DBIS congratulates Irene Barba Rodríguez for successfully defending her PhD thesis on Constraint-based Planning and Scheduling Techniques for the Optimized Management of Business Processes at the University of Seville, Spain. Prof. Manfred Reichert  participated at Irene’s PhD defense as one of the members of the core PhD committee. Irene’s thesis addresses a highly relevant topic in the area of business processes that has obtained relatively little attention so far by the research community. In particular, she extends the traditional process lifecycle with AI Planning and Scheduling techniques. As a main contribution of her thesis, Irene describes techniques for the generation of optimized execution plans from declarative process specifications, the application of these optimized execution plans for assisting users during process execution through recommendations, the generation of optimized imperative process models from execution plans, and an approach for the modeling and enacting of business processes involving planning and scheduling decisions. The proposed techniques for generating execution plans enable many interesting applications like recommendations, time prediction, and simulation.

Due to the high scientific relevance of the above mentioned topics, DBIS is happy to announce the new collaboration, Manfred Reichert started with Irene Barba Rodríguez and Carmelo del Valle from the University of Seville. This initiative has already resulted in a first joint publication, which is also co-authored by Barbara Weber (University of Innsbruck) – another strong collaborator of the DBIS team.

Irene Barba, A. Lanz, B. Weber, M. Reichert, C. Del Valle (2012) Optimized Time Management for Declarative Workflows. In: 13th BPMDS'12 Working Conference, Gdansk, Poland, LNBIP, Springer.