OptBPPlanner: Automatic Generation of Optimized Business Process Enactment Plans
Unlike imperative models, the specification of business process (BP) properties in a declarative way allows the user to specify what has to be done instead of having to specify how it has to be done, thereby facilitating the human work involved, avoiding
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Abstract Unlike imperative models, the specification of business process (BP) properties in a declarative way allows the user to specify what has to be done instead of having to specify how it has to be done, thereby facilitating the human work involved, avoiding failures, and obtaining a better optimization. Frequently, there are several enactment plans related to a specific declarative model, each one presenting specific values for different objective functions, e.g., overall completion time. As a major contribution of this work, we propose a method for the automatic generation of optimized BP enactment plans from declarative specifications. The proposed method is based on a constraint-based approach for planning and scheduling the BP activities. These optimized plans can then be used for different purposes like simulation, time prediction, recommendations, and generation of optimized BP models. Moreover, a tool-supported method, called OptBPPlanner, has been implemented to demonstrate the feasibility of our approach. Furthermore, the proposed method is validated through a range of test models of varying complexity.
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Introduction
Nowadays, there exists an increasing interest in aligning information systems in a process-oriented way as well as in the effective management of business processes (BPs, i.e., sets of activities which are performed in coordination in an organization to achieve a business goal) [1]. BP management (BPM) supports BPs using
A. Jiménez (*) • I. Barba • C. del Valle Dpto. Lenguajes y Sistemas Informáticos, University of Seville, Seville, Spain e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected] B. Weber Department of Computer Science, University of Innsbruck, Innsbruck, Austria e-mail: [email protected] H. Linger et al. (eds.), Building Sustainable Information Systems: Proceedings of the 2012 International Conference on Information Systems Development, DOI 10.1007/978-1-4614-7540-8_33, © Springer Science+Business Media New York 2013
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methods, techniques, and software to design, enact, control, and analyze operational processes involving humans, organizations, applications, and other sources of information [2]. Typically, the traditional BPM life cycle [1] includes several phases, i.e., process design and analysis, system configuration, process enactment, and evaluation [1]. The quality of a BP design is essential for BP improvement, which has been ranked as the number one priority for top management by the 2010 Gartner survey [3]. When using an imperative approach, however, there are lots of manual work involved since the modelling expert has to describe exactly how it should be done. The usage of declarative processes, in turn, allows the user to specify what has to be done instead of how, thereby facilitating the human work involved and avoiding failures. There are frequently different ways to execute a declarative model in such a way that all constraints are fulfilled. The different execution alternatives, however, can vary significantly in how wel
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