Luise Pufahl 

Date/Time: 14.08.2019, 14:00 Uhr 

Location: D2.2.094 

Abstract 

The growing online shopping market has led to an enormous increase in parcel deliveries. The delivery of parcels at the last mile (from the final hub to the recipients) imposes various challenges on logistics service providers due to low-profit margins and a high risk of not delivering parcels at the first try. The SMile project aims to innovate the last mile logistics by ensuring delivery in a so-called micro depot. From a micro depot, a parcel can be picked up, or also be delivered by small and local delivery services at a desired time framework. For implementing the SMile process, we needed to support flexibility, as well as an optimized resource allocation from parcels to local deliverers.

In this talk, I want to present two research projects in the context of the SMile project: (1) the fragment-based Case Management (fCM) approach to support flexible processes, and (2) the Resource Manager extending traditional BPMSs for complex resource allocations (e.g., parcels to tours for local deliverers).

The fCM approach captures a process by small process fragments (comparable to small BPMN process diagrams) that can be flexibly combined at run-time based on data handled by the process. I want to present the fCM concept, its application and implementation (the Chimera engine), and some extensions, such as methods for case modeling.

For supporting complex resource allocation in business processes, we had the idea to design a Resource Manager that encapsulates the knowledge on resources and their availability, and allows the usage of resource-constrained scheduling algorithms or heuristics. I want to sketch in this talk the motivation and idea behind the Resource Manager, its current implementation, and future research aspects. 

Bio 

Luise Pufahl is a postdoctoral researcher at the Business Process Technology research group at Hasso Plattner Institute. Her current research interests are flexible business processes including case management and event processing, process analysis and improvement based on operations research, simulation and process mining techniques. Her research is mainly driven by the design science method with developing artifacts evaluated by different methods in context. She wrote her doctor's thesis on Modeling and Executing Batch Activities in Business Processes. Her research appeared in major journals and conferences (e.g., IS, Springer Computing, CAiSE, BPM, AMCIS, ICSOC).

Luise is leading the SMile project from the HPI side, a research project funded by the German's government on innovating the last mile logistics of parcel delivery. She is involved in teaching with regards to Business Process Management (e.g, in Healthcare), Process Mining, Modeling of Information Systems, Business Process Compliance, and Business Event Processing. Additionally, she has been involved in the organization of three Massive Open Online Courses on BPM and Decision Modeling. She leads the development of Scylla, an extensible BPMN process simulator.