Optimal top-k query evaluation for weighted business processes

A Business Process (BP for short) consists of a set of ac- tivities that achieve some business goal when combined in a flow. Among all the (maybe infinitely many) possible execu- tion 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 ex- ecution 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 algo- rithm for identifying the top-k weighted flows of a given BP, and use it for efficient top-k query evaluation.