Planning and Scheduling of Business Processes in Run-Time: A Repair Planning Example

Over the last decade, the efficient and flexible management of business processes has become one of the most critical success aspects. Furthermore, there exists a growing interest in the application of Artificial Intelligence Planning and Scheduling techniques to automate the production and execution of models of organization. However, from our point of view, several connections between both disciplines remains to be exploited. The current work presents a proposal for modelling and enacting business processes that involve the selection and order of the activities to be executed (planning), besides the resource allocation (scheduling), considering the optimization of several functions and the reach of some objectives. The main novelty is that all decisions (even the activities selection) are taken in run-time considering the actual parameters of the execution, so the business process is managed in an efficient and flexible way. As an example, a complex and representative problem, the repair planning problem, is managed through the proposed approach.