Skills modeling to improve process and organization flexibility

Today's business process and workflow-management systems are mostly based on the assumption thatt he underlying business processes are known in advance and can be modeled before developing a PAIS to support them. Organizations want to improve their business processes and manage them in a flexible manner to offer the right business functions to the right users at the right point in time. For some business processes, the control flow cannot be captured at design-time because they have a high degree of knowledge work or because run-time information is needed to determine the flow of the process. To support flexibility of these processes, a modeling technique can indicate flexibility needs at design-time and finally support run-time flexibility for resource allocation. The objective of this thesis is to support run-time flexibility for capability-based resource allocation with means of modeling. Therefore a skill concept which is applied at design-time and indicates needs for run-time flexibility for resource allocation is needed. To reach this goal, flexibility needs of PAIS are analyzed during the literature review and it will be described how flexibility needs can be projected onto the organizational perspective of PAIS. The expressive power of BPMN and CMMN is measured with Resource Allocation Patterns before process oriented knowledge management approaches are explored to find possibilities to express human resource capabilities and human resource allocation. After document and artifact studies, a case study is formulated. The case study is used to indicate the business need and illustrate the demonstration implementation, which is realized in ADOxx. The implementation is based on a model that includes suggested concepts to support human resource allocation, the indication of run-time adaptation needs and the indication of evolving skills. The evaluation shows that the developed modeling technique can be used in a practical case and improve the expressive power of existing modeling languages. Furthermore it is explained how the modeling technique supports run-time flexibility....