ICS – publication “Dynamic Controllability of Processes without Surprises”

The research paper “Dynamic Controllability of Processes without Surprises“, written by the ICS group members O.Univ.-Prof. Dipl.-Ing. Dr. Johann Eder, Senior Scientist Dipl.-Ing. Dr. Marco Franceschetti and Univ.-Ass. Josef Lubas, BSc. MSc., is now available on the following link:

https://doi.org/10.3390/app12031461

The paper “Dynamic Controllability of Processes without Surprises” has been published at 29th of January 2022 in the Journal Applied Sciences and is available as free full-text by using the link above.

 

Abstract
Dynamic controllability guarantees that a process control can steer the execution of a business process without violating any temporal constraints although some tasks have uncontrollable durations. However, it has been shown that dynamic controllability may lead to process executions with the undesirable property that tasks have to be started or ended on extremely short notice. Sudden termination forces the agent to immediately terminate the execution of a process task without any prior notice in order to meet some temporal constraints. Semi-dynamic controllability guarantees dynamic controllability and the absence of sudden termination. Here, we show that dynamic controllability may also lead to the problem of sudden start, which forces the immediate start of a process task without prior notice. We formalize all constellations of temporal constraints causing sudden start and sudden termination in a process. We propose a technique to design processes in which activities can be dynamically dispatched without these surprises, i.e., with advance notice, and extend the notion of semi-dynamic controllability by also considering the sudden start. This leads to a sound and complete algorithm for checking the semi-dynamic controllability of time-constrained processes.