To achieve their goals, organizations execute business processes, which require effective allocation of resources to process activities. This results in the decision-making problem: Which resources should be allocated to which process activities? This problem significantly impacts both process efficiency and effectiveness. Over the past decades, various system-initiated (largely automated) resource allocation approaches have been developed. This study presents a comprehensive overview of this field by analyzing 61 primary studies identified through a rigorous, structured literature review covering publications from 1995 to 2023. We investigate resource allocation goals and cardinalities and describe how process models, execution data, and task attributes, as well as resource attributes, are used to specify the resource allocation problem. Additionally, the type of algorithmic solution and evaluation methods are discussed. This study shows that most approaches support 1-to-1 allocation cardinalities only, specify process-oriented goals, focus on process models, and utilize rule-based methods. Based on the results, we call for future research to define common terminology, support evidence-oriented resource allocation and adaptability, and improve reproducibility and comparability by performing benchmarking studies.

The design and analysis of process models is a critical factor for organizational improvement across various industries. Thanks to its potential to enable common understanding and foster automation, process modeling is increasingly adopted in the healthcare sector. However, the complexity of the healthcare domain makes process modeling a challenging task, potentially explaining the modest uptake of process modeling standards like the Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN). In this paper, we identify common challenges of process modeling in healthcare, elicited from healthcare process modeling initiatives and supported by the literature. For each challenge, we present some BPMN best practices in the form of ready-to-use process fragments that guide the standard modeling of complex healthcare aspects. Also, we report the results of a first evaluation of the use and perceived usefulness of best practices conducted with junior experts in medicine and IT. We observed that the domain-specific process fragments help to capture healthcare aspects in detail and are perceived as a source of learning, turning out to be especially useful for modelers with a basic understanding of BPMN and the healthcare domain.

In many cases, it is not cost effective to automate business processes which affect a small number of people and/or change frequently. We present a novel approach for enabling domain experts to model and deploy such processes from their respective domain as Web service compositions. The approach builds on user-editable service, naming and representing Web services as forms. On this basis, the approach provides a visual composition language with a targeted restriction of control-flow expressivity, process simulation, automated process verification mechanisms, and code generation for executing orchestrations. A Web-based service composition prototype implements this approach, including a WS-BPEL code generator. A small lab user study with 14 participants showed promising results for the usability of the system, even for nontechnical domain experts.

In this paper we present FormSys, a Web-based system that service-enables form documents. It offers two main services: filling in forms based on Web services' incoming SOAP messages, and invoking Web services based on filled-in forms. This can be applied to benefit individuals to reduce the number of often repetitive form fields they have to complete manually in many scenarios. It can also help organisations to remove the need for manual data entry by automatically triggering business process implementations based on incoming case data from filled-in forms. While the concept applies to forms of any type of document, our implementation uses Adobe AcroForms due to its universal applicability, availability of a usable API, and end-user appeal. In the demo, we will show the two core functions, namely soap2pdf and pdf2soap, along with use case applications of the services developed from real world scenarios. Essentially, this work demonstrates how PDFs can be used as a channel for interacting with Web services.

Automatic Web service composition (WSC) is a key component of flexible SOAs. We address WSC at the profile/capability level, where preconditions and effects of services are described in an ontology. In its most expressive formulation, WSC has two sources of complexity: (A) a combinatorial explosion of the services composition space, and (B) worst-case exponential reasoning is needed to determine whether the underlying ontology implies that a particular composition is a solution. Any WSC technology must hence choose a trade-off between scalability and expressivity. We devise new methods for finding better trade-offs. We address (A) by techniques for the automatic generation of heuristic functions. We address (B) by approximate reasoning techniques for the fully expressive case, and by identifying a sub-class where the required reasoning is tractable. We show empirically that our approach scales gracefully to large pools of pre-discovered services, in several test cases.