AUTOMATED PLANNING OF PROCESS MODELS: THE CONSTRUCTION OF SIMPLE MERGES

Business processes evolve dynamically with changing business demands. Because of these fast changes, traditional process improvement techniques have to be adapted and extended since they often require a high degree of manual work. To reduce this degree of manual work, the automated planning of process models is proposed. In this context, we present a novel approach for an automated construction of the control flow structure simple merge (XOR join). This ac-counts for a necessary step towards an automated planning of entire process models. Here we build upon a planning domain, which gives us a general and formal basis to apply our ap-proach independently from a specific process modeling language. To analyze the feasibility of our method, we mathematically evaluate the approach in terms of key properties like termina-tion and completeness. Moreover, we implement the approach in a process planning software and apply it to several real-world processes.