Project Description:

Complex business processes, which may have to be dynamically adapted to changing circumstances during their enactment (as required in the context of Industry 4.0 processes), are neither easy to comprehend nor to trace. As example consider an order management process as required in the context of the production of customized or individualized goods. Project P5 will empirically investigate both the psychological processes and structures underlying the understanding and anticipation of changing business processes. Furthermore, P5 will investigate how the need of respective process changes can be diagnosed and corresponding decisions be made. In particular, knowledge about these psychological processes will allow for the development of user-friendly algorithms and man-machine interfaces properly assisting end-users in changing business processes. In order to be able to reliably assess the current status of a business process, explanatory mechanisms will be provided. More precisely, based on formal process descriptions and their changes as well as the current process trace, simple inference procedures will be applied to create respective explanations and to present them in a user-friendly manner using different modalities.

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Direct supervisor:

• Prof. Dr. Martin Baumann, Institute of Psychology and Education (Human Factors), Ulm University

Tandem partner:

• Prof. Dr.-Ing. Hartwig Baumgärtel, https://www.hs-ulm.de/produktionstechnikFaculty of Production Engineering and Production Economics, University of Applied Sciences Ulm

Expert advisors:

• Prof. Dr. Susanne Biundo-Stephan, Institute of Artificial Intelligence, Ulm University
• Prof. Dr. Manfred Reichert, Institute of Databases and Information Systems, Ulm University

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Affiliation:	Ulm University
Methods/Technologies:	planning & reasoning, interaction
Applications:	Industry 4.0, adaptive process-management-systems