A knowledge-intensive adaptive business process management framework. Issue 95 (January 2021)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Kir, Huseyin; Erdogan, Nadia
• Is Part Of: Information systems. Issue 95(2021)
• Publication Date: 2021-01
• Subjects: Business process management -- Knowledge-intensive processes -- Process modeling and execution -- Process adaptation -- Agent-based business process management -- Agile business process management; Database management -- Periodicals; Electronic data processing -- Periodicals; Bases de données -- Gestion -- Périodiques; Informatique -- Périodiques; Database management; Electronic data processing; Periodicals; 005.7
• DOI: 10.1016/j.is.2020.101639
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0306-4379

Abstract

Abstract: Business process management has been the driving force of optimization and operational efficiency for companies until now, but the digitalization era we have been experiencing requires businesses to be agile and responsive as well. In order to be a part of this digital transformation, delivering new levels of automation-fueled agility through digitalization of BPM itself is required. However, the automation of BPM cannot be achieved by solely focusing on process space and classical planning techniques. It requires a holistic approach that also captures the social aspects of the business environment, such as corporate strategies, organization policies, negotiations, and cooperation. For this purpose, we combine BPM, knowledge-intensive systems and intelligent agent technologies, and yield one consolidated intelligent business process management framework, namely agile BPM, that governs the entire BPM life-cycle. Accordingly, agile BPM proposes a modeling methodology to semantically capture the business interests, enterprise environment and process space in accordance with the agent-oriented software engineering paradigm. The proposed agent-based process execution environment provides cognitive capabilities (such as goal-driven planning, norm compliance, knowledge-driven actions, and dynamic cooperation) on top of the developed business models to support knowledge workers' multi-criteria decision making tasks. The context awareness and exception handling capabilities of the proposed approach have been presented with experimental studies. Through comparative evaluations, it is shown that agile BPM is the most comprehensive knowledge-intensive process management solution. Highlights: Agent and process models has many concepts in common and can be modeled together. QoS perspectives enable BPM system's case based automatic configuration. Intent based process abstractions enable runtime agility. Decoupling of constraints from process models increases adaptability. Agents can handle task failure ratios up to 10% on behalf of business experts.