Ricerc@Sapienza

Business Process Management (BPM) is a central element of today organizations. However, in the era of Big Data and Internet-of-Things, all real-world domains are becoming cyber-physical (e.g., consider the shift from traditional manufacturing to Industry 4.0), with the presence of connected artifacts (such as sensors and smartphones) producing huge amounts of data and events that dramatically influence the enactment of business processes (BPs). In such unconstrained settings, BPM professionals lack the needed knowledge to model all possible contingencies and exception handlers at the outset. Consequently, any running BP will be inevitably affected by an increasing number of unplanned exceptional situations, and thus will always has knowledge gaps that prevent it to adapt to novel situations. To overcome this issue, BPbots will develop a new breed of intelligent techniques that go beyond traditional preprogrammed solutions in BPM and enable BPs to act autonomously in presence of unpredictable environments. The philosophy of BPbots is not to re-design or change existing BPs, but to make them evolve as intelligent entities able to automatically adapt to new situations never encountered before, without the need of any human intervention. The use of action-based formalisms in Artificial Intelligence (AI) will be the key to harness and interpret the ever-changing knowledge of cyber-physical domains and to adapt BPs preserving their base structure. Remarkable results obtained by the applicant in Automated Planning in AI for solving challenging problems of process adaption and mining provide evidence of the effectiveness of AI technologies being deployed alongside BPM, and put the applicant in a strong position to realize this project. BPbots will pave the way for ground-breaking scientific and technological advances in the BPM field towards the development of a new generation of BPs able to behave intelligently in any possible situation.