Information Systems 95 (2021) 101639

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Information Systems
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/is

A knowledge-intensive adaptive business process management

framework
∗
Huseyin Kir , Nadia Erdogan
Computer Engineering Department, Computer and Informatics Faculty, Istanbul Technical University, Turkey

article info a b s t r a c t

Article history:
Received 2 September 2019
Received in revised form 22 August 2020
Accepted 31 August 2020
Available online 10 September 2020
Recommended by Stefanie Rinderie-Ma
Keywords:
Business process management
Knowledge-intensive processes
Process modeling and execution
Process adaptation
Agent-based business process management
Agile business process management
Business process management has been the driving force of optimization and operational efficiency for
companies until now, but the digitalization era we have been experiencing requires businesses to be
agile and responsive as well. In order to be a part of this digital transformation, delivering new levels
of automation-fueled agility through digitalization of BPM itself is required. However, the automation
of BPM cannot be achieved by solely focusing on process space and classical planning techniques. It
requires a holistic approach that also captures the social aspects of the business environment, such as
corporate strategies, organization policies, negotiations, and cooperation. For this purpose, we combine
BPM, knowledge-intensive systems and intelligent agent technologies, and yield one consolidated
intelligent business process management framework, namely agileBPM, that governs the entire BPM
life-cycle. Accordingly, agileBPM proposes a modeling methodology to semantically capture the
business interests, enterprise environment and process space in accordance with the agent-oriented
software engineering paradigm. The proposed agent-based process execution environment provides
cognitive capabilities (such as goal-driven planning, norm compliance, knowledge-driven actions, and
dynamic cooperation) on top of the developed business models to support knowledge workers’ multi-
criteria decision making tasks. The context awareness and exception handling capabilities of the
proposed approach have been presented with experimental studies. Through comparative evaluations,
it is shown that agileBPM is the most comprehensive knowledge-intensive process management
solution.
© 2020 Published by Elsevier Ltd.

1. Introduction Companies need to combine advanced automation, cloud com-

The three industrial revolutions of the past were all triggered
by technical innovations: The introduction of steam-powered
mechanical production at the end of the 18th century, electri-
fication at the beginning of the 20th century and digitalization
through the introduction of programmable logic controllers for
the automation of production processes in the 1970s. Accord-
ing to experts, the fourth industrial revolution—triggered by the
internet—is no longer a ‘‘future trend’’, it is now at the center of
many companies’ strategic and research agendas [1]. The wave
of Industry 4.0 has already started disrupting markets, spawning
new business models, blurring industry boundaries and enabling
multi-company virtual business networks and ecosystems. Busi-
ness complexity is growing exponentially and current enterprise
systems are becoming insufficient to meet the agility and dy-
namism that are required by this new business environment [1].
∗ Corresponding author.
E-mail addresses: hkir@itu.edu.tr (H. Kir), nerdogan@itu.edu.tr
(N. Erdogan).
puting, computer-powered processes and intelligent algorithms
to transform their businesses and stay competitive [2].
1.1. Problem statement
While computer-powered processes constitute an important
part of the new enterprise transformation, currently businesses
still have very incomplete and deferred control over their pro-
cess spaces. It is recognized that while classical business pro-
cess management (BPM) systems are suitable for predefined and
standardized flows, they are less convenient when it comes to
capturing business processes whose conduct and execution are
heavily dependent on an expert’s knowledge-intensive decision-
making tasks [3]. In addition to the traditional needs of efficiency
and optimization, BPM needs to deliver automation-fueled agility
in order to capture knowledge-intensive processes and be a key
driver of digital transformation [4]. New approaches and methods
that extend BPM are needed to enable building complex adaptive
systems that react dynamically to changes and bring order out of
the chaos.
In literature, various researches have been conducted for
decades to ensure the agility of business process management

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.is.2020.101639
0306-4379/© 2020 Published by Elsevier Ltd.
H. Kir and N. Erdogan
systems (BPMS). Some studies have investigated how techniques
from the planning community could be used to synthesize new
processes and repair previously defined ones that are no longer
suitable for a given context [5,6]. Another set of approaches
bringing together ideas from both the Semantic Web and BPM
communities to automatically mediate between business experts’
requirements and the semantic web services [7–9]. In addition, a
number of studies have investigated goal or precondition and ef-
fect based process selection approaches to build adaptive process
management systems [10–12].
While task/service orchestration and planning driven
approaches are considered mature enough for supporting busi-
ness processes, these methodologies show limitations and pit-
falls while dealing with the collaborative, non-deterministic and
evolving nature of the enterprise knowledge-intensive processes
[1]. Besides, these approaches lack to capture the alignment
of planning decisions with corporate strategies and to recog-
nize organization values, beliefs, and policies. As Di Ciccio et al.
[13] stated, knowledge-intensive business process management
should not focus only on a single dimension (such as tasks or
flows), it should capture and manage a series of interrelated
elements (data, actions, rules, goals, processes, knowledge work-
ers and the environment) along all the phases of the process
life-cycle.
1.2. Solution approach
The solution introduced in this work for the management of
knowledge-intensive business processes with high variability re-
lies on three hypotheses. The first hypothesis is, process design is
not limited to the modeling of task and control-flows, but rather
data, rule, goal, environment and process perspectives should be
captured in a holistic way. Second, to maintain encapsulation
and componentization, process executions should not be man-
aged in terms of task-flows altering the enterprise information
space, but rather in terms of interacting entities, each with its
own goals, knowledge, decisions and life-cycle [3]. The ultimate
goal of BPM systems shifts from maintaining process automation
to assisting business expert’s decision making [13]. Accordingly,
as the third hypothesis, at least some fragments of the knowl-
edge worker’s expertise can be formalized and supported by
autonomous proxies.
In this sense, the concept of knowledge-based multi-agent
systems, composed of multiple interacting actors is a promising
modeling approach that can simulate the way complex, dynamic
processes emerge from the goal-driven collaboration of individual
actors at the bottom level [14]. Also, belief–desire–intention (BDI)
agents provide a natural encapsulation for knowledge, goal and
rule driven decision making that knowledge-intensive process
management requires [11]. The agileBPM utilizes BDI agents as
autonomous entities that pursue business goals, sense physical
and virtual stimuli in the environment, recognize the business
context, reason about how they should and should not behave,
and assist the business expert accordingly.
In modern BPM systems, discrete process design and execu-
tion phases are gradually disappearing and become continuous
and integrated activities of design, execution and adaptation [13].
The agileBPM proposes a consolidated modeling methodology
that seamlessly integrates business processes, knowledge-
intensive and multi-agent systems modeling paradigms and de-
sign components. This integration enables seamless utilization
and transformation of design time building blocks (such as
knowledge, rules, goals, processes, events, etc.) through the whole
process execution phases (planning, execution, decision making
and adaptation) driven by the intelligent agents.
The objective of this research is to augment, enrich and sup-
port business activities to make it easier for business experts to
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Information Systems 95 (2021) 101639
make more informed and accurate decisions. Knowledge workers
are still the main drivers of the business, and next-generation
BPM systems need to capture and digitalize the behavior of
experts in decision-making, cooperation, and negotiation. For this
purpose, the agileBPM aims to formalize goal-directed action
selection, process quality assessment, rule compliance control,
exception management, and dynamic cooperation capabilities of
business experts and serves as agent capabilities.
1.3. Paper contribution and organization
The agileBPM provides a consolidated methodology that cap-
tures both cognitive (such as knowledge, rules, goals) and control
flow dimensions of the enterprise process space in an incremen-
tal manner. The developed multi-agent based process execution
environment utilizes and infers the captured business process
knowledge fabric through the whole BPM life-cycle and trans-
forms it as the enterprise itself evolves. While most of the existing
approaches [5,6,12] solely focus on the adaptiveness of busi-
ness processes through unanticipated exception handling, the
proposed agileBPM architecture also enables addressing the prob-
lem from collaboration (enterprise goals, dynamic collaborations,
quality of service) and context awareness (rule adoption and
compliance, data-driven actions, reasoning) dimensions. Accord-
ingly, the agileBPM has been the most comprehensive solution,
providing the majority of the key requirements of knowledge-
intensive process management systems identified by Di Ciccio
et al. [13].
The remainder of this paper is structured as follows: After
this introduction, Section 2 presents a consolidated methodol-
ogy for knowledge-intensive business process modeling and in-
troduces a set of models that conceptualize various aspects of
the business space and enable autonomous runtime agility. Sec-
tion 3 describes the planning module that drives the decision
support through utilizing constructed business models and Sec-
tion 4 presents four use cases that demonstrate the business
expert assistance capabilities of the proposed approach. Then in
Section 5, the adaptiveness and exception management capabil-
ities of the agileBPM system are evaluated through simulation.
Section 6 presents the most prominent approaches to business
processes automation and accordingly positions the agileBPM
solution. The paper concludes with a summary and an outlook
on further research directions.
2. Knowledge-intensive process modeling methodology
An agent-based business process management system is a
complex adaptive system that is able to autonomously pursue
organizational goals, perceive the business environment, recog-
nize the application context, and respond accordingly [15]. How-
ever, deciding how a given enterprise system should respond
to changes through adopting an agent, knowledge, and business
process-centered view is a challenging task since there are many
factors that need to be considered, such as managerial tenden-
cies, organizational strategies, infrastructure, legislation, resource
availabilities and many more. Given this multitude of factors,
a number of perspectives are often required to understand an
organizational setting. To achieve such capability, the concept
demands a novel framework with normalized reference models
that support a multitude of perspectives, formal methods and a
standardized architecture [16]. As mentioned in the literature [1,
15,17], knowledge-intensive business processes have many no-
tions common with the multi-agent concept (such as knowledge,
constraints, goals, actions, events, plans) and are well-suited for
being operated by multi-agent systems.
H. Kir and N. Erdogan
Fig. 1. Knowledge-intensive process modeling methodology phases.
Yet multi-agent technology is beyond being simply a dis-
tributed software development infrastructure; it is also a mature
software engineering paradigm. In this regard, agent-oriented
business process management [18] is a full life-cycle proposi-
tion, not just a programming or implementation issue. In ad-
dition to providing the required semantic process model and
ontology stack, it is also essential to provide guidance on how
these models are applied. Accordingly, seamless integration of se-
mantic processes, knowledge-intensive systems and multi-agent
technologies requires a purpose-built method that enables the
development of common conceptualizations in integrity.
Through evaluating the most prominent agent-oriented soft-
ware engineering (AOSE) methodologies [19–25] and process se-
mantization approaches [26–29] in the literature, we propose
an agent-based knowledge-intensive process modeling method-
ology and complementary toolkit, which ensures that the design
and development of knowledge and control flow dimensions
of the business processes are carried out in an integrated and
incremental manner within the agent-oriented software engi-
neering life-cycle [30]. Our proposed methodology reuses and
enhances model definitions from existing BPM and AOSE method-
ologies to take advantage of their strengths wherever possible. As
shown in Fig. 1, the modeling methodology is structured in five
phases, which span from the business requirements specification
to deployment of constructed models to the agents. In the fol-
lowing, we describe and illustrate the five development phases of
the proposed methodology: Requirements Specification, Analysis,
Architectural Design, Detailed Design and Deployment.
The process modeling methodology will be illustrated through
a sales order process. The process starts with the arrival of a
sales order to the salesperson. The salesperson triggers the supply
chain manager (SCM) for the procurement and delivery of order
items. Finally, the accounting role executes the relevant payment
process and the sales order is completed. In order to maintain the
simplicity of the case, only relevant parts of the sample processes
will be addressed.
2.1. Requirements specification
Requirements analysis represents the initial phase in most
software engineering methodologies that tries to answer the
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Information Systems 95 (2021) 101639
Fig. 2. Sales order strategic relations model.
most fundamental of all design questions: “What is the sys-
tem intended for?” The process identification phase of the BPM
life-cycle addresses this question by systematically identifying a
collection of interlinked business processes required to achieve
an organization’s goals [31]. Therefore, when the system goals
are decomposed and achievement responsibility assigned to the
BPMS, goals become system requirements [32]. However, un-
like classical BPM modeling methodologies, this strategic align-
ment between the organizational (goals) and operational (pro-
cess) models is not only a design-time issue but also the driver of
autonomous agent behaviors towards organizational goals in the
agent-based BPM. Therefore, some AOSE methodologies, such as
Tropos [23] and Prometheus [33], provide means for the goal-
driven specification of requirements in a machine-processable
manner and utilize them to make autonomous decisions at run-
time. Similarly, some BPM methodologies propose binding busi-
ness objectives with process models to maintain their co-
evolution [32]. In both AOSE and BPM domain, i* [34] is one
of the most commonly used techniques due to its higher ex-
pressiveness, actor–goal orientation, and ability to deal with
non-functional requirements [23,32]. Accordingly, the agileBPM
adopts i* methodology to analyze requirements and understand
the organizational context.
2.1.1. Strategic relations model
The first phase of the proposed methodology defines system
requirements via modeling the stakeholders, their objectives, and
relationships through a strategic relations model. This model tries
to identify why an actor would engage in some tasks, pursue
a goal, need a resource, or desire a qualification. The strategic
relations model is represented by a mind map-like directed graph
where business actors are modeled as, nodes and the relations
between actors are represented by edges. These relations may
stand for a task to be performed, a resource to be shared, a mutual
goal to be achieved, or a non-functional requirement (soft-goal)
to be satisfied. These relations represent system requirements
from each actor’s viewpoint and generate Organizational and
Business Functions Ontology [35] as an output. Fig. 2 represents
the simplified requirements analysis of a generic sales process
through defining primary actors sales, accounting and supply
chain management (SCM), and their dependencies.
H. Kir and N. Erdogan
Fig. 3. Supply Chain Management (SCM) goal model.
2.2. Analysis
Business goals and strategies express what an organization
wants to achieve from the business perspective. In order to allow
modeling organizations from an intentional point of view, busi-
ness goals need to be captured explicitly. Within the scope of the
analysis phase, Strategic Relations models created in the require-
ments specification phase are extended through looking “into”
the actors in order to model internal intentional relationships.
AgileBPM utilizes goal models that allow a deeper understanding
of each process participant’s needs and how these requirements
are met. As one of the key building blocks of knowledge-intensive
systems, the goal model reveals the operational goals for each
actor by decomposing strategic goals specified in the strategic
relations model.
2.2.1. Goal model
Fig. 3 represents the goal model of the supply chain man-
agement role. In this model, through each actor’s perspective,
strategic goals are decomposed into operational constituents via
means-ends analysis, contribution analysis, and task/goal decom-
position methods. Means-ends relations are utilized to specify
alternative ways of achieving a goal. Decomposition relations pro-
vide a hierarchical description of intentional elements that make
up a routine by resolving into subgoals. The contribution relations
provide elaboration of the effects from intentional elements to
soft-goals. Goal models developed for each role incrementally
form the Enterprise Strategy Ontology.
2.2.2. Domain model
The analysis phase ends with the construction of domain
models that capture the environment that the agent can sense
and process upon. In accordance with Gaia [21], PASSI [25] and O-
MaSE [20] methodologies, agileBPM utilizes ontologically defined
domain models for instituting common vocabularies amongst
the system participants and for defining the resources that are
consumed/produced during the goal achievement process. Do-
main models describe what kind of entities an agent and process
can deal with and how they relate to each other. In this con-
text, domain models primarily focus on resources identified in
the strategic relations model, such as sales order, delivery info,
and payment receipt. In addition, the use of public ontologies
is encouraged as a best practice of ontology modeling. While
conventional process models are based on data flows, agileBPM
adopts a knowledge-based approach where references of the
knowledge concepts are carried along the process. This enables
dynamic adaptation to the evolution of the information model
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Information Systems 95 (2021) 101639
and makes processes easily accessible, reusable, and composable
with other processes. Domain models produce the Enterprise
Data Ontology, which defines the schema of the enterprise and
constitutes a part of the agent knowledge bases.
2.3. Architectural design
There are inevitable dependencies and relationships between
process participants and these interactions are captured in the
architectural design phase. While the goal model focuses on
the internal intentional relationships of an actor, the interaction
models enable the modeling orchestration of goals and interac-
tions of the process participants. Both BPM and AOSE research
domains propose similar models for capturing goal-driven in-
teractions of process participants, such as Subject Interaction
Diagrams of subject-oriented BPM [36] and Prometheus agent
interaction diagrams [22]. For the modeling of these relations,
contrary to a conventional message-oriented interaction mod-
eling approach that focuses on the precise ordering of partic-
ular message exchanges, agileBPM adopts the goal based ab-
stractive approach. Goal-oriented interaction models focus on
the essential nature and purpose of an interaction that empow-
ers autonomous behaviors instead of pushing agents to follow
predefined communicative acts mechanically.
2.3.1. Interaction model
Interaction diagrams are abstract workflows which are not
fully defined in terms of concrete tasks and messages and are
thus not executable. These abstract flows capture the skeleton
of a process, emphasizing the interactions and business goal de-
pendencies in a bird’s-eye view, leaving the concrete definition of
the process to the subsequent steps. Interaction models designed
independently of action and messaging details provide agents
with great flexibility on runtime decision making and exception
handling.
Fig. 4 presents an interaction model of the Deliver Order
business scenario that is accomplished through the coordination
of three roles, namely supply chain management, accounting,
and customer. In accordance with the interaction model, the
role enacting agent determines its actual actions and messages
at runtime to achieve the collaborative goals. Even messaging
protocols can change dramatically in accordance with these goal
achievement decisions.
2.3.2. Rule model
Real business scenarios not only have to realize business
goals and functional requirements but are also influenced by
regulations, rules and business policies. In knowledge-intensive
systems, business policies are orthogonally applied to all business
scenarios and define conditions which drive the execution of the
processes. In addition to studies on applying rules in the context
of knowledge-intensive business processes management [37],
there are also studies on applying rules in the field of multi-
agent systems; while every agent tries to achieve its individual
goal, making a multi-agent system act on a common interest is
only possible via organizing agent behaviors and interactions in a
normative way [38–40]. With the unification of approaches both
from BPM and AOSE a rule model is constructed.
In contrast to the approach based on adding conditional
branches to processes in order to exhibit rule-compliant behav-
iors, a rule-based approach provides high flexibility through a
declarative manner. Through the rule model, since rules are not
hard-wired into agent behaviors, conditions may change, new
obligations might be added, existing norms may become obsolete,
and explicit representation of semantic constraints can empower
more flexible and reasoning-based decision making. In this sense,
H. Kir and N. Erdogan
Fig. 4. Deliver order scenario interaction model.
a rule model is composed of regulative rules that ensure compat-
ibility with the business policies by being tracked proactively and
reactive rules which are used for optimizing business processes
and adapting to constraints reactively.
(a) Regulative Rules: In many enterprise domains, business
processes often have to strictly comply with business policies,
legislations, partner contracts, and semantic constraints, such as
‘‘Dangerous goods barred from carriage by IATA regulations shall
not be accepted for air carriage’’. These rules are represented
with Semantic Web Rule Language (SWRL) [41] and proactively
regulate the behavior of their subjects through defining what is
legal and what is not. From a compliance perspective, regulative
rules have deontic effects which are: obligation (O), prohibition
(Phb) and permission (Prm).
IATADangerousGoods(? goods) → PhbSCM airShipping(? goods)
In this statement, the PhbSCM deontic operator represents the
prohibition of the supply chain management role. The prohibition
of A is the obligation of ¬A (the opposite of A) and deontic effects
remain in force until it is terminated or fulfilled.
(b) Reactive Rules: In the legal domain, the term ‘‘rule’’ is
usually utilized in the regulatory sense. However, rules also apply
as prescriptions that define who (the rule subject) does what
(the action) in which conditions (the norm application case) [42].
Reactive rules enable the event-driven realization of context-
dependent actions through monitoring an environmental circum-
stance defined by an event, along with a set of conditions and
performing the corresponding behaviors with the occurrence of
the observed pattern. The essential syntax of these rules is on
Event if Condition do Action (ECA) and provides active real-time
reactions to events which are ideally suited for detecting and
reacting to events in dynamic computing environments [43].
Primarily non-functional requirements (soft-goals) and com-
pensation behaviors are represented in this form. For example,
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Information Systems 95 (2021) 101639
if the ‘‘Deliver goods on time’’ soft-goal fails, the re-planning of
adaptation behavior is defined as:
deliv erOrder(? order) →
⨂
OSCM deliv erOnTime(? order) OSCM replanGoal(shipping)
⨂
In this statement, the connective operator associates the
soft-goal and compensation behaviors (such as planning/
replanning a goal, suspending/canceling a behavior).
In addition, for many business scenarios, it is unrealistic to
assume that all exceptional situations and business conditions
can be anticipated at design-time and thus be incorporated into
the process model a priori. Reactive rules provide high flexibility
through enabling agents to handle these cases at a cognitive level
without requiring manual process flow updates. ECA rules are
also utilized for dynamically handling exceptions and defining
actionable rules (such as ‘‘Sales of certain chemicals that exceed
a threshold should be approved by the related customs and trade
authority’’) in a declarative manner. Rule models produce the
Enterprise Rules and Constraints Ontology which constitutes the
foundation of enterprise and agent rule bases.
2.4. Detailed design
In the detailed design phase, process models are designed
based on the interaction models. The design approach of the pro-
cess models in this study differs from conventional process mod-
els at several points. Initially, business processes are addressed as
a loosely coupled behavior network of the process participants.
Accordingly, contrary to the swimlane based role distinction of
conventional approaches, processes are designed from the per-
spective of the relevant roles, and a separate process model is
created for each role as in subject-oriented BPM [36]. Secondly,
instead of defining the procedures that should be followed along
the process step by step, flexibility by under-specification is at-
tained through goal tasks. The actual binding of goal tasks is
H. Kir and N. Erdogan
postponed to the execution phase and empowers the agent to
make context-based optimized decisions at runtime.
2.4.1. Process model
The process model for the Deliver Order process of the supply
chain management role is presented in Fig. 5, where yellow tasks
(Procurement and Shipping) stand for the goal tasks. While not
depicted on the process visual, in accordance with the Business
Process Modeling Ontology (BPMO) meta-model [26], a set of
ontological metadata are defined in the process model. Firstly,
the process itself and all goal tasks are linked to the related
goals in the Enterprise Strategy Ontology. Then, all process inputs
and outputs are defined in terms of Enterprise Data Ontology
concepts. Finally, functional process and goal task semantics, such
as preconditions and effects, are defined to specify if the agent is
capable of executing the process and process execution concludes
with a desired logical state. The precondition of the Deliver Order
process is simply ‘‘Sales order should be approved by both customer
and the sales authority’’ and defined as the antecedent (body) of
a SWRL rule on top of the Enterprise Data Ontology;
approv edBy({salesOrder }, ? salesRole)∧
approv edBy({salesOrder }, ? customer)
The effects of the related process is ‘‘order status changed to
completed and the payment date is updated’’ and defined as the
consequent (head) of the rule;
orderStatus({salesOrder }, ‘‘completed′′ )∧
issueDate({paymentReceipt }, ? date)∧
paymentDate({salesOrder }, ? date)
In order to refer to runtime concepts such as process instance
and agent knowledge from the process space, a set of built-ins
({self}, {process} and {paramName}) are provided. These built-in
references are replaced by the related agent knowledge base
entities (respectively the agent itself, the process instance and the
related process parameter) at process instantiation time.
The newly created or modified models are registered to the
Process Registry Agent hosting a repository of known process
models in BPMO format, so that they can be used in the next steps
for discovery and enactment.
2.5. Deployment
In our framework, agents are active software entities that are
able to enact roles. It is assumed that agents are designed inde-
pendently of any domain or organization and have their own ini-
tial (self) beliefs, desires, capabilities and obligations. Agents join
societies by adopting organizational roles in which assignments
are defined in the agent model.
2.5.1. Agent model
In PASSI [25] role identification models, in Gaia [21] agent
models and in Ingenias methodology [24] agent viewpoint mod-
els are utilized for the assignment of roles to agents. AgileBPM
adopts the formalization depicted in Gaia as it is the most influ-
ential methodology that utilizes roles as an abstraction for system
analysis and deploys to agents for execution [44].
In role theory, roles are defined as self-conceptions, self-
referent cognitions that agents apply to themselves as a conse-
quence of the social role positions they occupy. Within the scope
of this proposal, a role is identified as a set of cognitive qualities
R = ⟨G, Gs , σr , πr ⟩, respectively a set of goals (G) that should be
achieved while playing the role, obligations that need to be sat-
isfied (soft-goals, Gs ), a set of role-related prohibitions (rules, σr )
and beliefs of the role (domain knowledge, πr ). Once the Agent
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Information Systems 95 (2021) 101639
Model is realized, agents retrieve the relevant role packages from
the related organizational authority and each agent updates itself
to include the characteristics of the enacted role. Agents can join
multiple organizations and may exhibit several roles in each of
them. Through the role enactment, the agent gains a series of
new goals, a set of soft-goals, rules applied to the role, as well
as the base beliefs and domain knowledge required to play the
role.
In addition, roles determine the enterprise knowledge graphs
that are accessible to the agent and the actions it can perform.
Each time an agent enacts a role, its capabilities (goals) are
published through the Directory Facilitator (DF) agent yellow
page service [45]. In this way, cooperative agents can dynamically
discover the supplier agent and collaborate for the achievement
of a common goal.
3. Business models in decision support
The goal of BPM systems is shifting from maintaining process
automation to assisting business experts’ decision making [13]. To
this end, next-generation BPM suites should not only focus on the
execution of control flows but also capture the cognitive aspects
of actors and support decision making. The ultimate decision
support that a BPMS can provide is to recommend actions to
achieve strategic goals. For this purpose, the questions to be
answered are: which business processes can be utilized to achieve
organizational goals, which process is better, is the actor capable
of executing the process and does process execution cause a rule
violation? In business process management, these questions are
tried to be answered within the scope of process planning. This
section details how business models are used for decision making.
In the literature, there are various studies on process plan-
ning aim to generate a sequence of actions (i.e., plan) from a
model that defines how actions work, what the world’s initial
state and the goal state is [46]. A significant number of these
studies utilize classical planning approaches for adaptive process
planning. However, there is a gap between the research area
of theoretical (but often unrealistic) planning on the one hand
and real-world planning on the other. The theoretical planning
approach can be very insufficient for enterprise environments
that are non-deterministic due to the unpredictable intentions of
process participants, and where information completeness cannot
be guaranteed. Also, in process management, it is more desirable
to adapt a running process through avoiding radically changing
the activities already assigned to process participants, and simply
updating parts of the process that need to be adapted and keeping
other parts stable [13]. For this purpose, in accordance with
agileBPM’s goal based underspecified process models, we adopt
a goal-driven approach for runtime decision making.
In goal-driven process planning, the concrete activities to be
performed are determined upon the goal task’s enactment on a
per-case basis [10,47]. For this purpose, agileBPM adopts a best-
first search based heuristics approach to recommend the most
promising goal achieving processes that are compatible with the
actual context. At the core of this approach lies the selection of
‘‘best’’ actions where the questions to be answered are: what
is the best way to constrain the process search space and how
to digitalize the process selection heuristics of the knowledge
worker for identifying the promising solutions? To this end, ag-
ileBPM proposes a three-step solution. First, process discovery is
utilized for efficiently searching and ranking the processes that
can achieve the given goal with a given parameter space. Second,
process selection is applied to identify the most appropriate
process through digitalizing quality assessment, organizational
strategies and business rules’ compliance control heuristics of the
knowledge workers. Third, if there is no single process that can
H. Kir and N. Erdogan
Fig. 5. SCM role deliver order process model. (For interpretation of the references to color in this figure legend, the reader is referred to the web version of this
article.)
achieve the goal, a state-of-the-art external planner is invoked
to compose and recommend a solution. In the following, process
discovery, process selection and process composition modules
are introduced, which drive the action recommendation through
establishing a context-based planning pipeline.
3.1. Process discovery
Adaptations always start with what is currently available for
use and apply it in new ways that maximize fitness in the im-
mediate term. Without knowing what the available options are,
there is no way to establish a meaningful heuristic function.
In this respect, agents have to be able to autonomously iden-
tify which behaviors to recommend to adaptively achieve the
desired goals. The process discovery module aims at locating
processes that, totally or partially, fulfill a goal from the process
repository managed by the Process Registry Agent in an efficient
way. The process discovery encompasses (a) goal model based
goal matching, (b) domain model based semantic and syntactic
process signature matching (input/output), and (c) the semantic
relevance ranking of these processes by the Process Registry
Agent. In addition to the semantic signatures of the processes,
functional process semantics that are encoded in terms of logi-
cal preconditions are also important in specifying the fitness of
a process to current environmental conditions. However, since
precondition validation requires the process performer agent’s
conception of the world (knowledge), this operation cannot be
handled by the Process Registry Agent itself and is postponed to
the process selection phase governed by the performer agent.
Semantic process models are defined in BPMO notation with
semantic signature parameters encoded in Enterprise Data Ontol-
ogy concepts and functional semantics (precondition and effects)
represented as SWRL rule fragments. In this respect, a seman-
tic process is a 6-tuple P = ⟨id, G, I , O, Pre, Eff ⟩, respectively an
identifier, goals (G) referring to Goal Model taxonomy, inputs (I)
and outputs (O) referring to resources defined in Domain Model,
preconditions (Pre) and effects (Eff ) that defines constraints on
Domain Model concepts. For a process request R and an offer
P, goal matching can be defined as a strict logical subsumption
relation:
Goal match: Process P matches the goal of Request R ⇔ ∀GR ∈
goal(R) ∧ ∃GP ∈ goal(P) : GR ⊒ GP
Similar to logic-based matching of the semantic web ser-
vice signatures [48], the degree of strict logical process signa-
ture matching is defined as follows. With ⊒1 denoting direct
subsumption relation in the Goal Model taxonomy tree.
Exact match: Process P fully matches with request R ⇔ ∀IP ∈
in(P) ∧ ∃IR ∈ in(R) : IP ≡ IR ∧ ∀OP ∈ out(P) ∧ ∃OR ∈ out(R) :
OP ≡ OR
Plug-in match: Process P plugs into request R ⇔ ∀IP ∈
in(P) ∧ ∃IR ∈ in(R) : IP ⊒ IR ∧ ∀OP ∈ out(P) ∧ ∃OR ∈ out(R) :
OR ⊒1 OP
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Information Systems 95 (2021) 101639
Subsumes match: Request R subsumes process P ⇔ ∀IP ∈
in(P) ∧ ∃IR ∈ in(R) : IP ⊒ IR ∧ ∀OP ∈ out(P) ∧ ∃OR ∈ out(R) :
OR ⊒ OP
Subsumed-by match: Request R subsumed by process P ⇔
∀IP ∈ in(P) ∧ ∃IR ∈ in(R) : IP ⊒ IR ∧ ∀OP ∈ out(P) ∧ ∃OR ∈
out(R) : OP ≡ OR ∨ OR ⊑1 OP where ⊒ denotes subsumption
relation and ≡ denotes concept equality in the Domain Model
taxonomy tree. These semantic relevance degrees are ordered as:
Exact > Plug-in > Subsumes > Subsumed-by.
Structural match: Another proposal for evaluating the seman-
tic similarity between a pair of concepts is defined by how closely
they are related in the hierarchy. For this purpose, the taxonomy
tree lowest common ancestor (LCA) distance metric is utilized
to overcome poorly defined external and internal domain model
taxonomies [49].
Syntactic match: The process matchings identified through
logical signature matchings produce high-precision results (see
Fig. 6) and enable agents to continue their execution without
human intervention. However, most of the domain model ontolo-
gies in the semantic web today are disconnected is-a ontologies,
which hamper the effective use of any logic-based matchmaker.
The lack of semantic relations (such as owl:equivalentClass and
owl:disjointWith etc.) hinders taking full advantage of the ex-
pressiveness of OWL-DL and the implicit knowledge respectively
inferred by a description logic reasoner. In this manner, seman-
tic approaches are mostly assisted by syntactic similarity-based
matching approaches [50]. AgileBPM utilizes Jaccard text sim-
ilarity due to its accuracy in this domain [51] and reinforces
it with a distributional semantics-based alignment approach.
Word2vec [52] word embeddings trained with enterprise doc-
uments are utilized to detect domain model concepts that are
not semantically linked due to inadequate ontology modeling but
are likely to relate through evaluating the linguistic similarity
of the concepts. This approach significantly improves recall by
providing a basic level of alignment assessment across heteroge-
neous ontologies, identifying domain-specific abbreviations and
synonyms. On the other hand, syntactic alignments require data
mediators at runtime for translating between concepts located in
disjoint ontologies. Development of the necessary mediators are
out of the scope of this framework and it is assumed that the
required data mediators have already been defined and deployed
to a mediator repository [53], brokered by a data mediator agent
beforehand.
Hybrid match: Each of the methods used for process discovery
has its strengths and insufficiencies from the accuracy point of
view. In order to benefit from the strengths of all approaches,
a hybrid solution has been developed that uses these methods
in combination. The hybrid approach first attempts logic-based
matching, if cannot find a match, goes for syntactic and structural
similarities, respectively.
To the best of our knowledge, there is no publicly avail-
able matchmaker or an evaluation dataset for semantic business
processes [54]. For this reason, we have generated a semantic
business process test repository (namely BPMO-TC4) based on
H. Kir and N. Erdogan
Fig. 6. Micro-averaged recall/precision process discovery performance.
Table 1
Process discovery and ranking performance.
Hybrid Logic & LCA Logic Jac & w2v
AUC 0.82 0.79 0.71 0.59
nDCG 0.851 0.824 0.768 0.628
AQRT 3.88 1.04 0.77 3.12
the semantic service discovery standard test collection OWLS-
TC41 which covers various application domains such as travel,
tourism and e-health. The generated test collection consists of
1083 process offers and 42 test requests with binary and graded
(0 to 3) relevance sets where 160 of the processes and 18 of the
requests have preconditions and effects defined in SWRL. Since
OWLS does not have goal definitions, evaluation processes do not
have goals either, and discovery is driven by logical, structural
and syntactic matchings for this test set. The generated evaluation
dataset is published along with the project source code.2
The experimental performance evaluation results of the pro-
cess matchmaker on the generated binary relevance dataset are
summarized in Fig. 6. Experiments show that supporting stan-
dard strict logical signature matching techniques with taxonomy
tree lowest common ancestor (LCA) distance metric significantly
improves logic-based matching performance (see Table 1). An
appropriate combination of logic and non-logic-based hybrid pro-
cess matching significantly outperforms both types of selection in
terms of precision and recall (with 0.82 AUC and 0.8 optimized
F-score) but at the cost of higher response times.
Discovery result ranking performance is evaluated by normal-
ized discounted cumulative gain (nDCG) metric for the process
matching configuration optimized for the highest F-score on the
graded relevance dataset. The discovery, ranking performance
and average query response time (AQRT in seconds) of each
approach are summarized in Table 1. Accordingly, the hybrid
process discovery approach is adopted by the agileBPM.
1 http://projects.semwebcentral.org/projects/owls-tc/
2 https://github.com/asbpm/agilebpm
Information Systems 95 (2021) 101639
Table 2
Process selection criteria BSC.
Perspective Indicator Detailed indicator
Financial Process cost - Direct cost
- Delay cost
Process trend - Frequency
Customer Agility - Easiness of change
Satisfaction - Responsiveness
- Reliability
Internal business Maintainability - Complexity
- Coherence
Learning & growth Objective - Clearness of purpose
- Clearness of responsibilities
3.2. Process selection
The Process Registry Agent provides a relevance ranked list of
goal-directed behaviors to the process performer agent for rec-
ommendation. Yet adaptation is not solely a change in response
to a stimulus, it is a change in the direction of improvement.
Business process management is also described as a “process
optimization process”, hence the quality of service (QoS) is a cen-
tral part of the process selection in achieving high-performance
organizations. The process selection module aims to enhance
intelligent agents with the process quality evaluation heuristics
of business experts. However, this is not a straightforward task.
Firstly, there are differing perceptions of quality corresponding
Jaccard
to differing perspectives (business and management, information
0.57
0.608
technologies, customer, etc.). Secondly, there are no widely ac-
0.55 cepted approaches and quality metrics to assist in this process.
Studies in the literature are mostly incomplete prototypes that
consider only a limited number of factors that are generally
very conceptual [55–58]. One of the most significant strategic
decision-making techniques utilized by business experts to evalu-
ate the business processes from a strategic management perspec-
tive is the Balanced Scorecard (BSC) system [31,59]. In agileBPM,
based on the works of Cho and Lee [60], a balanced scorecard
with quantifiable indicators is utilized to support multi-criteria
decision making of the agents (see Table 2).
A balanced scorecard allows decision makers – in this case
agents – to look at the business from four essential perspec-
tives in order to identify measures that can be used to track
the implementation of a business strategy. In this direction, pri-
mary business perspectives and related quality indicators are as
follows:
Financial perspectives on process quality focus on the practical
applicability of the process in an economic context. Indicators
evaluating these aspects focus on cost and trends:
• Direct Cost: The average operation cost for each process in
terms of the duration of the tasks carried out during the
process: the man-month cost of the responsible roles and
the cost of the resources consumed during the process.
• Delay Cost: The average additional cost of the process in-
stances that exceed the average execution duration of the
process.
• Process Frequency: The number of process instantiations
in a fixed time frame which reflects the popularity of the
process.
Customers’ expectations from enterprises can be summarized as:
• Agility: Customers expect businesses to respond to changes
quickly and this metric aims to measure the adaptability of
processes to these changing conditions. Within the scope of
this project, process agility is achieved through goal tasks.
In this respect, the number of goal tasks used in the process
model is utilized as an indicator of process agility.
8
H. Kir and N. Erdogan
• Responsiveness: The responsiveness metric is used to assess
the process quality by tracking the average cycle time of
a process to respond to requests from other processes or
clients [31].
• Reliability: Single momentary process failure can have a
high, or even critical, impact on customers. The reliability in-
dicator is simply described by the ratio number of successful
executions/number of scheduled executions [61].
From an internal business perspective, processes represent orga-
nizational competencies that form the productive capacity of the
organization. As core business assets, processes should be delib-
erately managed; their understandability and maintainability are
important.
• Complexity: The complexity level of a business process af-
fects the time and effort required for its effective learning,
maintenance and optimization. In literature, a number of
metrics for evaluating process complexity exists, but only
a small number of these have been theoretically and exper-
imentally verified [62]. In this context, we use the control-
flow complexity (CFC) metric [63] in agileBPM to evaluate
the simplicity and understandability of the process design.
∑ cost-efficient options automatically. In addition, each agent au-
CFC (P) = CFCXOR−split (i) +
i∈{XORs of P }
∑ ∑
CFCOR−split (j) + CFCAND−split (k)
j∈{ORs of P } k∈{ANDs of P }
For XOR-splits of the process, the complexity (CFCXOR−split )
is equal to the number of transitions going out of the split.
CFCOR−split corresponds to 2n − 1 where n is the outgoing
transition count and for AND-splits, the complexity is simply
1. The greater values of CFC represents the greater overall
architectural complexity of a process.
• Coherence: A business process model should only comprise
those activities and events which are required to achieve
the goal. Depicting superfluous aspects in a business process
model decreases understandability. For this purpose, we
use the cohesion metric [64] to quantitatively express the
degree to which the elements of a process belong together.
The autonomous process execution environment requires pro-
cesses with clear business targets and responsibility assignments.
• Clearness of purpose: Goals are matched through logical
subsumption and processes with concrete goals should be
preferred over abstract ones. The goal’s depth in the goal
hierarchy (DGT) is used for this purpose. The DGT met-
ric measures the length of the longest path from a given
goal G to the root class in the Enterprise Strategy Ontology
inheritance hierarchy.
• Clearness of responsibilities: This metric aims to ensure that
the assignments of tasks do not cause ambiguity. The use of
concrete roles is encouraged, rather than the abstract roles
that appear in the upper levels of the role hierarchy, and it
is evaluated through the roles’ depth in the role hierarchy.
Quality indicator values need to be normalized to the same scale
to serve a consistent evaluation through diverse measurement
metrics. For a positive indicator, such as agility, a higher value
implies better quality and negative indicators, e.g., complexity,
display the opposite effect. Accordingly, indicator values are nor-
malized by the following equations where Imax and Imin are the
maximum and minimum values of the indicator I amongst all
discovered processes;
{
Iv alue −Imin
Imax −Imin
if Imax − Imin > 0
Iv alue = for + indicators
1 if Imax − Imin = 0
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Information Systems 95 (2021) 101639
{
Imax −Iv alue
Imax −Imin
if Imax − Imin > 0
Iv alue = for − indicators
1 if Imax − Imin = 0
Based on the given normalizations, the quality of each discov-
ered process is uniformly calculated through the weighted sum
of quality indicators.
∑
Quality(P) = Ivi alue ∗ w eighti
i=1
In order to identify perspective weights, Cho and Lee [60]
conduct a survey-based approach and identify the customer per-
spective as the most important one with the highest priority
(0.42), followed by internal business (0.26), financial (0.17) and
then learning and growth (0.15). However, instead of setting fixed
weights, the agileBPM process selection mechanism supports a
configurable weighting approach for process quality indicators.
Process success factors can change over time due to changes in
the environment. For example, in a financial crisis, the priority
would shift from customer satisfaction to reduction of costs. By
increasing the weight of the ‘‘financial’’ perspective, all process
enactments can be prioritized organization-wide in favor of the
tonomously optimizes its weights based on its conception of the
world and optimizes its behaviors. For example, in the case of
a failure during the process execution, an agent may waste some
resources (e.g., time and budget). Through prioritizing critical per-
spectives (e.g., cost and reliability) during replanning, the agent
may enact another behavior that better fits the current resource
availabilities.
3.3. Process composition
Ideally, for a given goal, process discovery and process selec-
tion modules would identify a process compatible with the actual
execution context from the process repository. In case a process
cannot be found, agileBPM invokes a state-of-the-art external
planner to synthesize a process that can achieve the objective.
For this purpose, the SHOP2 HTN planner is utilized, which de-
compose goals recursively into smaller sub-goals through the
goal model until it reaches primitive processes and consequently
recommends a composite process flow [65]. Since agileBPM pro-
cess model interfaces are fully compliant with WSMO and OWL-S
specifications, BPMO processes can be translated into SHOP2 do-
mains in a sound and complete way. The adoption of a process
composer, in addition to discovery and selection modules, enables
automated recommendations of the tasks to be executed next. In
this way, the knowledge worker is constantly guided to reach the
goal and the goal is effectively achieved.
Algorithm 1 summarizes the overall goal-driven process rec-
ommendation procedure of the agileBPM.
4. Application scenarios
Recommending goal-achieving processes for effectively guid-
ing the business expert during the knowledge-intensive process
(KIP) enactment is very important. However, as Di Ciccio et al.
[13] identify, a business process management system should also
provide other capabilities (such as data-driven actions, rule man-
agement, and flexible process execution) to support and enable
the knowledge worker adequately. In this section, four potential
business scenarios displaying further knowledge worker assis-
tance capabilities of the agileBPM agent-based process execution
environment are introduced.
H. Kir and N. Erdogan
Algorithm 1 Goal driven process recommendation algorithm
Require: g: goal to enact, πr : knowledge of the active role, σr : role
related rules
1: procedure EnactGoal(g)
2: Pcandidates ← ProcessRegistryAgent .discov er(g) ▷ ACL msg
3: while g not achieved nor terminated do
4: QoSconfig ← calculate QoS weights based on πr
5: Sort(Pcandidates , QoSconfig )
6: pc ← Pop(Pcandidates )
7: if pc preconditions met in πr then
8: if pc effects consistent with σr then
9: Recommend(pc )
10: end if
11: end if
12: end while
13: if recommendation failed for g then
14: Recommend(shop2Compose(g , πr ))
15: end if
16: end procedure
• Scenario 1: Knowledge is a key constituent of KIPs, and not
only processes modify the enterprise information model,
but also the information model should reshape processes.
Knowledge-driven behaviors scenario captures how pro-
cess execution is altered and new reactive actions are trig-
gered through the evolution of the information model.
• Scenario 2: During KIP enactment, unexpected exceptions
and external events may occur, disrupting the current pro-
cess flow and accordingly require dynamic adaptation of the
KIP. This scenario reveals agileBPM capabilities to deal with
unanticipated exceptions.
• Scenario 3: In a KIP, a knowledge worker must be able to
explicitly define business rules and constraints that influ-
ence the process enactment. The definition and propagation
of the rules are detailed in the norm adoption and com-
pliance scenario by introducing a new regulation about
vegetable supply chains.
• Scenario 4: Unlike well-structured business processes, KIPs
are emergent in their nature and may not be fully pre-
specified. The concrete tasks to be performed need to be
identified by the knowledge workers’ decisions at runtime.
Flexible process execution scenario details agileBPM’s ad
hoc process definition capabilities through an artful SCM
quality assurance process.
4.1. Knowledge-driven behaviors
KIPs are characterized by tasks whose execution is shaped
by the evolution of the knowledge model [13]. In agileBPM, the
process and knowledge relation are twofold: first, knowledge can
shape the process flows through task preconditions defined on
enterprise data, and secondly, changes in the knowledge model
can trigger goal-seeking processes.
As pointed out previously, as the final step of process selection,
functional process semantics encoded in terms of preconditions
stating how knowledge may constrain the task execution is con-
firmed by the agent. For example, an agent may discover several
shipping options for the ‘‘Shipping’’ goal of the Deliver Order
process (see Fig. 5). As a first option, a Marine Shipping process
may require that the actual moisture level of all transferred goods
be within Transportable Moisture Limits (TML) to prevent lique-
faction that can lead to a cargo shift and accidents. In agileBPM,
marine shipping goal’s precondition can be defined as follows:
SalesOrder({order }) ∧ hasProduct({order }, ? good)∧
moistureLev el(? good, ? ml) ∧ lessThan(? ml, $TML_MAX $)
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Information Systems 95 (2021) 101639
While these preconditions may be met during the initial en-
actment of the Deliver Order process, at actual Shipping goal
task execution time, the sensory analysis may reveal that mois-
ture level is above limits. The process selection module applies
precondition rules on the agent knowledge base and checks to
ascertain if the rule reasoner infers a violation. In case of the
precondition failure, the agent informs knowledge worker, skips
that particular Marine Shipping process selection, re-plans the
goal, and recommends another process (such as a Railway Ship-
ping) to the knowledge worker. In this way, the evolution of
the agent knowledge model dynamically influences the actual
process progression.
Secondly, the agileBPM knowledge-driven process execution
environment creates an institutional reality and enables agents
to act in an observe–think–act cycle through logical reasoning.
These observations can be a specific knowledge state or con-
ception of an event, and reactive actions can be the initiation
of goal-directed action planning. In contrast to the approach
based on adding conditional branches and exception handlers to
process models at design time in order to control such events, the
knowledge-driven approach provides higher flexibility through
reacting on a stimulus during process execution without making
assumptions about the time these events may occur.
Knowledge-driven behaviors allow the evolution of the knowl-
edge to trigger reactive actions and also soft-goals (non-
functional requirements) to be maintained. For example, ‘‘system
must maintain a minimum stock amount for material A’’ soft-goal
can be represented as a reactive rule and trigger a purchase order
goal as a compensation action.
stock(materialA) < $min_amount$ →
OSCM triggerGoal(purchase(materialA))
Reactive rules are controlled by the agent with each knowl-
edge update operation. In this way, when the agent observes the
rule premises in its knowledge base, it immediately realizes rule
conclusions and dynamically enacts the compensation goal.
4.2. Deal with unanticipated exceptions
Real-world business process execution environments are
highly dynamic because of diverse, frequently changing situa-
tions: shipment delays, production equipment failures, absent
participants, change/cancellation of orders. Such changing situa-
tions lead to deviations from existing plans and fail to achieve
goals unless swift actions are taken to minimize the adverse
effects [4]. In agileBPM, the reactive rule model is utilized to
recognize exceptional circumstances automatically and to deter-
mine the necessary process instance flow adaptations. For this
purpose, failures trigger new obligations, which are the principal
motivators for agents to act. Based on obligations, an agent can
dynamically replace/re-plan the failed goal, trigger a repair action,
or abort/roll-back the execution.
In this scenario, an agent selects railway transportation due
to its cost-effectiveness for a shipping goal. If the execution of a
particular action during goal enactment results in an unexpected
state, such as a strike in railway services, the agent reactively
re-plans the shipping goal or triggers another compensation goal.
⨂
OSCM goal(shipping) OSCM replanGoal(shipping)
Exception and other factors emerge a new environment that is
different from the initial planning state as they alter the context
(resource, time, etc.) of the KIP. Therefore, re-planning becomes
necessary in order to effectively reach the desired goal state from
the current state by recommending the most suited task flow. For
this purpose, the process discovery module runs and discovers
H. Kir and N. Erdogan
the same process candidates as before. However, at this time,
the context-based QoS configuration module analyzes the new
state, sets up a more convenient process selection configuration,
and initiates a re-planning. Accordingly, the agent selects an-
other shipment option, such as airway or highway transportation,
and recommends to the knowledge worker. In this way, despite
the unanticipated exceptions, the process goal can be effectively
reached, as the knowledge worker is continuously guided to reach
the process goal.
4.3. Norm adoption and compliance
In order to ensure that a process execution does not result
in a breach of the rules governing it, agileBPM provides control
mechanisms for validating and assuring compliance with the
semantic constraints defined in the Rule Model. The use of a
normative vocabulary and implementation of norms in agent
systems have a well-established tradition to improve multi-agent
coordination and cooperation [39,40]. However, in contrast to
open societies, adhering with norms and policies is a must in the
enterprise domain to avoid severe sanctions, maintain customer
trust, and the prestige of the organization. For that reason, the
agileBPM framework requires agents to comply with the whole
set of norms rather than letting agents autonomously decide in
which to follow. Accordingly, agents adopt norms voluntarily;
norm government, punishment, and reward mechanisms are out
of the scope of this work.
Within the scope of this work, norms are utilized as a factor
that influences the agent reasoning and deliberation process, nec-
essarily in action selection. Since business rules are so diverse and
variable, it is unlikely that all regulations can be hard-wired into
agent behaviors as conditional branches or process preconditions
at design time. The agent must make sure that the effects of its
actions do not cause violations of the rules. In such cases, process
effects should be validated against the rule model in advance in
order to estimate whether process execution concludes with a
desired environment state.
As an example, take a company in the food domain. Let a new
regulation established by some governmental organization define
that certain kinds of vegetables must now be sold within a shorter
sell-by date than before. In a conventional BPM system, a business
expert needs to identify all processes relating to the shipment of
the related kind of vegetable and manually change process flows
accordingly. In the agileBPM system, the new rule is represented
as a regulative rule and added to the agent’s rule base:
SalesOrder(? order) ∧ hasProduct(? order , ? good)∧
GreenVegetable(? good) → PhbSCM (≥ 5 deliv eryTime)(? order)
The process performer agent discovers the processes that can
fulfill the Shipping goal of the Deliver Order process (such as air,
railway, water, and truck shipping) and sorts the discovered pro-
cesses based on its QoS preferences, such as cost efficiency, and
selects the water shipping process (see Fig. 5). Before executing
the process, the agent realizes the process effects in its virtual
knowledge base as if the process has been completed, updates
the remaining stock and the deliverable’s actual location, and
assesses the delivery time through the average process execution
time. Then the agent checks whether the knowledge base after
the operation leads to a rule conflict. If the average execution time
of the process is higher than the new sell-by date, a regulative
rule failure occurs. The agent gives up the enactment of the
current shipping approach selection and goes for the next option
that is compliant with the new regulation.
While normative specifications enable greater flexibility, they
also raise a number of challenges. The adoption of new norms
or revision of existing ones may lead to conflicts and render the
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Information Systems 95 (2021) 101639
agent unable to select a norm-consistent process. For example, if
every process required for fulfilling one of the agent’s obligations
leads to a forbidden state, the agent may not be able to move for-
ward and remain norm compliant unless a resolution is applied.
In such a case, the agent informs the human expert to resolve the
conflict or to provide a new norm compliant process.
4.4. Flexible process execution and ad hoc processes
Business processes in supply chain management are highly
formal and standardized today. However, there are still many
artful processes in the domain that knowledge workers create
‘‘on the fly’’, to cope with many of the situations that arise in
their daily work. One of such cases is quality assurance in the
perishable products’ supply chain. Challenges include varieties
in product types (crop, live-stock, aquaculture, etc.), differenti-
ating quality standards based on destination and product type
(EurepGAP, ISO 22000, IFS, BRC, etc.), varying shelf life and sup-
ply timetables, chemical treatments, warehousing and packaging
decisions, joint export planning and information sharing strategy
within SCM networks. Thus, while the outline of these processes
may be stable at an abstract level, the key details are not [4].
An agent-based execution environment that considers intelligent
BDI agents as a proxy for actors in the enterprise ecosystem is
a promising approach that can simulate how processes emerge
from the interaction and decisions of autonomous agents at the
bottom level.
In this scenario, the SCM knowledge worker decides to dynam-
ically run several quality assurance controls based on her domain
know-how. For this purpose, agileBPM proposes a multi-agent co-
operation based dynamic interaction mechanism that enables the
definition of ad hoc processes at runtime. Ad hoc processes are
not dictated ahead of time but emerge as part of the collaboration
and negotiation between the participants. Multi-agent systems
utilize contract net protocols (CNP) for the construction and ex-
ecution of dynamic collaborations, and accordingly, CNPs have
a well-established background in the multi-agent systems [66].
The agileBPM also supports CNP, where a coordinator agent can
announce a particular goal that is required to be achieved and
other agents in the system (in-house or external) bid for the
contract to undertake the goal.
Accordingly, the SCM knowledge worker decides to initiate a
shelf-life test for a specific perishable product in the warehouse.
For this purpose, the coordinator SCM agent queries Directory
Facilitator (DF) agent to discover every agent who can accomplish
the required goal. DF provides the list of all goal-achieving agents.
Then, the coordinator solicits proposals from potential contractor
agents by issuing a call for proposals that specify the goal, as
well as any requirements (deadline, budget, etc.). Each contractor
knowledge worker evaluates the call and rejects or makes a
proposal with some conditions (price, time, etc.). Once the dead-
line expires, the SCM knowledge worker evaluates the received
proposals and selects agents to perform the goal. The proposals
are binding on the participant agents, so once the coordinator
accepts the proposal, the participant acquires a commitment to
perform the goal. Once the participant has completed the goal,
sends a completion message, and results to the coordinator agent.
Through ad hoc processes, knowledge workers can step by
step, identify quality assurance goals to be achieved and related
participants, and negotiations are automatically established. With
the dynamic initiation of several goals (shelf-life test, sensory
analysis, chemical treatments, etc.), a complex ad hoc quality
assurance process emerges as a result of the collaboration of the
participants.
H. Kir and N. Erdogan
5. Evaluation
To evaluate the adaptiveness and exception management ca-
pabilities of the proposed agileBPM system, a business process
simulator module, which automatically builds business processes
and sets up various challenging execution environments, is de-
veloped.
To our knowledge, there are no publicly available real-world
datasets for evaluating semantic business processes in any stan-
dard notation [27,28,54]. In order to evaluate the agileBPM system
on a standard set of business processes, a synthetic workflow
gallery that is extracted from real-world scientific applications’
execution traces is utilized [67]. The workflow gallery comprises
highly parallel processes with real-world execution times of each
process task. Given customizable configurations are set for the
simulator;
• Number of tasks in the process is set as 50, and goals from
the BPMO-TC4 dataset are randomly assigned to each task.
• Process repository size for goal matching is fixed to 10 pro-
cesses per goal. The execution time of each process is se-
lected randomly by the normal distribution with the mean
equal to the real-world execution time of the related task.
Similarly, process costs are normally distributed with mean
equal to the square of the task execution time.
• Resource availability: In order to observe the behavior of the
proposed system under extreme environmental conditions,
various environments with diverse resource (time and bud-
get) availabilities are defined, from tight constraints, where
only a small number of process ensembles (goal matching
combinations) can be completed, to more liberal constraints
where all of the process-matching configurations can be
completed. The budget constraints are calculated by iden-
tifying the minimum budget required to execute the min-
imum cost ensemble of each process (MinBudget), and the
smallest budget required to execute all possible ensembles
of the processes in the gallery (MaxBudget):
∑ This set of experiments points out that, in business environ-
MinBudget = min Cost(p)
p∈g
∑
MaxBudget = max Cost(p)
p∈g
This range (MinBudget to MaxBudget) is then divided into
three equal intervals (lowBudget, midBudget, highBudget)
to determine the budgets to use in each environment. Sim-
ilarly, the deadline constraints are calculated by identifying
the shortest duration required to execute the ensembles
with the shortest critical path of each process (MinDead-
line), and by identifying the smallest duration required to
execute all possible ensembles of the processes (MaxDead-
line), which is the sum of the critical paths of all pro-
cess ensembles. Accordingly, shortDeadline, midDeadline
and longDeadline ranges are identified.
∑
MinDeadline = min criticalPath(p)
p∈g
∑ even with a substantial number of errors. As any task failure
MaxDeadline = max criticalPath(p)
p∈g
By setting up four environments with separate resource
availabilities (longDeadline-highBudget (HDHB),
midDeadline-midBudget (MDMB), shortDeadline-
midBudget (SDMB) and midDeadline-lowBudget (MDLB)), it
is ensured that experiments cover the most interesting area
of the parameter space for the simulation.
12
Information Systems 95 (2021) 101639
Table 3
Process fill rates based on various environments and task failure ratios.
Runtime estimate error
0% 2% 5% 10% 20% 50%
HDHB 1 1 1 0.99 0.97 0.86
MDMB 1 1 0.97 0.92 0.76 0.16
SDMB 0.98 0.91 0.81 0.65 0.37 0.02
MDLB 0.95 0.89 0.80 0.61 0.30 0.0
• Error rate: In order to evaluate the exception recovery ca-
pabilities of the system, a failure model is introduced into
the simulator. The model is characterized by a failure rate
ranging from 0% to 50%, which defines the probability of
each process task to fail. These failures may stand for var-
ious environmental stimuli, such as a knowledge conflict,
resource unavailability, or failure of a physical device, that
may occur during process execution. The failure time is
randomly determined between the task start and finish time
and each failure wastes time and budget in accordance with
the exception time.
Given an execution environment and a fixed task failure prob-
ability, the agileBPM simulator generated 5000 process models
with 50 goal tasks randomly picked from the BPMO-TC4 repos-
itory. In total, we tested 120 000 process models. Fig. 7 shows
the constraint satisfaction capabilities of the agileBPM system
under various environment conditions (resource availabilities)
and runtime task error ratios. Box plots show the ratio of cost
to budget, and makespan to deadline of the process ensembles.
Whiskers on the plots indicate maximum and minimum values.
The ratio indicates whether the value (for example, the simulated
cost) exceeded the constraint (budget). Values greater than 1
indicate that the constraint was exceeded. Accordingly, Table 3
respectively represents the process fill rates of the same experi-
ment. A process execution is successful only if both budget and
deadline constraints are satisfied.
ments with sufficient resources (HDHB), agileBPM can entirely
handle task failure ratios up to 10% (approx. five task failures
in a process composed of 50 tasks). After task failures, agileBPM
dynamically revises its process selection configuration based on
the new resource availabilities and can successfully cope with
exceptions to a certain failure ratio. For a 20% task failure ratio
in HDHB environment the agileBPM has planning effectiveness
(process fill rate) of 97% (see Table 3). This means that 4887
process instances out of 5000 have successfully completed within
the specified time and budget, while 113 processes failed since
they could not be completed within the deadline, as depicted in
Fig. 7. The system even provides satisfactory process completion
ratios in 50% failure cases, which indicate a significant system
malfunction and are considered as rare events. The agileBPM
process selection approach can successfully cope with limited
resources (66% resource availability for MDMB) and runtime task
failure ratios up to 5%. Additionally, the plots reveal that the
system is more successful in dealing with budget constraints,
in the process critical path extends the makespan, such errors
directly cause the deadline to be exceeded and make it harder
to adapt through re-planning.
6. Related work
For many organizations, process modeling has become an
essential part of documenting, managing and analyzing their
H. Kir and N. Erdogan
Fig. 7. Boxplots for deadline and budget ratios under various resource availabilities and task failure rates varying from 0% to 50%.
business operations. Despite its success, there are still some is-
sues that BPM systems have to cope with, such as termino-
logical ambiguities and the low degree of automation of the
BPM life-cycle [68–70]. In order to overcome these problems,
researchers are tackling the construction of process management
systems that can manage complex processes, while remaining
robust, reactive, and adaptive despite institutional and environ-
mental changes. In the following, we present the most prominent
approaches to business processes management automation and
position our proposal based on these studies. In order to sys-
tematically position agileBPM with regard to existing approaches,
an evaluation framework that identifies the key requirements
for knowledge-intensive process management systems is uti-
lized [13]. Evaluation results are presented in Table 4, which
shows whether a system provides full (+), partial (∼), or no
support (−) for each requirement.
The ADEPT project and its evolutions propose a system with
adaptive process management and exception handling capabili-
ties [12]. For this purpose, the system adopts a structural adapta-
tions approach at both process schema and instance levels. While
this system has the capability to propagate schema changes to
related process instances and to alter instance execution flows in
cases of unanticipated exceptions, all recovery procedures must
be defined and triggered manually by a human process designer
at run-time. It also utilizes a block-structured modeling approach
through a non-standard custom notation. The ADEPT project pro-
vides a simple learning approach through case-based reasoning.
Process instance changes are stored as cases in a case base, to
be retrieved and reused in order to perform similar changes in
the future. Based on the ADEPT technology, the AristaFlow BPM
Suite was developed, with the aim of transferring process flexi-
bility and adaptation concepts into an industrial-strength process
management system.
In contrast to ADEPT, SmartPM (Smart Process Management)
provides automated adaptation policies that do not require any
human intervention [5]. For this purpose, they utilize situation
calculus theories to model the domain in which processes are
executed, IndiGolog high-level agent programming language to
encode the processes flows, and classical planning to maintain
the automated adaptation of a process when needed. SmartPM
provides a GUI-based tool that can explicitly represent data and
associate it with a process model encoded through the BPMN 2.0
notation. However, compared to ontology-based domain mod-
eling and the knowledge-based decision-making approach pro-
posed by the agileBPM, the SmartPM technology stack brings
some restraints. First, situation calculus-based domain modeling
is very low level and difficult to understand for the enterprise
process management community. Second, the adopted classical
planning approach requires a fully observable, static and deter-
ministic domain which is lacking in capturing the real complexity
and dynamicity of the enterprises.
13
Information Systems 95 (2021) 101639
The Planlets [6] approach is based on YAWL (Yet Another
Workflow Language) [71] workflow definition language and, ac-
cordingly, provides a more user-friendly process modeling envi-
ronment. While YAWL provides capabilities to capture all sorts
of flow dependencies between tasks and to handle expected
exceptions on a rule-based basis, Planlets provides dynamic fail-
ure recovery features on top. For this purpose, Planlets extends
YAWL with modeling of pre- and post-conditions of tasks and
the use of planning techniques. In the context of adaptation of
workflow instances, each task in the repository is translated into
the PDDL [72] and in case of a failure, an external planner is
utilized for synthesizing the needed recovery procedure on-the-
fly. As with SmartPM, classical planning imposes some limitations
for addressing more expressive problems, including incomplete
information, contextual preferences and multiple task effects.
Also, Planlets mainly focuses on the control-flow perspective of
the process, and information modeling is supported in a primitive
way. Moreover, goals and external events are not part of their
specification.
Also, a number of goal-based approaches [10,11] exist for
maintaining runtime dynamicity. The Go4Flex project combines
BPMN processes with goal-hierarchies for Jadex BDI agents
equipped with BPMN interpreters [73]. For this purpose, they
propose Goal-oriented Process Modeling Notation (GPMN), a spe-
cific language to model goal-oriented business processes [10]. The
system achieves runtime agility by executing associated different
plans for the same goal, depending on the current situation.
Accordingly, the framework captures business context through
a table of typed and named properties defined by the workflow
engineer. Due to a lack of semantic capabilities, Go4Flex expects
processes that intend the same goal to provide the same interface.
Hence, these systems are only suitable for homogeneous environ-
ments and cannot handle cross-enterprise collaborations. More-
over, the primitive approach utilized to represent the context is
insufficient to capture the real-world enterprise environment.
Di Ciccio et al. [13] state that to provide complete process-
aware system support, the entire set of interrelated requirements
have to be supported. Application of use case scenarios intro-
duced in Section 4 compels several requirements. First, actions
need to be enriched with constraints, such as pre and post-
conditions, defined on process data (data-driven actions). Second,
users should be allowed to explicitly define business rules on pro-
cess data (rules and constraints). Third, ad hoc processes should
be able to dynamically emerge from the collaboration and ne-
gotiation of process participants (flexible execution). Fourth, the
system should be able to catch unpredictable exceptions and
generate recovery procedures to recover (unanticipated excep-
tions). Fifth, external events should be able to alter the infor-
mation model and, accordingly, adjust the state of the running
process (model external events). However, Table 4 reveals that
most of the proposed approaches focus on handling unanticipated
H. Kir and N. Erdogan Information Systems 95 (2021) 101639

Table 4
Evaluating some agile process management approaches against the requirements described in Di Ciccio et al. [13].
Requirement agileBPM ADEPT SmartPM Planlets Go4Flex
Data modeling + ∼ + ∼ ∼
Late data modeling ∼ – – – –

Data
Access to data + – – – +
Access to shared data + + + – +
Rule Action
Data-driven actions + ∼ ∼ ∼ ∼
Late actions modeling ∼ + ∼ ∼ –
Rules and constraints + – + – ∼
Late constraints + – – – –
Goal modeling + – ∼ – +
Goal

Late goal modeling + – ∼ – –

Different modeling styles – – + + –
Visibility of knowledge + ∼ – – +
Processes

Flexible execution + + – – –
Unanticipated exceptions + + + + –
Migration of instances – + – + –
Learning from event logs – ∼ – + –
Learning from data – – – – –
Resource/skill modeling + + + + –
Workers’ interaction – – – – –
Knowledge

Workers’ privileges + – – – –
worker

Late resource modeling + – – + –

Late privileges modeling ∼ – – – –
Workers’ decisions + ∼ ∼ ∼ ∼
Model external events + – + + –
Env.

Late modeling of events + – – – –

exceptions. Accordingly, agileBPM is the only proposal that sup-
ports all given use cases by satisfying the majority of the key
requirements.
On the other hand, since agileBPM is still a prototype system,
it lacks production level requirements such as the migration of
running instances in case of a process model change. Also, ag-
ileBPM has limited support for learning from historical execution
logs through incorporating average process execution times and
failure ratios in decision making. AgileBPM aims to integrate a
process mining toolkit [74], as ADEPT and Planlets, for more
comprehensive learning capabilities.
7. Conclusions
BPM has successfully delivered benefits over a long period
of time and continues to do so, but new realities of business
have created new imperatives for business information systems.
Today’s BPM systems need new methods for thinking about in-
telligent processes in ways that build on the concepts of col-
laboration, adaptiveness, and context awareness. In the litera-
ture, there already exists a set of research that aim adaptive
processes through implementing business logic with specialized
agent programming languages and applying classical planning
techniques on top. However, their adoption by the industry is
very limited due to their lack of support for industrial standards
and adversities in their implementation. The research activity
outlined in this study aims to define a general methodology,
a concrete architecture, and a prototype process management
system for automatic adaptation of business processes through
a knowledge-based approach. For this purpose, we utilize se-
mantically enriched BPM standards and ontologically captured
business environments along with the techniques from the field
of multi-agent systems.
This paper proposes an end-to-end agile BPM solution in two
stages. First, we propose a knowledge-intensive business pro-
cess modeling methodology, which captures the enterprise and
business process space in accordance with the existing AOSE
paradigms. Incrementally developed reference models semanti-
cally describe the organization, environment, business strategies,
14
functions, constraints and constitute the initial knowledge of
the BDI agents. Later, agileBPM presents an agent-based pro-
cess execution environment that enables agents to make au-
tonomous intent-steered and knowledge-driven behavior adap-
tations at runtime. Inspired by the decision-making systematic
of business experts, the proposed heuristic planning approach
aims to reduce the gap between the idealized model of pro-
cess and physical reality by gradually determining the course
of actions as more information becomes available during execu-
tion. Through this infrastructure, process QoS estimation, agent
capabilities evaluation, norm compliance checks, exception han-
dling and knowledge-driven autonomous actions are provided
that drive the runtime agility.
Superior to existing methods, agileBPM successfully captures
social aspects of the business through incorporating actors’ men-
tal states (such as goals, intentions, obligations, prohibitions,
beliefs, etc.) to multi-criteria decision-making processes. Corre-
spondingly, the system utilizes BDI agents as virtual assistants
that pursue business goals, perceive physical and virtual stim-
uli in the environment, recognize the business context, reason
about how they should and should not behave, and act accord-
ingly. The empirical study reveals that, in an environment with
sufficient resources, the agileBPM framework can successfully
handle randomly generated runtime disruptions. Compared with
the existing studies in the literature, the agileBPM system has
been the most comprehensive solution, providing most of the
key requirements of a knowledge-intensive process management
system.
With all given features, the agileBPM framework is not only
a new intelligent process execution infrastructure but also a
complete business process management life-cycle proposal built
on top of existing standards and best practices. It also serves as a
preliminary infrastructure towards enabling the transfer of exten-
sive multi-agent technology research to the knowledge-intensive
business process management domain.
One of the main limitations of the present study is that ag-
ileBPM considers agents to adopt norms voluntarily and fully
cooperative in nature, which is relatively optimistic for inter-
organization cooperation and open societies. Secondly, temporal
H. Kir and N. Erdogan
constraints [75] are not yet supported, and therefore neither task
preconditions nor effects may refer to time patterns in the cur-
rent approach. For future work, we plan to extend the agileBPM
framework with enhanced electronic social institutions, which
provides assistance to the automated specification of business
agreements. The development of such institutions is expected to
establish a necessary level of trust that enables privately owned
agents to safely engage in business interactions by providing
contract management, brokering, negotiation mediation and rep-
utation mechanisms that will transform PMS systems into open
enterprise marketplaces.
Declaration of competing interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing finan-
cial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared
to influence the work reported in this paper.
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