arXiv AI By Michel Kunkler, Stefanie Rinderle-Ma

Planning and Scheduling Business Processes under Control-Flow Uncertainty: Extended Version

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The paper addresses the challenge of scheduling business process activities when the exact sequence of required tasks is uncertain due to data‑driven decisions made during execution. It proposes framing the problem as a chance‑constrained optimization and introduces two formulations: a decomposed two‑stage approach (planning to minimize superfluous activities under a feasibility constraint, followed by scheduling to minimize makespan) and an integrated single‑stage approach. Experiments on two real‑world and one synthetic dataset show that the integrated method achieves better makespans but struggles with scalability, whereas the decomposed method scales to larger settings.

Machine-generated by The Flow from the publisher's headline and feed description — not written or checked by a human. The full article lives at arXiv AI.

arXiv AI
Sep 10

Planning and Scheduling Business Processes under Control-Flow Uncertainty

The paper addresses the challenge of scheduling business process activities when the exact sequence of required tasks is uncertain due to data-driven decisions made during execution. It proposes framing the problem as a chance-constrained optimization and introduces two formulations: a decomposed two-stage approach that first minimizes expected superfluous activities under a feasibility constraint and then schedules to minimize makespan, and an integrated approach that combines planning and scheduling into a single model. Experiments on two real-world and one synthetic dataset show that the integrated approach achieves better makespans but struggles with scalability, whereas the decomposed approach scales to larger settings.

By Michel Kunkler, Stefanie Rinderle-Ma
arXiv AI
Aug 25

iScheduler: Reinforcement Learning-Driven Continual Optimization for Large-Scale Resource Investment Problems

iScheduler is a reinforcement‑learning‑driven framework that tackles large‑scale Resource Investment Problems (RIP) by modeling them as a Markov decision process over decomposed subproblems and building schedules through sequential process selection. The approach speeds up optimization and allows efficient reconfiguration by reusing unchanged process schedules and only rescheduling affected processes. Using the new L‑RIPLIB benchmark, iScheduler achieves competitive resource costs while cutting time to feasibility by up to 43× compared to leading solver‑backed baselines.

By Yi-Xiang Hu, Yuke Wang, Feng Wu, Zirui Huang, Shuli Zeng, Xiang-Yang Li