Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

As research and development in science and technology continue to improve the lives of Canadians, there is an increasing dependence on computing technology. As the organization of people, resources and information involved in many activities (ranging from business and manufacturing processes to public health and health services delivery) becomes more complex, and tasks are distributed over various locations, several problems emerge: (1) how do we generate plans that allow us to organize the people, the resources, and the information, to get the job done in an optimal fashion; (2) how can we develop a system that can take in information, sometimes from several different sources and in several different formats, and adapt or modify the process automatically; (3) how do we ensure that the process as a whole is behaving as we wish - that is, verify, or guarantee, that at all times and under all situations, the process has properties we want and does not display any undesirable properties. Workflow technology is designed to provide a reliably repeatable pattern of activity for complex processes, enabled by a systematic organization of resources, defined roles and information flows. Our research focuses on the mathematical foundations of workflow technology that will enable us to find solutions to the above three problems. We use and develop methods from mathematical logic to automatically generate plans that can be mathematically proved to have properties that we want. Such proofs are especially important in processes or systems where human lives are at stake. We are working with industry and health authorities to develop prototypes for systems to improve health services delivery. Interfacing these systems with Canada's emerging electronic health records will provide benefits to all Canadians. In the long term, the results of our research will be applicable to many other economic sectors.