Adaptive Plans for Business Process Control

Business processes that involve non-trivial decision making can have a highly unpredictable behaviour and are prone to failure. Such processes can be achieved by executing a plan. Plans that achieve business processes should be adaptive. Such plans should be adaptive in that they should be able to discover new ways of doing things, and should be able to select the “best” way of doing something from what they already know. The Problem is to find a method that selects the “best” plan. Failure of a process leads to a total or partial loss of effort. Business processes involve humans so there will inevitably be a significant amount of information concerning the execution of each process that is not available to the process control system. A solution to the Problem need not, and should not, be fine grained because of the significance of the information which is not available to the process control system. The solution reported here aims only to provide a method that works well in practice.