Designing Business Processes with History-Aware Resource Assignments

Abstract

Human resources are actively involved in business process management (BPM), due to their participation in the execution of the work developed within business process (BP) activities. They, thus, constitute a crucial aspect in BP design. Different approaches have been recently introduced aiming at extending existing BP modelling notations to improve their capabilities for human resource management. However, the scope of the proposals is usually quite limited, and most of them provide ad-hoc solutions for specific scenarios. Resource Assignment Language (RAL) was developed just to overcome such shortcomings, being independent of the modelling notation in which it is used, and providing interesting resource analysis mechanisms. Still, RAL is currently focused on a single BP instance and, thus, resource assignments cannot contain constraints between two process instances. in this paper, we introduce a complete (i.e. syntactical and semantical) extension for RAL to provide it with history-aware expressions. These expressions will, in turn, be able to be automatically resolved and analysed along with the other RAL expressions, thanks to RAL’s semantics based on Description Logics (DLs).