Planning of business process execution in Business Process Management environments

• We propose a new method for establishing BP execution plans.
• We define a formal business process model and provide MIP formulations for business process optimization.
• We also provide a genetic algorithm to obtain solutions for processes with many activities.
• We show that we can obtain business process execution plans, which can improve business process efficiency.
• This research represents a starting point for optimizing business process execution plans.

Efficient management of business processes is a key element of enterprise information systems for organizations operating in a competitive business environment. Despite methodology introduced to enhance the effectiveness of Business Process Management, research on the initial phase of system implementation has typically focused on the accurate execution of processes, not efficiency. The enhancement of process efficiency in various manufacturing applications, however, has received much attention over the past several decades. Unfortunately, due to the dissimilarities between business and manufacturing processes, optimized manufacturing processes cannot be applied directly to business processes. This study introduces a methodology for incorporating business process semantics and alternative paths in the Business Process Management structure. The approach entails mixed integer programming (MIP) formulation for a business-process execution plan and a meta-heuristic algorithm to obtain good solutions for multi-activity processes.