Optimal Top-K Query Evaluation for Weighted Business Processes

A Business Process (BP for short) consists of a set of activities that achieve some business goal when combined in a flow. Among all the (maybe infinitely many) possible execution flows of a BP, analysts are often interested in identifying flows that are “most important”, according to some weight metric. This paper studies the following problem: given a specification of such a BP, a weighting function over BP execution flows, a query, and a number k, identify the k flows with the highest weight among those satisfying the query. We provide here, for the first time, a provably optimal algorithm for identifying the top-k weighted flows of a given BP, and use it for efficient top-k query evaluation.

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: PVLDB
• Authors: Daniel Deutch, Tova Milo, Neoklis Polyzotis, Tom Yam
• Keywords: BP Execution, Possible Execution flows, PVLDB 2010, Top-k Query Evaluation