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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Notes
- 1.
A web-based application for the generation of optimized BP enactment plans from ConDec-R specifications can be accessed at http://regula.lsi.us.es/OptBPPlanner.
- 2.
ntMAX represents the maximum value of the initial domain of nt (cf. Fig. 1b).
- 3.
The overall completion time is the time needed to complete all process instances which were planned for a certain period.
- 4.
The generated Gantt chart of Fig. 1c groups activities by roles, e.g., the Execution1 of D is performed by the Resource 1 of the Role R2. The rest of activities are performed by Role R1.
- 5.
These values are considered to analyze the behavior of our proposal when dealing with problems of different size, i.e., with different number of repetitions of certain activities.
- 6.
The set of problems which are used are available at http://regula.lsi.us.es/ISD12/EV.zip.
- 7.
Note that getting the optimum for scheduling problems of 189 activities can entail a great complexity. In fact, there are many scheduling benchmarks of smaller size for which their optimal values are not even known.
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Acknowledgments
This work has been partially funded by the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación (TIN2009-13714) and the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF/FEDER).
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Jiménez, A., Barba, I., del Valle, C., Weber, B. (2013). OptBPPlanner: Automatic Generation of Optimized Business Process Enactment Plans. In: Linger, H., Fisher, J., Barnden, A., Barry, C., Lang, M., Schneider, C. (eds) Building Sustainable Information Systems. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-7540-8_33
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