Prescriptive Process Monitoring Under Resource Constraints: A Reinforcement Learning Approach

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Shoush, Mahmoud, Dumas, Marlon
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2023
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author Shoush, Mahmoud
Dumas, Marlon
author_facet Shoush, Mahmoud
Dumas, Marlon
contents Prescriptive process monitoring methods seek to optimize the performance of business processes by triggering interventions at runtime, thereby increasing the probability of positive case outcomes. These interventions are triggered according to an intervention policy. Reinforcement learning has been put forward as an approach to learning intervention policies through trial and error. Existing approaches in this space assume that the number of resources available to perform interventions in a process is unlimited, an unrealistic assumption in practice. This paper argues that, in the presence of resource constraints, a key dilemma in the field of prescriptive process monitoring is to trigger interventions based not only on predictions of their necessity, timeliness, or effect but also on the uncertainty of these predictions and the level of resource utilization. Indeed, committing scarce resources to an intervention when the necessity or effects of this intervention are highly uncertain may intuitively lead to suboptimal intervention effects. Accordingly, the paper proposes a reinforcement learning approach for prescriptive process monitoring that leverages conformal prediction techniques to consider the uncertainty of the predictions upon which an intervention decision is based. An evaluation using real-life datasets demonstrates that explicitly modeling uncertainty using conformal predictions helps reinforcement learning agents converge towards policies with higher net intervention gain
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2307_06564
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Prescriptive Process Monitoring Under Resource Constraints: A Reinforcement Learning Approach
Shoush, Mahmoud
Dumas, Marlon
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Prescriptive process monitoring methods seek to optimize the performance of business processes by triggering interventions at runtime, thereby increasing the probability of positive case outcomes. These interventions are triggered according to an intervention policy. Reinforcement learning has been put forward as an approach to learning intervention policies through trial and error. Existing approaches in this space assume that the number of resources available to perform interventions in a process is unlimited, an unrealistic assumption in practice. This paper argues that, in the presence of resource constraints, a key dilemma in the field of prescriptive process monitoring is to trigger interventions based not only on predictions of their necessity, timeliness, or effect but also on the uncertainty of these predictions and the level of resource utilization. Indeed, committing scarce resources to an intervention when the necessity or effects of this intervention are highly uncertain may intuitively lead to suboptimal intervention effects. Accordingly, the paper proposes a reinforcement learning approach for prescriptive process monitoring that leverages conformal prediction techniques to consider the uncertainty of the predictions upon which an intervention decision is based. An evaluation using real-life datasets demonstrates that explicitly modeling uncertainty using conformal predictions helps reinforcement learning agents converge towards policies with higher net intervention gain
title Prescriptive Process Monitoring Under Resource Constraints: A Reinforcement Learning Approach
topic Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.06564