Adapting process models via an automated planning approach

ABSTRACT

Today’s fast-paced business world poses many challenges to companies. Amongst them is the necessity to quickly react to needs for change due to shifts in the competitive environment. Hence, achieving a high flexibility of business processes while maintaining their quality has become crucial. We address this issue by proposing an automated planning approach capable of adapting existing process models to upcoming needs for change. This means that the needs for change have not yet been implemented and the adapted process models have not yet been realised. The approach constructs adapted process models, which are complete and correct. We evaluate our approach by means of mathematical proofs, a prototypical implementation and an application in a real-world situation. Further, by means of a computational complexity analysis and a simulation experiment, its runtime is benchmarked against planning process models from scratch.

KEYWORDS:

• Process flexibility
• process changes
• process models
• business process management

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. We executed the prototype on a Dell Latitude Notebook with an Intel Core i7-2640 M, 2.80 GHz, 8GB RAM running on Windows 8.1 (Version 6.3.9600) 64 bit and Java 1.8.0 (build 1.8.0.-b132) 64 bit.