Temporal Planning for Business Process Optimisation

In this paper we consider the problem of designing and optimising a business process. Given a set of activities and a fixed budget, the objective is to determine duration and resource allocation for each activity such that the time-to-market is minimised while budget and dependencies constraints are met. We give a formal description of the problem and we show how it can be cast as a temporal planning problem, resulting in a challenging benchmark planning problem involving concurrency and duration-dependent costs. The user has to define only dependencies among activities, costs of resources and the available budget, and then use a planner to design an efficient process, which is then generated as a Gantt chart. As a case study, we consider a concrete scenario provided by an industrial partner, and we use a temporal planner to design an effective business process.