Run-Time Planning of Case-based Business Processes

Abstract

Context: Organizations act in highly competitive markets, which forces them to be flexible. Constantly changing business requirements require flexible business processes. Case Management Model and Notation (CMMN) supports modelling run-time flexibility of partially structured business process models, but does not or not fully specify the contol flow. Objective: The goal is to develop a planning method that supports the case worker in planning case-based business processes at run-time. For this, I propose a method to support context-specific planning of CMMN models by automatically updating and planning the worklist at run-time. The idea is to propose the case worker a sequence of tasks to successfully complete the process instance.Method: I identify the requirements of run-time planning of partly structured processes by analysing the admission process for the master degree at FHNW. In order to gain a broad perspective of the problem, I conduct a literature review of existing planning methods and derive the most suitable heuristic search algorithm. To plan the process instance, I adapt the SMA* algorithm that supports run-time planning of case-based business processes in order to satisfy a context-specific goal at run-time. An illustrative example is presented to show applicability of the planning method. Finally, to demonstrate real application, the planning method is evaluated using two concrete cases provided by FHNW....