Βελτιστοποίηση επιχειρησιακών διαδικασιών βασισμένη σε προγραμματισμό περιορισμών

Abstract

During the last two decades a change occurred in the dialectics of Business Administration science about the principles that should rule the organizational structure of a company. A structural model based on business processes that run through the business entity horizontally and/or vertically, is gradually replacing the traditional strategy that stratifies the functional entity in distinct and isolated hierarchical levels. A business process can be defined as a set of coordinated activities aiming at the successful realization of a business goal and the production of surplus value. Therefore, the design and the implementation of a process can significantly affect the efficiency of an organization's operation and the quality that the consumer receives from the produced outcome. The significance of planning and managing the business processes for the survival of a company in the modern globalized economic environment, demonstrates the need for the development of computational systems that can assist the effort for the improvement or re-engineering of processes in regard to quantitative and qualitative criteria. Considering that the constraint logic programming can offer the computational means for the confrontation of complex combinatorial problems, the aim of this thesis is to design and develop a system that can compose optimized complex business processes from simple tasks based on predefined evaluation criteria. The proposed system is consisted by four collaborating software modules. The database that stores the simple tasks in the appropriate quantitative representation for the optimization procedure. The graphical user interface (GUI) that accepts the required input by the decision maker and creates the constraint logic program using the programming language Prolog. The ECLiPSe platform executes the logic program to determine the feasible processes for specific input and output resource data sets, and construct the processes with the optimum evaluation. Finally, the visualization subsystem translates the quantitative representation of the optimized business processes into a graphical form.