Goal-driven business process derivation

Abstract

Solutions to the problem of deriving business processes from goals are critical in addressing a variety of challenges facing the services and business process management community, and in particular, the challenge of quickly generating large numbers of effective process designs (often a bottleneck in industry-scale deployment of BPM). The problem is similar to the planning problem that has been extensively studied in the artificial intelligence (AI) community. However, the direct application of AI planning techniques places an onerous burden on the analyst, and has proven to be difficult in practice. We propose a practical yet rigorous (semi-automated) algorithm for business process derivation from goals. Our approach relies on being able to decompose process goals to a more refined collection of sub-goals whose ontology is aligned with that of the effects of available tasks which can be used to construct the business process. Once process goals are refined to this level, we are able to generate a process design using a procedure that leverages our earlier work on semantic effect annotation of process designs. We illustrate our ideas throughout this paper with a real-life running example, and also present a proof-of-concept prototype implementation. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.