A Planning and Scheduling Perspective for Designing Business Processes from Declarative Specifications

Abstract

Usually, business process models are manually achieved by business analysts and most of current modelling languages are of imperative nature. As a consequence, non-optimized or faulty models can be obtained. This work proposes a planning based approach to give business analysts assistance for the process models generation. This approach entails the selection and the order of the activities to be executed (planning), and the resources allocation involving temporal reasoning (scheduling), both considering function optimization. The process information is specified in a declarative way, that is translated into the standard planning language PDDL. A friendly graphic language is used (ConDec-R, an extension of ConDec).