Presentation at the 1st Int'l Workshop on Decision Mining & Modeling for Business Processes (DeMiMoP’13), BPM'13;

David Knuplesch, Beijing, China, August 26, 2013, 11:00 am

Making the right decisions in time is one of the key tasks in every business. In this context, decision theory fosters decision-making based on well-defined decision rules. The latter evaluate a given set of parameters and utilize evidenced data in order to determine an optimal alternative out of a given set of choices. In particular, decision rules are relevant in the context business processes as well. Contemporary process modeling languages, however, have not incorporated decision theory yet, but mainly consider rather simple, guard-based decisions that refer to process-relevant data. To remedy this drawback, this paper introduces an approach that allows embedding decision problems in business process models and applying decision rules to deal with them. As a major benefit, it becomes possible to automatically determine and choose optimal execution paths during run time.