Providing Support for the Optimized Management of Declarative Processes

Declarative process models are becoming increasingly popular due to the high flexibility they offer to process participants. Based on a declarative process model, there exist numerous possible enactment plans, each one with specific values for relevant objective functions (e.g., overall completion time). How to actually execute such a model is quite challenging due to several reasons:(1) proper objective functions must be considered to find optimized enactment plans, (2) users often do not have an understanding of the overall process, (3) the presence of a variety of temporal constraints to be met during process enactment, and (4) the need to coordinate multiple instances of a process concurrently exe-cuted (which compete for shared resources). This is further complicated by the fact that the enactment of new process instances may continuously start over time and many organizations do not exactly know their future demands. In such con-text, to properly support users in enacting declarative process models, this paper suggests generating optimized enactment plans from declarative process models. The generated enactment plans may be used for different purposes, e.g., to pro-vide personal schedules to users. Moreover, they may be dynamically adapted if required. To evaluate the applicability of our approach in practical settings we apply it to a real process scenario from the healthcare domain.