PRODIGI: Process-Decision Integration for KnowledGe-Intensive Process Management

Modeling and automating business processes is important for improving efficiency and effectiveness in businesses. During the execution of a business process, a plethora of business decisions need to be made in order to ensure the correct enactment of the business process. With increasing automation of business processes, the need for the automation of routine business decisions grows, as business processes can contain a lot of decisions or can even be the enactment of one major decision.

Despite extensive research on how to design process models, the question of integrated process and decision design has received less attention in literature. However, the integration of decisions with processes is of paramount importance for knowledge-intensive processes. The knowledge that is encapsulated in the decisions is strongly needed for automation, since decision-making (in e.g. online and mobile applications) needs to be faster and more efficient. Therefore, it is important that the decision logic can be formulated in a correct, flexible and maintainable way. Sound decision modeling and mining techniques are required that allow to unambiguously describe and implement the decisions deployed in business processes and systems. Although a lot of research has already been devoted to process modeling and mining quality criteria, there is still a lot of research to be done on the decision side, and especially on the integration between decisions and processes, bothin modeling and mining.