Introducing decision-aware business processes Alaaeddine Yousfi a,b, *, Anind K. Dey b , Rajaa Saidi a,c , Jin-Hyuk Hong b a LRIT, Research Unit Associated to the CNRST (URAC 29), FSR, Mohammed V University, Rabat, Morocco b HCII, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA c INSEA, Rabat, Morocco 1. Introduction Facing keen demand, Business Processes (BPes) are becoming a key platform for many innovative ideas in both the academic and business sectors. Each of these entities offers a variety of benefits that were otherwise difficult to obtain within functional organiza- tions [8]. In a process-oriented organization, the participants, the activities, the participants’ assigned activities and their order of accomplishments are all meticulously posed. Everything is smoothly organized to avoid unexpectedness. Therefore, reduce time, save money and better the quality. Nevertheless, BPes at present, are still deficient when it comes to the critical ability of offering assistance to their users [38]. Although able to handle a variety of business situations, they cannot yet recommend one or some over others, resulting in a lack of decision-making ability, which, clearly is an open space for further contributions. To provide an overview of what business processes are lacking in the decision-making area, let us consider the following real life examples in order of increasing complexity: Example 1 (basic): Railroad Track Junction A railroad track junction describes the location where multiple railroads intersect. Switches are placed to direct each train to its destination. A basic embedded Decision Support System (DSS) [36] automatically alters the switches’ orientation depending on the train provenance, destination and time. Although this idea seems trivial since the data upon which determining the position of the switch is easily perceivable by the human mind, this example is a clear illustration of how the process of orienting the switches is made easier due to the embedded DSS coupled with the data characterizing each train. Example 2 (medium): United Parcel Service In its Worldport hub located in Louisville, Kentucky, the United Parcel Service (UPS) operates the most technologically advanced system for sorting packages and steering them to their destination transporter (e.g., aircraft, truck) via approximately a hundred miles of conveyor belts. Even if the packages are headed to the same destination, they do not necessarily take the same path on the conveyor belts. For example, two packages headed to Pittsburgh, Computers in Industry 70 (2015) 13–22 A R T I C L E I N F O Article history: Received 16 April 2014 Received in revised form 2 February 2015 Accepted 11 February 2015 Available online Keywords: Decision-Aware Business Process Business process improvement BPMN Decision-making Context Context-awareness A B S T R A C T Business processes are designed to smoothly operate under multiple contexts (or business situations). Each context technically implies taking a different course of action. Be that as it may, going for the most appropriate action is still left up to the business process participant without any kind of assistance. Such a situation demonstrates that there is a lack of a context-aware decision-making feature. This paper addresses the issue of enabling a context-aware decision-making within the frame of business processes. We combine the concepts of business process, context-awareness and decision-making to introduce a new concept of Decision-Aware Business Processes in which decision partitions are the cornerstones. A decision partition reacts to the collected contextual parameters by selecting or recommending the most appropriate decision(s). In fact, the focus of this research is to introduce a new formalism for designing these partitions by means of patterns. Throughout our approach, each proposed pattern leads to building decision partitions in a straight-forward fashion. An overall example is proposed to illustrate our approach. It is inspired from the banking industry and introduces a decision-aware business process that handles loan applications. To sum up, whether seasoned, novice or in-between, business process participants will be able to save time in taking action(s). Moreover, the workflow becomes no longer stagnant across the business process. Instead, it dynamically adapts itself to each new set of business requirements imposed by the collected contextual input(s). ß 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. * Corresponding author at: HCII, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA. Tel.: +1 412 268 9378. E-mail addresses: aeyousfi@cmu.edu (A. Yousfi), anind@cs.cmu.edu (A.K. Dey), r.saidi@insea.ac.ma (R. Saidi), hjinh7@gmail.com (J.-H. Hong). Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Computers in Industry jo ur n al ho m epag e: ww w.els evier .c om /lo cat e/co mp in d http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.compind.2015.02.003 0166-3615/ß 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.