Enabling Highly Automated Cross-Organisational Workflow Planning

Project summary

Workflow planning is one of the most crucial digital transformation activities. Planning cross-organisational process workflows requires knowledge from multiple domains. In addition, it also requires an overview of how these workflows interact with each other wrt. the dependency on both shared resources and on execution order. Process-Aware Information Systems are commonly used in both private and public sectors to manage planning. However, they usually lack domain-specific knowledge and flexible support for cross-organisational processes, and very often do not consider actual experience of the workflow participants, which may help detecting potential bottlenecks in the workflows. Therefore, workflow planning is still largely a manual process relying on human experts.

The project aims at providing decision support for optimising workflow planning for cross-organisational processes and participant experience, based on abstract executable models. With the critical task dependencies specified by the planners, it automates the coordination of tasks and resources within individual concurrent workflows in a cross-organisational process, such that the synchronisation and revisioning of these concurrent workflow models across organisations can be done automatically. In addition, it uses the participant experience to uncover potential bottlenecks in existing workflows to assist future replanning.

The main contributions of CROFLOW are to provide automation for coordination of tasks and resources, bottleneck discovery, and dynamic revisioning for concurrent workflow models, which consequently are used to provide decision support for optimal workflow planning and participant experience. The project’s approach represents a potential breakthrough of the existing techniques for cross-organisational processes. The success of CROFLOW will result in substantial positive impacts on planning practice in both public and private sectors.