[jboss-user] [jBPM] - Re: Process Inference

[Kris Verlaenen]

Kris Verlaenen [https://community.jboss.org/people/KrisVerlaenen] created the discussion

"Re: Process Inference"

To view the discussion, visit: https://community.jboss.org/message/763080#763080

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I think there are different approaches to solving your problem.  Note that some of these are still experimental and might not solve exactly what you're looking for, but they might at least do something in the same area.

The best researched one is probably "process mining".  This is the idea of deriving a process from various information sources, typically some form of logs that describe real-life cases (history logs), so those cases can be used to automatically create a process based on that, which can then be used for future execution.  The downside is that the generated process itself typically isn't that flexible (so it might be difficult to deviate).

Ad-hoc processes allow you to specify "recommendations" when executing (a part of) a process, and the user can then select which recommendations to execute, possibly add new tasks that are not part of the process yet, etc.  This typically works well with then using this information (deviations and selected recommendation) to improve the process based on this info.

Incomplete processes are processes that don't contain all the logic yet, but where parts are left unspecified, and only at runtime will be decided what to execute.

Pure Adaptive Case Management (ACM) tries to tackle cases where there is no process upfront, people can just create cases and execute these.  It is my opinion that these are not a different kind of processes however, but that these are just one extreme of processes and that your suggestion is probably something in between.  The main idea is that a user has full flexibility here, and doesn't need a (full) business process to do his work, but that for example recommendations might be generated based on the current state of the case.

We always try to work towards supporting some of these more advanced cases in jBPM already.  For example, we do support ad-hoc (sub-)processes and by offering users the ability to combine processes with rules and event processing, at almost every level, we believe these paradigms combined can also allow you to define a lot more flexible yet smart processes.  Integrating for example a neural network to support the reasoning would be more experimental, we haven't considered this yet at this on its own probably is a big, specialized research area.  But if anyone is willing to give it a try, let us know, and we'll try to help out where we can !  :) 

Kris
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