Research Perspective - Chun Ouyang

I conduct research in the areas of business process management, service computing, protocol engineering, and Petri nets and state space analysis. My efforts are currently focused on the following research topics:

• Business process modelling and execution/automation
• Transformation between different process languages
• Semantics and analysis of processes/Web services
• Workflow management systems and workflow patterns
• Application of business process management to the Screen Business

Please go to the Publications page for a list of my publications. Some of my publications (full-text) are also available from QUT ePrints archives. Some citations to my work can be found on Google Scholar.

Some of my research output is showcased in the following sites:

• YAWL: A fully-featured open-source workflow management system based on the workflow patterns and built around a service-oriented architecture.
• YAWL4Film: A workflow system that extends the general YAWL system to support the automation of film production processes.
• BPMN and BPEL transformation tools: A collection of open-source tools to transform process models between BPMN and BPEL and to detect semantic errors in BPMN and BPEL process models by transforming them into Petri nets.
• BPMCenter: Portal aggregating various research activities in the area of business process management focusing on joint projects involving Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e) in the Netherlands and Queensland University of Technology (QUT) in Australia.

I am/was involved in the following major research projects:

• BPM for the Creative Industries: this project is part of the ARC Center of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovations and is led by Prof Michael Rosemann and A/Prof Arthur ter Hofstede at QUT. Since I joined the project in June 2007, I have been undertaking research in investigating how the application of BPM technology can deliver benefits to the field of screen business. In particular, I was in charge of the development of a workflow system-based prototype for automating film productions. The system known as YAWL4Film was successfully deployed in two pilot projects at the Australian Film, Television, and Radio School (AFTRS) during October 2007. The project team are now working closely with AFTRS and an independent film and TV production company to further develop and customise the system so that it can be used in the production of a medium-budget, live-action feature film.

• BABEL: this refers to an ARC Discovery Grant "Expressiveness Comparison and Interchange Facilitation between Business Process Execution Languages" led by A/Prof Arthur ter Hofstede and A/Prof Marlon Dumas at QUT and Prof Wil van der Aalst at TU/e. I worked as one of the main researchers on this project from December 2004 to May 2007. During this period, I undertook research in the areas of workflow foundations, inter-workflow mappings and business process modelling and execution. In particular, I defined mappings from Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (WS-BPEL) and Business Process Modelling Notation (BPMN) to Petri nets for detecting semantic errors in BPMN and BPEL process models, and a mapping from BPMN to WS-BPEL so that a process modelled in BPMN can be automated using an existing BPEL engine such as Oracle BPEL Process Manager.

• Development of Advanced State Space Reduction Techniques: this was a joint project between University of South Australia (UniSA), Adelaide University and University of Arhus in Denmark, and was supported by an ARC Discovery Grant. In this project, I closely worked with Prof Jonathan Billington, Dr Lars Michael Kristensen, and Guy Gallasch on applying an advanced sweep-line state space reduction technique for analysis of an e-commerce protocol proposed by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF).

• Modeling and Analysis of Avionics Mission Systems: this was a joint project between the Computer Systems Engineering Centre at UniSA and the Australian Defence Science and Technology Organisation (DSTO). In this project, I closely worked with Prof Jonathan Billington and Dr Jörn Freiheit on modelling and analysis of Ada structure graphs and process structure charts using Coloured Petri nets.

Before all the above, my PhD research was carried out on formal specification and verification of the Internet Open Trading Protocol (IOTP). IOTP aims to provide reliable common transaction services to multiple trading parties over the Internet. It was developed by IETF as the Request for Comments (RFC) 2801. The RFC contains an informal narrative description of IOTP. During my PhD research, I applied a protocol engineering methodology using Coloured Petri nets to develop models of IOTP at different levels of abstraction in order to check if the protocol works correctly as specified in the RFC.