveness and in its capacity to evolve. This creates problems especially to maintain and introduce new requirements into some applications. Our work is then directed towards the development of new models and tools to build very extensible workflow-based applications.

Our proposal is based on three main ideas. The first one is that in workflows it is possible to identify and separate concerns, in a similar way to what is done in aspect-oriented programming; some sample concerns are Control, Time, Data and Resources. The second idea is that these concerns can be implemented using extensible, executable models, which should run in a synchronized way. The third idea is that the executable models can be implemented using a coordination model based on synchronized state machines. The base element of this coordination model is called an 'open object': it offers a synchronization mechanism based on event passing and method calls, as well as several advantages towards extensibility. Following these ideas, we are currently working on the detailed specification of the open objects' structure and behavior, and the definition of dedicated models to represent some of the more common concerns.

Keywords: Workflow Languages, Coordination Models, Separation of Concerns.