Generating Business Process Recommendations with a Population-Based Meta-Heuristic

Abstract

Abstract. In order to provide both guidance and flexibility to users during process execution, recommendation systems have been proposed. Existing recommendation systems mainly focus on offering recommendation according to the process optimization goals (time, cost…). In this paper we offer a new approach that primarily focuses on maximizing the flexibility during execution. This means that by following the recommendations, the user retains maximal flexibility to divert from them later on. This makes it possible to handle (possibly unknown) emerging constraints during execution. The main contribution of this paper is an algorithm that uses a declarative process model to generate a set of imperative process models that can be used to generate recommendations.

Guiding Knowledge Workers Under Dynamic Contexts

“…There are several approaches that propose support for KiPs [5,11,12,15,17,21,23,[27][28][29][30]. These approaches focus on guiding KiPs with some machine learning/artificial intelligence(AI) techniques based on historical information [11,15,21,30], modeling and planning of KiPs using AI (or automated planning) techniques and Markov Decision Process (MDP) [12,23,[27][28][29], and optimization of declarative processes [5,17]. KiPs are hardly repeatable [7], therefore useful historical information does not always exist.…”

“…KiPs are hardly repeatable [7], therefore useful historical information does not always exist. Different from existing approaches [5,11,12,15,17,21,[27][28][29][30], we focus on guiding knowledge workers on such cases where no historical data is present.…”

“…Considering the approaches in [5,17], the focus of our method is different. We guide knowledge workers to address the goals in a dynamic context where the context affects how the goals are achieved.…”

“…We guide knowledge workers to address the goals in a dynamic context where the context affects how the goals are achieved. In [5,17], the effect of context on the way that the goals are achieved is not considered. Also, we focus on information gathering aspect of tasks when prioritizing them, which is also not the focus of the existing approaches in [5,17].…”

“…In [5,17], the effect of context on the way that the goals are achieved is not considered. Also, we focus on information gathering aspect of tasks when prioritizing them, which is also not the focus of the existing approaches in [5,17]. Lastly, to the best of our knowledge, the notion of dynamic context and its integration for guiding knowledge workers in executing flexible KiPs, has not been investigated in the existing work [5,11,12,15,17,18,23,[27][28][29][30].…”