PMAI23 @IJCAI

2nd International Workshop on Process Management in the AI era

Macao, S.A.R

August 19, 2023

Process Management (PM) is a multidisciplinary field that combines insights from operations management, computer science, and data science (cf. process mining). The rapid development of artificial intelligence (AI) techniques is leading to the creation of a new generation of information systems that can “augment” PM, making them more autonomous, adaptive, intelligent, and self-optimizing. Such systems are recently referred to as AI-augmented BPM systems (ABPMS). These AI-empowered, trustworthy, and process-aware systems continuously reason and act on data within a set of constraints, with the goal of adapting and improving one or more processes according to various indicators. ABPMSs are the backbone necessary to realize the vision of the enterprise of the future, enabling organizations to gradually shift their process management, advancing along the six levels of autonomous process execution management. Achieving a synergetic combination between AI and PM poses foundational, conceptual, and technical challenges related to the integration of symbolic and sub-symbolic AI techniques, and how to infuse them within PM. At the same time, delegating autonomy brings pressing requirements on the trustworthiness of such systems, and on their ability to interact with human experts and explain their own behavior.

This workshop aims at bringing together researchers from different research disciplines to promote the synergy between AI and PM to address the above frontier challenges. The AI community at IJCAI and AAAI has hosted, as the birthplace of the early revolution of AI, some early events dedicated to business processes (Gamble 1998¹; Drabble and Jarvis 1999²). And yet, the business process community has, over the years, drifted apart and found their separate home in the International Conference on Business Process Management (BPM) and, more recently, the International Process Mining Conference (ICPM). This landscape, however, is set to change, as AI techniques mature and become deployed with increasing fidelity and robustness required for enterprise applications. We can see this changing landscape manifested in recent workshops and events, such as, AAAI 2020 hosting its first-ever workshop on Intelligent Process Automation (IPA 2020), AAAI President Yolanda Gil’s talk at the AAAI 2020 Presidential Address (Gil 2020³), and the 1st PMAI@IJCAI 2022 workshop in previous year. AAAI 2023 also features the AI4BPM bridge program, catering a rich collection of invited speakers, poster sessions, tutorials, and hands-on system demonstrations. The PMAI workshop nicely complements it with a significant research emphasis towards the vision of ABPMS and Autonomous Enterprises.

We welcome scientists, practitioners, and students from academic and industrial communities who are interested in the synergy between AI and PM, to participate and submit their original work. We welcome not only contributions that empower PM with AI techniques, but also contributions that exploit their combination to solve more general problems in AI.