What Automated Planning Can Do for Business Process Management

Business Process Management (BPM) is a central element of today organizations. Despite over the years its main focus has been the support of processes in highly controlled domains, nowadays many domains of interest to the BPM community are characterized by ever-changing requirements, unpredictable environments and increasing amounts of data that influence the execution of process instances. Under such dynamic conditions, BPM systems must increase their level of automation to provide the reactivity and flexibility necessary for process management. On the other hand, the Artificial Intelligence (AI) community has concentrated its efforts on investigating dynamic domains that involve active control of computational entities and physical devices (e.g., robots, software agents, etc.). In this context, Automated Planning, which is one of the oldest areas in AI, is conceived as a model-based approach to synthesize autonomous behaviours in automated way from a model. In this paper, we discuss how automated planning techniques can be leveraged to enable new levels of automation and support for business processing, and we show some concrete examples of their successful application to the different stages of the BPM life cycle

SmartPM: automatic adaptation of dynamic processes at run-time

The research activity outlined in this thesis is devoted to define a general approach, a concrete architecture and a prototype Process Management System (PMS) for the automated adaptation of dynamic processes at run-time, on the basis of a declarative specification of process tasks and relying on well-established reasoning about actions and planning techniques. The purpose is to demonstrate that the combination of procedural and imperative models with declarative elements, along with the exploitation of techniques from the field of artificial intelligence (AI), such as Situation Calculus, IndiGolog and automated planning, can increase the ability of existing PMSs of supporting dynamic processes. To this end, a prototype PMS named SmartPM, which is specifically tailored for supporting collaborative work of process participants during pervasive scenarios, has been developed. The adaptation mechanism deployed on SmartPM is based on execution monitoring for detecting failures at run-time, which does not require the definition of the adaptation strategy in the process itself (as most of the current approaches do), and on automatic planning techniques for the synthesis of the recovery procedure

Beiträge zum 17. Interuniversitären Doktorandenseminar Wirtschaftsinformatik

Dieser Tagungsband enthält Themenbeiträge des 17. Interuniversitären Doktorandenseminars Wirtschaftsinformatik. Die Aufsätze stammen von Doktoranden der mitteldeutschen Universitäten Halle-Wittenberg, Leipzig, Dresden, Freiberg, Chemnitz und Jena. Die thematische Vielfalt reicht von der IT-Unterstützung für KMUs über intelligente Verfahren im Supply Chain und Business Process Management bis hin zu Fragen der Konzeptionierung und Umsetzung Analytischer Informationssysteme. Diese Themen belegen eindrucksvoll die Forschungsorientierung in der Wirtschaftsinformatik, die auch die Forderung nach praktischer Relevanz nicht scheuen muss

Process-aware Information Systems for Emergency Management

Nowadays, Process-aware Information Systems (PAISs) are widely used in many business scenarios, e.g., by government agencies, by insurance companies, and by banks. Despite this widespread usage, the typical application of such systems is predominantly in the context of business scenarios. Nevertheless, emergency management can also benefit from the use of PAISs; for instance, the metaphor of a business process fits very good with the concept of emergency recovery plan. This paper summarizes an invited talk given by the first author for the EMSOA'10 workshop that has been co-located with the ServiceWave 2010 Conference. This paper starts the basic PAIS' requirements for the domain of emergency management, then it gives an overview of the nowadays' literature on using PAISs for Emergency Management. Finally, the paper proposes an architecture and a system to support the execution of emergency management processes

Process-aware information systems for emergency management

Nowadays, Process-aware Information Systems (PAISs) are widely used in many business scenarios, e.g., by government agencies, by insurance companies, and by banks. Despite this widespread usage, the typical application of such systems is predominantly in the context of business scenarios. Nevertheless, emergency management can also benefit from the use of PAISs; for instance, the metaphor of a business process fits very good with the concept of emergency recovery plan. This paper summarizes an invited talk given by the first author for the EMSOA’10 workshop that has been co-located with the ServiceWave 2010 Conference. This paper starts the basic PAIS’ requirements for the domain of emergency management, then it gives an overview of the nowadays’ literature on using PAISs for Emergency Management. Finally, the paper proposes an architecture and a system to support the execution of emergency management processes