Introducing decision-aware business processes

Business processes are designed to smoothly operate under multiple contexts (or business situations). Each context technically implies taking a different course of action. Be that as it may, going for the most appropriate action is still left up to the business process participant without any kind of assistance. Such a situation demonstrates that there is a lack of a context-aware decision-making feature. This paper addresses the issue of enabling a context-aware decision-making within the frame of business processes. We combine the concepts of business process, context-awareness and decision-making to introduce a new concept of Decision-Aware Business Processes in which decision partitions are the cornerstones. A decision partition reacts to the collected contextual parameters by selecting or recommending the most appropriate decision(s). In fact, the focus of this research is to introduce a new formalism for designing these partitions by means of patterns. Throughout our approach, each proposed pattern leads to building decision partitions in a straight-forward fashion. An overall example is proposed to illustrate our approach. It is inspired from the banking industry and introduces a decision-aware business process that handles loan applications. To sum up, whether seasoned, novice or in-between, business process participants will be able to save time in taking action(s). Moreover, the workflow becomes no longer stagnant across the business process. Instead, it dynamically adapts itself to each new set of business requirements imposed by the collected contextual input(s).