RAL Solver: a Tool to Facilitate Resource Management in Business Process Models

Abstract

Business process (BP) modelling notations tend to stray their attention from resource management, unlike other aspects such as control flow or even data flow. On the one hand, the languages they offer to assign resources to BP activities are usually either little expressive, or hard to use for non-technical users. On the other hand, they barely care about the subsequent analysis of resource assignments, which would enable the detection of problems and/or inefficiency in the use of the resources available in a company. We present RAL Solver, a tool that addresses the two aforementioned issues, and thus: (i) allows the specification of assignments of resources to BP activities in a reasonably simple way; and (ii) provides capabilities to automatically analyse resource assignments at design time, which allows extracting information from BP models, and detecting inconsistencies and assignment conflicts.