On September 29th, 2017, Ricardo Massa Ferreira Lima presented the REFlex Water engine.
Abstract: This project proposes the conception of a novel water management framework, called REFlex Water, that uses declarative business processes to specify the management policies and to control the actions of water managers. The main component of REFlex Water is the REFlex Rule Engine, which analyzes the rules of the declarative business process to identify inconsistencies or threats to the correct execution of the process. The engine controls the process execution, avoiding conflicts (deadlocks or livelocks) and the state space explosion observed in the existing engines. The REFlex Water framework integrates three main technologies: (1) IoT infrastructure for water management systems; (2) the REFlex Rule Engine for executing declarative processes; (3) CEP (Complex Event Process) Engine for interpreting great amount of sensors data in real time. Many works has addressed the first technology. This project innovates in integrating these three technologies into a single water management framework. We believe that declarative processes can provide the desired freedom the water managers need to perform their daily controlling activities, which relies mostly on their experience, but keeping the control over strict water policies. Likewise, the CEP engine brings the capacity for compiling signals from a complex network of sensors into a contextual water management information in real-time. Therefore, we expect to produce a complete solution for the efficient and safe management of complex water systems.
Mini-bio: Ricardo Massa Ferreira Lima is an assistant professor at Informatics Center of the Federal University of Pernambuco. Ricardo received his PhD degree in computer science from Federal University of Pernambuco, in 2000. He was a post-doc in the formal methods group at Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, in 2001. Since 2010, Ricardo has been investigating the development of efficient and safe engines for executing declarative business processes as well as the application this technology in industrial scenarios. He supervised 2 PhD thesis and 3 MSc dissertation on these topics. Currently, four PhD students are working on themes related to the REFlex Water project.
