Benchmarking Answer Set Programming systems for resource allocation in business processes

Declarative logic programming formalisms are well-suited to model various optimization and configuration problems. In particular, Answer Set Programming (ASP) systems have gained popularity, for example, to deal with scheduling problems present in several domains. The main goal of this paper is to d...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Expert systems with applications Vol. 205; p. 117599
Main Authors: Havur, Giray, Cabanillas, Cristina, Polleres, Axel
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: Elsevier Ltd 01.11.2022
Subjects:
Answer set programming
Benchmark
Business process management
Resource allocation
Benchmark
Business process management
Answer set programming
Resource allocation
ISSN:0957-4174, 1873-6793
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:Declarative logic programming formalisms are well-suited to model various optimization and configuration problems. In particular, Answer Set Programming (ASP) systems have gained popularity, for example, to deal with scheduling problems present in several domains. The main goal of this paper is to devise a benchmark for ASP systems to assess their performance when dealing with complex and realistic resource allocation with objective optimization. To this end, we provide (i) a declarative and compact encoding of the resource allocation problem in ASP (compliant with the ASP Core-2 standard), (ii) a configurable ASP systems benchmark named BRANCH that is equipped with resource allocation instance generators that produce problem instances of different sizes with adjustable parameters (e.g., in terms of process complexity, organizational and temporal constraints), and (iii) an evaluation of four state-of-the-art ASP systems using BRANCH. This solid application-oriented benchmark serves the ASP community with a tool that leads to potential optimizations and improvements in encodings and further drives the development of ASP solvers. On the other hand, resource allocation is an important problem that still lacks adequate automated tool support in the context of Business Process Management (BPM). The ASP problem encoding, ready-to-use ASP systems and problem instance generators benefit the BPM community to tackle the problem at scale and mitigate the lack of openly available problem instance data. •Resource Allocation in Business Processes problem is formalized and encoded in ASP.•An ASP systems benchmark is devised to evaluate the configured systems for RABP.•A detailed evaluation of four state-of-the-art ASP systems for RABP is presented.
ISSN:0957-4174
1873-6793
DOI:10.1016/j.eswa.2022.117599