Automated planning of process models: Design of a novel approach to construct exclusive choices

In times of dynamically changing markets, companies are forced to (re)design their processes quickly and frequently, which typically implies a significant degree of time-consuming and cost-intensive manual work. To alleviate this drawback, we envision the automated planning of process models. More precisely, we propose a novel algorithm for an automated construction of the control flow pattern 'exclusive choice', which constitutes an essential step toward an automated planning of process models. The algorithm is built upon an abstract representation language that provides a general and formal basis and serves as the vocabulary to define the planning problem. As part of our evaluation, we find that, based on a given planning problem, our algorithm is not subject to potential modeling failures. We further implement the approach in process planning software and analyze not only its feasibility and applicability by means of several real-world processes from different application contexts and companies but also its practical utility based on the criteria flexibility by definition, modeling costs, and modeling time. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.