Lenguajes y Sistemas Informáticos

URI permanente para esta comunidadhttps://hdl.handle.net/11441/11391

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A Benchmark for ASP Systems: Resource Allocation in Business Processes
(Department für Informationsverarbeitung und Prozessmanagement, 2019) Havur, Giray; Cabanillas Macías, Cristina; Polleres, Axel; Universidad de Sevilla. Departamento de Lenguajes y Sistemas Informáticos; Austrian Research Promotion Agency (FFG)
The goal of this paper is to benchmark Answer Set Programming (ASP) systems to test their performance when dealing with a complex optimization problem. In particular, the problem tackled is resource allocation in the area of Business Process Management (BPM). Like many other scheduling problems, the allocation of resources and starting times to business process activities is a challenging optimization problem for ASP solvers. Our problem encoding is ASP Core-2 standard compliant and it is realized in a declarative and compact fashion. We develop an instance generator that produces problem instances of different size and hardness with respect to adjustable parameters. By using the baseline encoding and the instance generator, we provide a comparison between the two award-winning ASP solvers CLASP and WASP and report the grounding performance of GRINGO and I-DLV. The benchmark suggests that there is room for improvement concerning both the grounders and the solvers. Fostered by the relevance of the problem addressed, of which several variants have been described in different domains, we believe this is a solid application-oriented benchmark for the ASP community.
A framework for efficiently mining the organisational perspective of business processes
(Elsevier, 2016) Schönig, Stefan; Cabanillas Macías, Cristina; Mendling, Jan; Universidad de Sevilla. Departamento de Lenguajes y Sistemas Informáticos; European Union (UE); Austrian Research Promotion Agency (FFG)
Process mining aims at discovering processes by extracting knowledge from event logs. Such knowledge may refer to different business process perspectives. The organisational perspective deals, among other things, with the assignment of human resources to process activities. Information about the resources that are involved in process activities can be mined from event logs in order to discover resource assignment conditions, which is valuable for process analysis and redesign. Prior process mining approaches in this context present one of the following issues: (i) they are limited to discovering a restricted set of resource assignment conditions; (ii) they do not aim at providing efficient solutions; or (iii) the discovered process models are difficult to read due to the number of assignment conditions included. In this paper we address these problems and develop an efficient and effective process mining framework that provides extensive support for the discovery of patterns related to resource assignment. The framework is validated in terms of performance and applicability.
A Framework for Safety-critical Process Management in Engineering Projects
(Springer, 2015) Bala, Saimir; Cabanillas Macías, Cristina; Haselböck, Alois; Havur, Giray; Mendling, Jan; Polleres, Axel; Sperl, Simon; Steyskal, Simon; Universidad de Sevilla. Departamento de Lenguajes y Sistemas Informáticos; Austrian Research Promotion Agency (FFG)
Complex technical systems, industrial systems or infrastructure systems are rich of customizable features and raise high demands on quality and safety-critical aspects. To create complete, valid and reliable planning and customization process data for a product deployment, an overarching engineering process is crucial for the successful completion of a project. In this paper, we introduce a framework for process management in complex engineering projects which are subject to a large amount of constraints and make use of heterogeneous data sources. In addition, we propose solutions for the framework components and describe a proof-of-concept implementation of the framework as an extension of a well-known BPMS.
A template-based approach for responsibility management in executable business processes
(Taylor and Francis, 2018) Cabanillas Macías, Cristina; Resinas Arias de Reyna, Manuel; Ruiz Cortés, Antonio; Universidad de Sevilla. Departamento de Lenguajes y Sistemas Informáticos; Austrian Science Found; Austrian Research Promotion Agency (FFG); European Union (UE); Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (MINECO). España; Junta de Andalucía
Process-oriented organisations need to manage the different types of responsibilities their employees may have w.r.t. the activities involved in their business processes. Despite several approaches provide support for responsibility modelling, in current Business Process Management Systems (BPMS) the only responsibility considered at runtime is the one related to performing the work required for activity completion. Others like accountability or consultation must be implemented by manually adding activities in the executable process model, which is time-consuming and error-prone. In this paper, we address this limitation by enabling current BPMS to execute processes in which people with different responsibilities interact to complete the activities. We introduce a metamodel based on Responsibility Assignment Matrices (RAM) to model the responsibility assignment for each activity, and a flexible template-based mechanism that automatically transforms such information into BPMN elements, which can be interpreted and executed by a BPMS. Thus, our approach does not enforce any specific behaviour for the different responsibilities but new templates can be modelled to specify the interaction that best suits the activity requirements. Furthermore, libraries of templates can be created and reused in different processes. We provide a reference implementation and build a library of templates for a well-known set of responsibilities.
Automated Resource Allocation in Business Processes with Answer Set Programming
(Springer, 2016) Havur, Giray; Cabanillas Macías, Cristina; Mendling, Jan; Polleres, Axel; Universidad de Sevilla. Departamento de Lenguajes y Sistemas Informáticos; Austrian Research Promotion Agency (FFG)
Human resources are of central importance for executing and supervising business processes. An optimal resource allocation can dramatically improve undesirable consequences of resource shortages. However, existing approaches for resource allocation have some limitations, e.g., they do not consider concurrent process instances or loops in business processes, which may greatly alter resource requirements. This paper introduces a novel approach for automatically allocating resources to process activities in a time optimal way that is designed to tackle the aforementioned shortcomings. We achieve this by representing the resource allocation problem in Answer Set Programming (ASP), which allows us to model the problem in an extensible, modular, and thus maintainable way, and which is supported by various efficient solvers.
Efficient and Customisable Declarative Process Mining with SQL
(Springer, 2016) Schönig, Stefan; Rogge-Solti, Andreas; Cabanillas Macías, Cristina; Jablonski, Stefan; Mendling, Jan; Universidad de Sevilla. Departamento de Lenguajes y Sistemas Informáticos; European Union (UE); Austrian Research Promotion Agency (FFG)
Flexible business processes can often be modelled more easily using a declarative rather than a procedural modelling approach. Process mining aims at automating the discovery of business process models. Existing declarative process mining approaches either suffer from performance issues with real-life event logs or limit their expressiveness to a specific set of constaint types. Lately, RelationalXES, a relational database architecture for storing event log data, has been introduced. In this paper, we introduce a mining approach that directly works on relational event data by querying the log with conventional SQL. By leveraging database performance technology, the mining procedure is fast without limiting itself to detecting certain control-flow constraints. Queries can be customised and cover process perspectives beyond control flow, e.g., organisational aspects. We evaluated the performance and the capabilities of our approach with regard to several real-life event logs.
Exploring Human Resource Management in Crowdsourcing Platforms
(Springer, 2016) Cabanillas Macías, Cristina; Universidad de Sevilla. Departamento de Lenguajes y Sistemas Informáticos; Austrian Research Promotion Agency (FFG)
The correct execution of process activities is usually responsibility of the employees (i.e., human resources) of an organisation. In the last years, notable support has been developed to make resource management in business processes more efficient and customisable. Recently, a new way of working has emerged and caught significant attention in the market: crowdsourcing. Crowdsourcing consists of outsourcing activities in the form of an open call to an undefined network of people, i.e., the crowd. While in traditional resource management in business processes resources are known and task assignment is usually controlled, the workers in crowdsourcing platforms are unknown and are allowed to select the tasks they want to perform. These and other di↵erences between resource management in business processes and in crowdsourcing platforms have not been explicitly investigated so far. Taking as reference the existing mature work on resource management in business processes, this paper presents the results of a study on the existing support for resource management in crowdsourcing platforms.
Mining Project-Oriented Business Processes
(Springer, 2016) Bala, Saimir; Cabanillas Macías, Cristina; Mendling, Jan; Rogge-Solti, Andreas; Polleres, Axel; Universidad de Sevilla. Departamento de Lenguajes y Sistemas Informáticos; Austrian Research Promotion Agency (FFG)
Large engineering processes need to be monitored in detail regarding when what was done in order to prove compliance with rules and regulations. A typical problem of these processes is the lack of control that a central process engine provides, such that it is di cult to track the actual course of work even if data is stored in version control systems (VCS). In this paper, we address this problem by de ning a mining technique that helps to generate models that visualize the work history as GANTT charts. To this end, we formally de ne the notion of a project-oriented business process and a corresponding mining algorithm. Our evaluation based on a prototypical implementation demonstrates the bene ts in comparison to existing process mining approaches for this speci c class of processes.
Mining the Organisational Perspective in Agile Business Processes
(Springer, 2015) Schönig, Stefan; Cabanillas Macías, Cristina; Jablonski, Stefan; Mendling, Jan; Universidad de Sevilla. Departamento de Lenguajes y Sistemas Informáticos; Austrian Research Promotion Agency (FFG)
Agile processes depend on human resources, decisions and expert knowledge, and they are especially versatile and comprise rather complex scenarios. Declarative, i.e., rule-based, process models are wellsuited for modelling these processes. Although there are several mining techniques to discover such declarative process models from event logs, they put less emphasis on the organisational perspective, which speci es how resources are involved in the activities. As a consequence, the resulting models do not specify who should execute which task and with which constraint (like separation of duties) in mind. In this paper, we propose a process mining approach to discover resource-aware, declarative process models. Our speci c contribution is the extraction of complex rules for resource assignment that integrate the control- ow and organisational perspectives. Our experiments demonstrate the expressiveness of the mined rules with a reference to the Work ow Resource Patterns and a real-world use case.
Process- and Resource-Aware Information Systems
(IEEE Computer Society, 2016) Cabanillas Macías, Cristina; Universidad de Sevilla. Departamento de Lenguajes y Sistemas Informáticos; Austrian Research Promotion Agency (FFG)
Business processes involve several perspectives that have an effect in all the phases of the business process management lifecycle. The organisational perspective addresses the way in which human resources take part in process activities. Human resources are of utmost importance as they are responsible for the correct execution of processes. However, the organisational perspective has received less attention than others and the existing support is limited. With the aim of easing the development of advances in human resource management in business processes, in this paper we present a novel framework that collects several aspects to be considered along with the existing support.
Resource Allocation with Dependencies in Business Process Management Systems
(Springer, 2016) Havur, Giray; Cabanillas Macías, Cristina; Mendling, Jan; Polleres, Axel; Universidad de Sevilla. Departamento de Lenguajes y Sistemas Informáticos; Austrian Research Promotion Agency (FFG)
Business Process Management Systems (BPMS) facilitate the execution of business processes by coordinating all involved resources. Traditional BPMS assume that these resources are independent from one another, which justifies a greedy allocation strategy of offering each work item as soon as it becomes available. In this paper, we develop a formal technique to derive an optimal schedule for work items that have dependencies and resource conflicts. We build our work on Answer Set Programming (ASP), which is supported by a wide range of efficient solvers. We apply our technique in an industry scenario and evaluate its effectiveness. In this way, we contribute an explicit notion of resource dependencies within BPMS research and a technique to derive optimal schedules.
Resource Utilization Prediction in Decision-Intensive Business Processes
(CEUR-WS.Org, 2017) Sperl, Simon; Havur, Giray; Steyskal, Simon; Cabanillas Macías, Cristina; Polleres, Axel; Haselböck, Alois; Universidad de Sevilla. Departamento de Lenguajes y Sistemas Informáticos; Austrian Research Promotion Agency (FFG); Austrian Science Found (FWF)
An appropriate resource utilization is crucial for organizations in order to avoid, among other things, unnecessary costs (e.g. when resources are under-utilized) and too long execution times (e.g. due to excessive workloads, i.e. resource over-utilization). However, traditional process control and risk measurement approaches do not address resource utilization in processes. We studied an often-encountered industry case for providing large-scale technical infrastructure which requires rigorous testing for the systems deployed and identi ed the need of projecting resource utilization as a means for measuring the risk of resource underand over-utilization. Consequently, this paper presents a novel predictive model for resource utilization in decision-intensive processes, present in many domains. In particular, we predict the utilization of resources for a desired period of time given a decision-intensive business process that may include nested loops, and historical data (i.e. order and duration of past activity executions, resource pro les and their experience etc.). We have applied our method using a real business process with multiple instances and presented the outcome.
Safety-critical Human- and Data-centric Process Management in Engineering Projects
(CEUR-WS.Org, 2015) Cabanillas Macías, Cristina; Mendling, Jan; Polleres, Axel; Haselböck, Alois; Universidad de Sevilla. Departamento de Lenguajes y Sistemas Informáticos; Austrian Research Promotion Agency (FFG)
Complex technical systems, industrial systems or infrastructure systems are rich of customizable features and raise high demands on quality and safety-critical aspects. The activities to create complete, valid and reliable planning and customization process data for a product deployment are part of an overarching engineering process that is crucial for the successful completion of a project and, particularly, for verifying compliance to existing regulations in a distributed, heterogeneous environment. In this paper, we discuss the challenges that process management needs to address in such complex engineering projects, and present an architecture that comprises the functionality required together with ndings and results already obtained for its di erent components.
Specification and Automated Design-Time Analysis of the Business Process Human Resource Perspective
(Elsevier, 2015) Cabanillas Macías, Cristina; Resinas Arias de Reyna, Manuel; Río Ortega, Adela del; Ruiz Cortés, Antonio; Universidad de Sevilla. Departamento de Lenguajes y Sistemas Informáticos; Austrian Research Promotion Agency (FFG); Junta de Andalucía; Junta de Andalucía; Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (MINECO). España
The human resource perspective of a business process is concerned with the relation between the activities of a process and the actors who take part in them. Unlike other process perspectives, such as control flow, for which many different types of analyses have been proposed, such as finding deadlocks, there is an important gap regarding the human resource perspective. Resource analysis in business processes has not been defined, and only a few analysis operations can be glimpsed in previous approaches. In this paper, we identify and formally define seven design-time analysis operations related to how resources are involved in process activities. Furthermore, we demonstrate that for a wide variety of resource-aware BP models, those analysis operations can be automated by leveraging Description Logic (DL) off-the-shelf reasoners. To this end, we rely on Resource Assignment Language (RAL), a domain-specific language that enables the definition of conditions to select the candidates to participate in a process activity. We provide a complete formal semantics for RAL based on DLs and extend it to address the operations, for which the control flow of the process must also be taken into consideration. A proof-of-concept implementation has been developed and integrated in a system called CRISTAL. As a result, we can give an automatic answer to different questions related to the management of resources in business processes at design time.

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Examinando Lenguajes y Sistemas Informáticos por Agencia financiadora "Austrian Research Promotion Agency (FFG)"