Declarative logic programming formalisms are well-suited to model various optimization and configuration problems. In particular, Answer Set Programming (ASP) systems have gained popularity, for example, to deal with scheduling problems present in several domains. The main goal of this paper is to devise a benchmark for ASP systems to assess their performance when dealing with complex and realistic resource allocation with objective optimization. To this end, we provide (i) a declarative and compact encoding of the resource allocation problem in ASP (compliant with the ASP Core-2 standard), (ii) a configurable ASP systems benchmark named BRANCH that is equipped with resource allocation instance generators that produce problem instances of different sizes with adjustable parameters (e.g., in terms of process complexity, organizational and temporal constraints), and (iii) an evaluation of four state-of-the-art ASP systems using BRANCH. This solid application-oriented benchmark serves the ASP community with a tool that leads to potential optimizations and improvements in encodings and further drives the development of ASP solvers. On the other hand, resource allocation is an important problem that still lacks adequate automated tool support in the context of Business Process Management (BPM). The ASP problem encoding, ready-to-use ASP systems and problem instance generators benefit the BPM community to tackle the problem at scale and mitigate the lack of openly available problem instance data.

Business process compliance ensures that the business processes of an organisation are designed and executed according to the rules that enforce the compliance controls that govern the company. We faced the challenge of building a Business Process Compliance Management System (BPCMS) for a process-aware organisation that had to provide support for several needs that, despite having been identified in the literature, were only partially satisfied by existing approaches. The variability in the types of rules and their interpretation generally restricts the existing support for compliance checking to specific types of rules (e.g., rules affecting the control flow of the process), a specific phase of the business process management (BPM) lifecycle (e.g., design time or run time), or certain information systems (ISs) for data retrieval (e.g., process event logs). Motivated by this, we designed a conceptual framework for design-time and run-time compliance checking that relies on the use ofmashupsfor rule specification and checking. It presents the following advantages: (i) an open-ended set of types rules can be specified by designing and connecting mashup components; (ii) (parts of) the definitions of the rules can be reused as needed; and (iii) the mashup-based compliance checking (MCC) system can be integrated with ISs of the organisation, enabling the verification of actual facts on actions performed during the execution of a process (e.g., the existence of a specific document in a concrete location). Design-time and run-time implementations of the framework were conducted and tested in a real setting.

Abstract Automated process discovery is a technique that extracts models of executed processes from event logs. Logs typically include information about the activities performed, their timestamps and the resources that were involved in their execution. Recent approaches to process discovery put a special emphasis on (human) resources, aiming at constructing resource-aware process models that contain the inferred resource assignment constraints. Such constraints can be complex and process discovery approaches so far have missed the opportunity to represent expressive resource assignments graphically together with process models. A subsequent verification of the extracted resource-aware process models is required in order to check the proper utilisation of resources according to the resource assignments. So far, research on discovering resource-aware process models has assumed that models can be put into operation without modification and checking. Integrating resource mining and resource-aware process model verification faces the challenge that different types of resource assignment languages are used for each task. In this paper, we present an integrated solution that comprises (i) a resource mining technique that builds upon a highly expressive graphical notation for defining resource assignments; and (ii) automated model-checking support to validate the discovered resource-aware process models. All the concepts reported in this paper have been implemented and evaluated in terms of feasibility and performance.

Business processes involve several perspectives that have an effect in all the phases of the business process management lifecycle. The organisational perspective addresses the way in which human resources take part in process activities. Human resources are of utmost importance as they are responsible for the correct execution of processes. However, the organisational perspective has received less attention than others and the existing support is limited. With the aim of easing the development of advances in human resource management in business processes, in this paper we present a novel framework that collects several aspects to be considered along with the existing support.

Plenty of activities in many business contexts must be performed collaboratively, e.g., in a hospital or when organising a conference. Tasks such as team composition and allocation are usually performed manually and on the ground of limited criteria such as individual skills, a.o. because adequate automatic support is missing. This paper addresses this shortcoming. We present an approach for team selection and compliance checking in business processes, which includes (i) a language for describing teams; (ii) a way to define team selection conditions and policies related to team composition; and (iii) a mechanism for the automatic resolution of the team selection conditions and for team-related compliance checking based on formal ontologies.