A Formal Model for Configurable Business Process with Optimal Cloud Resource Allocation

• Published in: J.UCS (Annual print and CD-ROM archive ed.) Vol. 27; no. 7; pp. 693 - 713
• Main Authors: Ait Wakrime, Abderrahim, Boubaker, Souha, Kallel, Slim, Guermazi, Emna, Gaaloul, Walid
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Pensoft Publishers 28.07.2021; Graz University of Technology, Institut für Informationssysteme und Computer Medien; Graz University of Technology
• Subjects: Analysis; Business administration; Clo; Computer Science; Configurable Business Process; Formal Methods; Humanities and Social Sciences; Resource allocation; Configurable Business Process; Cloud Resources; Formal Methods; Propositional Satisfiability
• ISSN: 0948-695X; 0948-6968
• DOI: 10.3897/jucs.70978

In today's competitive business environments, organizations increasingly need to model and deploy flexible and cost effective business processes. In this context, configurable process models are used to offer flexibility by representing process variants in a generic manner. Hence, the behavior of similar variants is grouped in a single model holding configurable elements. Such elements are then customized and configured depending on specific needs. However, the decision to configure an element may be incorrect leading to critical behavioral errors. Recently, process configuration has been extended to include Cloud resources allocation, to meet the need of business scalability by allowing access to on-demand IT resources. In this work, we propose a formal model based on propositional satisfiability formula allowing to find correct elements configuration including resources allocation ones. In addition, we propose to select optimal con- figurations based on Cloud resources cost. This approach allows to provide the designers with correct and cost-effective configuration decisions.