Search

AI-Augmented Business Process Management Systems (ABPMSs) are an emerging class of process-aware information systems, empowered by trustworthy AI technology. An ABPMS enhances the execution of business processes with the aim of making these processes more adaptable, proactive, explainable, and context-sensitive. This manifesto presents a vision for ABPMSs and discusses research challenges that need to be surmounted to realize this vision. To this end, we define the concept of ABPMS, we outline the lifecycle of processes within an ABPMS, we discuss core characteristics of an ABPMS, and we derive a set of challenges to realize systems with these characteristics., Comment: 19 pages, 1 figure

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is a fast-emerging automation technology that sits between the fields of Business Process Management (BPM) and Artificial Intelligence (AI), and allows organizations to automate high volume routines. RPA tools are able to capture the execution of such routines previously performed by a human users on the interface of a computer system, and then emulate their enactment in place of the user by means of a software robot. Nowadays, in the BPM domain, only simple, predictable business processes involving routine work can be automated by RPA tools in situations where there is no room for interpretation, while more sophisticated work is still left to human experts. In this paper, starting from an in-depth experimentation of the RPA tools available on the market, we provide a classification framework to categorize them on the basis of some key dimensions. Then, based on this analysis, we derive four research challenges and discuss prospective approaches necessary to inject intelligence into current RPA technology, in order to achieve more widespread adoption of RPA in the BPM domain.

The research activity outlined in this PhD thesis is devoted to define a general approach, a concrete architecture and a prototype Process Management System (PMS) for the automated adaptation of dynamic processes at run-time, on the basis of a declarative specification of process tasks and relying on well-established reasoning about actions and planning techniques. The purpose is to demonstrate that the combination of procedural and imperative models with declarative elements, along with the exploitation of techniques from the field of artificial intelligence (AI), such as Situation Calculus, IndiGolog and automated planning, can increase the ability of existing PMSs of supporting dynamic processes. To this end, a prototype PMS named SmartPM, which is specifically tailored for supporting collaborative work of process participants during pervasive scenarios, has been developed. The adaptation mechanism deployed on SmartPM is based on execution monitoring for detecting failures at run-time, which does not require the definition of the adaptation strategy in the process itself (as most of the current approaches do), and on automatic planning techniques for the synthesis of the recovery procedure., Comment: Postprint of PhD Thesis of Andrea Marrella, published on October 2013

Healthcare is one of the largest business segments in the world and is a critical area for future growth. In order to ensure efficient access to medical and patient-related information, hospitals have invested heavily in improving clinical mobile technologies and spread their use among doctors. Notwithstanding the benefits of mobile technologies towards a more efficient and personalized delivery of care procedures, there are also indications that their use may have a negative impact on patient-centeredness and often places many cognitive and physical demands on doctors, making them prone to make medical errors. To tackle this issue, in this paper we present the main outcomes of the project TESTMED, which aimed at realizing a clinical system that provides operational support to doctors using mobile technologies for delivering care to patients, in a bid to minimize medical errors. The system exploits concepts from Business Process Management on how to manage a specific class of care procedures, called clinical guidelines, and how to support their execution and mobile orchestration among doctors. As a viable solution for doctors' interaction with the system, we investigated the use of vocal and touch interfaces. User evaluation results indicate a good usability of the system.

Process mining methods allow analysts to use logs of historical executions of business processes in order to gain knowledge about the actual behavior of these processes. One of the most widely studied process mining operations is automated process discovery. An event log is taken as input by an automated process discovery method and produces a business process model as output that captures the control-flow relations between tasks that are described by the event log. In this setting, this paper provides a systematic comparative evaluation of existing implementations of automated process discovery methods with domain experts by using a real-life event log extracted from an international software engineering company and four quality metrics. The evaluation results highlight gaps and unexplored trade-offs in the field and allow researchers to improve the lacks in the automated process discovery methods in terms of usability of process discovery techniques in industry.

In the era of Big Data and Internet-of-Things (IoT), all real-world environments are gradually becoming cyber-physical (e.g., emergency management, healthcare, smart manufacturing, etc.), with the presence of connected devices and embedded ICT systems (e.g., smartphones, sensors, actuators) producing huge amounts of data and events that influence the enactment of the Cyber Physical Processes (CPPs) enacted in such environments. A Process Management System (PMS) employed for executing CPPs is required to automatically adapt its running processes to anomalous situations and exogenous events by minimising any human intervention at run-time. In this paper, we tackle this issue by introducing an approach and an adaptive Cognitive PMS that combines process execution monitoring, unanticipated exception detection and automated resolution strategies leveraging on well-established action-based formalisms in Artificial Intelligence, which allow to interpret the ever-changing knowledge of cyber-physical environments and to adapt CPPs by preserving their base structure., Comment: Preprint from Proceedings of 1st International Workshop on Cognitive Business Process Management (CBPM 2017)

Business Process Management (BPM) is a central element of today organizations. Despite over the years its main focus has been the support of processes in highly controlled domains, nowadays many domains of interest to the BPM community are characterized by ever-changing requirements, unpredictable environments and increasing amounts of data that influence the execution of process instances. Under such dynamic conditions, BPM systems must increase their level of automation to provide the reactivity and flexibility necessary for process management. On the other hand, the Artificial Intelligence (AI) community has concentrated its efforts on investigating dynamic domains that involve active control of computational entities and physical devices (e.g., robots, software agents, etc.). In this context, Automated Planning, which is one of the oldest areas in AI, is conceived as a model-based approach to synthesize autonomous behaviours in automated way from a model. In this paper, we discuss how automated planning techniques can be leveraged to enable new levels of automation and support for business processing, and we show some concrete examples of their successful application to the different stages of the BPM life cycle., Comment: Preprint of a paper to be published in BPAI 2017, Workshop on BP Innovation with Artificial Intelligence

The Internet of Things (IoT) refers to a network of connected devices collecting and exchanging data over the Internet. These things can be artificial or natural, and interact as autonomous agents forming a complex system. In turn, Business Process Management (BPM) was established to analyze, discover, design, implement, execute, monitor and evolve collaborative business processes within and across organizations. While the IoT and BPM have been regarded as separate topics in research and practice, we strongly believe that the management of IoT applications will strongly benefit from BPM concepts, methods and technologies on the one hand; on the other one, the IoT poses challenges that will require enhancements and extensions of the current state-of-the-art in the BPM field. In this paper, we question to what extent these two paradigms can be combined and we discuss the emerging challenges.

Process mining allows analysts to exploit logs of historical executions of business processes to extract insights regarding the actual performance of these processes. One of the most widely studied process mining operations is automated process discovery. An automated process discovery method takes as input an event log, and produces as output a business process model that captures the control-flow relations between tasks that are observed in or implied by the event log. Various automated process discovery methods have been proposed in the past two decades, striking different tradeoffs between scalability, accuracy and complexity of the resulting models. However, these methods have been evaluated in an ad-hoc manner, employing different datasets, experimental setups, evaluation measures and baselines, often leading to incomparable conclusions and sometimes unreproducible results due to the use of closed datasets. This article provides a systematic review and comparative evaluation of automated process discovery methods, using an open-source benchmark and covering twelve publicly-available real-life event logs, twelve proprietary real-life event logs, and nine quality metrics. The results highlight gaps and unexplored tradeoffs in the field, including the lack of scalability of some methods and a strong divergence in their performance with respect to the different quality metrics used.