arXiv subjects

Michel Kunkler

Publications and source records attributed to Michel Kunkler.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Planning and Scheduling Business Processes under Control-Flow Uncertainty: Extended Version

Scheduling activities in business processes can improve efficiency (e.g., reduce makespan), but is challenging because the exact sequence of activities required to complete a case is often uncertain due to decisions based on data that emerges during execution. Nevertheless, probabilistic information regarding such decisions can often be estimated or derived from historical execution logs, and can help anticipate which execution paths are likely to lead to successful completion. Planning with particular execution paths affects feasibility, i.e., the probability of successful completion, and the expected number of superfluous activities that are planned but never executed. We frame the problem as a chance-constrained optimization problem and present two formulations: A decomposed approach with two stages, a planning stage that minimizes the expected number of superfluous activities subject to a feasibility constraint, and a scheduling stage that minimizes the makespan over the planned activities; and an integrated approach that combines planning and scheduling into a single formulation. Evaluation on two real-world and one synthetic dataset shows that the integrated approach yields superior makespans but is intractable at scale, while the decomposed approach scales to large settings.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2025

An Uncertainty-Aware ED-LSTM for Probabilistic Suffix Prediction

Suffix prediction of business processes forecasts the remaining sequence of events until process completion. Current approaches focus on predicting the most likely suffix, representing a single scenario. However, when the future course of a process is subject to uncertainty and high variability, the expressiveness of such a single scenario can be limited, since other possible scenarios, which together may have a higher overall probability, are overlooked. To address this limitation, we propose probabilistic suffix prediction, a novel approach that approximates a probability distribution of suffixes. The proposed approach is based on an Uncertainty-Aware Encoder-Decoder LSTM (U-ED-LSTM) and a Monte Carlo (MC) suffix sampling algorithm. We capture epistemic uncertainties via MC dropout and aleatoric uncertainties as learned loss attenuation. This technical report presents a comprehensive evaluation of the probabilistic suffix prediction approach's predictive performance and calibration under three different hyperparameter settings, using four real-life and one artificial event log. The results show that: i) probabilistic suffix prediction can outperform most likely suffix prediction, the U-ED-LSTM has reasonable predictive performance, and ii) the model's predictions are well calibrated.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2024

A Systematic Review of Business Process Improvement: Achievements and Potentials in Combining Concepts from Operations Research and Business Process Management

Business Process Management and Operations Research are two research fields that both aim to enhance value creation in organizations. While Business Process Management has historically emphasized on providing precise models, Operations Research has focused on constructing tractable models and their solutions. This systematic literature review identifies and analyzes work that uses combined concepts from both disciplines. In particular, it analyzes how business process models have been conceptualized as mathematical models and which optimization techniques have been applied to these models. Results indicate a strong focus on resource allocation and scheduling problems. Current approaches often lack support of the stochastic nature of many problems, and do only sparsely use information from process models or from event logs, such as resource-related information or information from the data perspective.

cs.SE↗