Planning@SAP: An Application in Business Process Management
Résumé
Business processes control the flow of activities within and between enterprises. Business Process Management is concerned, amongst other things, with the maintenance of these processes. In particular, it becomes ever more important to be able to quickly create modified processes for changed market conditions. We show that AI Planning can help with this, by automatically composing process skeletons. We formalize this as a particular form of planning with non-deterministic actions. Since there is no fixed ``domain'' -- business processes may talk about almost anything -- a major problem in applying the method is a practical way of obtaining the planning model. We show that, at SAP, one of the leading providers of enterprise software, one can obtain the models for free, by leveraging existing semi-formal models of software behavior. We finally show that, by arranging some known planning techniques in a suitable way, one can obtain tooling that solves practical examples in a matter of seconds, and that is hence suitable for use in a real-time BPM process modeling environment. Our prototype of such an environment is part of a research extension to the SAP NetWeaver platform.
Domaines
Intelligence artificielle [cs.AI]
Origine : Fichiers produits par l'(les) auteur(s)
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