AI-augmented Business Process Management Systems (ABPMSs) are an emerging class of process-aware information systems empowered by AI technology for autonomously unfolding and adapting the execution flow of business processes (BPs) within a set of potentially conflicting procedural and declarative constraints, called process framing . In this respect, framed autonomy enables an ABPMS to autonomously decide how to progress the execution of a BP, as long as the boundaries imposed by the frame are respected. Among these constraints, there could be a partial BP execution that needs to be completed, activating a different near-optimal framing that enables the BP to progress its execution. In this paper, we present an automata-based technique that pairs constraint-based framing with automated planning in AI to recommend, given a partial BP execution trace, the continuation of that trace that minimizes the violation cost of the conforming space defined by the process frame. We report on the results of experiments of increasing complexity to showcase our technique’s performance and scalability.

Trace alignment is the problem of finding the best possible execution sequence of a business process (BP) model that reproduces an (observed) execution trace of the same BP by pinpointing where it deviates. One limiting assumption that governs the state-of-the-art alignment algorithms relies in a static cost function assigning fixed costs to all the possible types of deviations related to a BP activity, thus neglecting the specific context in which the deviation takes place and flattening the analysis of its potential impact. In this paper, we relax this assumption by providing a technique based on theoretic manipulations of deterministic finite state automata (DFAs) to build optimal alignments driven by dedicated cost models that assign context-dependent variable costs to the deviations. We show how the algorithm can be implemented relying on automated planning in Artificial Intelligence (AI), which is proven to be an effective tool to address the alignment task in the case of BP models and event logs of remarkable size. Finally, we report on the results of experiments conducted in a real-life case study on incident management and on larger synthetic ones performed through three well-known planning systems to showcase the performance, scalability and versatility of our technique.