On the Application of Model-Driven Optimization to Business Processes

The optimization of business processes is an important task to increase the efficiency of the described workflows. Metaheuristic optimization, such as evolutionary search, has been used to optimize business process models, but it requires a high level of expertise that not all process designers have. Model-driven optimization (MDO) promises to make the use of metaheuristic optimization accessible to domain experts without in-depth technical expertise by allowing them to specify the optimization algorithm directly at the model level. Because this approach is less technical, the process designers can focus on the business process models and their properties. Using concrete business process optimization problems as a starting point, we discuss how MDO can be applied to these problems, what MDO would offer for business process optimization, and how the application to business processes could stimulate research on MDO.