BRANCH: an ASP systems benchmark for resource allocation in business processes

The goal of BRANCH is to benchmark Answer Set Programming (ASP) systems to test their performance when dealing with the task of automatically allocating resources to business process activities. Like many other scheduling problems, the allocation of resources and starting times to process activities is a challenging optimization problem, yet it is a crucial step for an optimal execution of the processes. BRANCH has been designed as a configurable benchmark equipped with instance generators that produce problem instances of different size and hardness with respect to adjustable parameters. This application-oriented benchmark supports the BPM community to find the ASP systems and implementations that perform better in solving the resource allocation problem.