These opportunities require a significant shift in the way the BPMS operates and interacts with its operators(both human and digital agents). While traditional BPMSs encode pre-defined flows and rules, an ABPMS is able to reason about the current state of the process(or across several processes) to determine a course of action that improves the performance of the process. To fully exploit this capability, the ABPMS needs a degree of autonomy. Naturally, this autonomy needs to be framed by operational assumptions, goals, and environmental constraints. Also, ABPMSs need to engage conversationally with human agents, they need to explain their actions, and they need to recommend adaptations or improvements in the way the process is performed. This manifesto outlined a number of research challenges that need to be overcome to realize systems that exhibit these characteristics.

Conformance checking is the problem of verifying if the actual executions of business processes, which are recorded by information systems in dedicated event logs, are compliant with a process model that encodes the process' constraints. Within conformance checking, alignment-based techniques can exactly pinpoint where deviations are observed. Existing alignment-based techniques rely on the assumption of a perfect knowledge of the order with which process' activities were executed in reality. However, experience shows that, due to logging errors and inaccuracies, it is not always possible to determine the exact order with which certain activities were executed. This paper illustrates an alignment-based technique where the perfect knowledge assumption of the execution's order is removed. The technique transforms the problem of alignment-based conformance checking into a planning problem encoded in PDDL, for which planners can find a correct solution in a finite amount of time. We implemented the technique as a software tool that is integrated with state-of-the-art planners. To showcase its practical relevance and scalability, we report on experiments with a real-life case study and several synthetic ones of increasing complexity.

One major task in business process management is that of aligning real process execution traces to a process model by (minimally) introducing and eliminating steps. Here, we look at declarative process specifications expressed in Linear Temporal Logic on finite traces (LTLf). We provide a sound and complete technique to synthesize the alignment instructions relying on finite automata theoretic manipulations. Such a technique can be effectively implemented by using planning technology. Notably, the resulting planning-based alignment system significantly outperforms all current state-of-the-art ad-hoc alignment systems. We report an in-depth experimental study that supports this claim.