Specification and Automated Design-Time Analysis of the Business Process Human Resource Perspective

Abstract

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.