<!DOCTYPE article PUBLIC "-//NLM//DTD JATS (Z39.96) Journal Archiving and Interchange DTD v1.0 20120330//EN" "JATS-archivearticle1.dtd">
<article xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">
  <front>
    <journal-meta>
      <journal-title-group>
        <journal-title>September</journal-title>
      </journal-title-group>
    </journal-meta>
    <article-meta>
      <title-group>
        <article-title>Multi-Criteria Knowledge-Based Recommender System for Decision Support in Complex Business Processes</article-title>
      </title-group>
      <contrib-group>
        <contrib contrib-type="author">
          <string-name>Aleksandra Revina†</string-name>
          <email>revina@tu-berlin.de</email>
          <xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff1">1</xref>
        </contrib>
        <contrib contrib-type="author">
          <string-name>Recommendation, Business Process Management, Complexity,</string-name>
          <xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff2">2</xref>
        </contrib>
        <contrib contrib-type="author">
          <string-name>Nina Rizun</string-name>
          <email>nina.rizun@pg.edu.pl</email>
          <xref ref-type="aff" rid="aff0">0</xref>
        </contrib>
        <aff id="aff0">
          <label>0</label>
          <institution>Applied Informatics in Management, Gdansk University of Technology</institution>
          ,
          <addr-line>Gdansk</addr-line>
          ,
          <country country="PL">Poland</country>
        </aff>
        <aff id="aff1">
          <label>1</label>
          <institution>Information and Communication Management, Technical University of Berlin</institution>
          ,
          <addr-line>Berlin</addr-line>
          ,
          <country country="DE">Germany</country>
        </aff>
        <aff id="aff2">
          <label>2</label>
          <institution>Stylistics</institution>
          ,
          <addr-line>Linguistics, Sentiment, IT Tickets</addr-line>
        </aff>
      </contrib-group>
      <pub-date>
        <year>2019</year>
      </pub-date>
      <volume>20</volume>
      <issue>2019</issue>
      <abstract>
        <p>In this paper, we present a concept of a multi-criteria knowledgebased Recommender System (RS) designed to provide decision support in complex business process (BP) scenarios. The developed approach is based on the knowledge aspects of Stylistic Patterns, Business Sentiment and Decision-Making Logic extracted from the BP unstructured texts. This knowledge serves as an input for a multi-criteria RS algorithm. The output is prediction of the BP complexity, based on which the algorithm modifies the type and the way of decision support, ranging from full to minimal automation. We show how the algorithm can be applied in the real-life scenarios by the example of the IT ticketing case study. We also evaluate the BP complexity prediction quality using both quantitative (databased) and qualitative (interview-based) approach in the case study.</p>
      </abstract>
    </article-meta>
  </front>
  <body>
    <sec id="sec-1">
      <title>CCS CONCEPTS</title>
      <p>
        • Information systems → Information systems applications;
Decision Support Systems; Data Analytics
With the considerable technology progress and enterprise
digitization, the discussions around the timeworn term of
complexity gain new power. Especially businesses and their IT
departments report a dramatic increase in the process complexity
[
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref29">29</xref>
        ]. In this context, a BP must have a certain level of complexity
to correspond with the complexity of its environment. Thus, the
complexity can be challenged and caused by both complex BP IT
environment and constantly increasing information flow to be
handled in the BP [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref26">26</xref>
        ]. It is widely acknowledged that RS open
wide opportunities for different domains and particularly
businesses. Hereby, the main characteristic of RS e-business
applications is an intensive use of the knowledge-based RS
approaches, i.e. ontologies and semantic technologies. This can be
explained by the fact that businesses demand a high degree of
domain knowledge for adequate assistance in recommendations
[
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref14">14</xref>
        ]. Hereby, the main RS challenges of robustness,
2
      </p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-2">
      <title>Related Work</title>
      <p>
        Multi-criteria RS are based on the well-known Multi-Criteria
Decision Making (MCDM) methods [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref1 ref22">1, 22</xref>
        ]. The value of
multicriteria recommendation approach in general and the MCDM
methods in particular has been demonstrated long ago and in
various application domains [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref15 ref16 ref25">15, 16, 25</xref>
        ]. At present, one of the
most popular categories has proven to be multi-criteria rating
recommenders, which though suffer from a number of problems,
e.g. constructing the best set of criteria [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref1">1</xref>
        ]. In regards to
knowledge-based recommenders, one differentiates two types:
case-based and constraint-based. Constraint-based RS exploit the
predefined knowledge bases with the explicit rules of delivering the
recommendation and are considered to perform well, specifically
in complex product domains [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref7">7</xref>
        ]. Rule-based reasoning and
rulebased expert systems have long been a focus of research on
intelligent systems [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref4 ref9">4, 9</xref>
        ]. Currently, they find another
advantageous practical application as a part of constraint-based RS.
Knowledge-based RS provide a major value in overcoming such
limitations as lack of transparency, cold-start problem and data
sparsity, which are common for content-based and collaborative
filtering approaches. However, acquiring the necessary knowledge
possessed by domain experts and converting it into formal,
executable representations is a challenging task [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref8">8</xref>
        ].
      </p>
      <p>
        Thus, the contributions of the paper can be highlighted in the
following: 1) construction of a set of criteria for a recommendation
problem in the context of unstructured BP texts, which is an
important topic for future research in multi-criteria RS [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref1">1</xref>
        ] and 2)
provision of a method to efficiently extract the necessary
knowledge aspects and transform them into executable
representations targeting the problem described above [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref8">8</xref>
        ].
      </p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-3">
      <title>3 Concept of Multi-Criteria Knowledge-Based RS</title>
      <p>
        A typical case study scenario from an ITIL-based CHM IT ticketing
process considered during the research is the following: 1) a
customer request (ticket) for a change in IT infrastructure products
or services is sent per e-mail; 2) requested changes can be processed
with various templates (pre-filled forms). Ideally, tickets
addressing related problems are processed with the same template.
However, key word search used at the case study department
doesn’t yield relevant results. Thus, a new template is likely to be
created both in case of a new type of request and when the template
is not found; 3) based on the information documented in a ticketing
system, the requested change is implemented. The goal of the RS
concept is to address the problems described in 2), i.e. incorrect
search results which imply inefficient work and time loss. While
remaining an important starting point, key word search must be
viewed as only one of several tools supporting the BP workers,
especially in the context of key word search commonly known
limitations [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref12">12</xref>
        ]. On the user side, key word search is known for a
constant need to reformulate the queries, no possibility to precisely
specify the search intention and limited knowledge on or
availability of the data to precisely express the search intention [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref2">2</xref>
        ].
On the key word search technology side, most existing solutions
focus on small datasets [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref28 ref30">30, 28</xref>
        ] and efficiency instead of search
quality [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref28 ref5">5, 28</xref>
        ]. With the proposed RS, it is aimed to support a BP
worker in finding the most successful way to process the request
under given conditions, i.e. incoming ticket text.
The RS modelled in BPMN [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref17">17</xref>
        ] (see Figure 1) should, first,
support the BP worker in ticket prioritization and, second, adapt the
type and the way of recommendation based on the complexity level
of the ticket text, i.e. perceived processing complexity (   ),
identified with the help of multi-criteria knowledge aspects, i.e.
Readability (  ), Perceived Anticipated Effort (  ) and
Business Process Cognition ( ) (see Section 3.1). Hereby, it is
important to note that the  computation yields to the three
levels of “low”, “medium” and “high”. This scale was selected for
two reasons: 1) in order to simplify the method presentation and 2)
it is a known scale of priority ratings especially for measuring
intangible criteria in the context of decision-making [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref24">24</xref>
        ]. Tickets
with  “low” can be described with clear rules and easily
automated by one-to-one template recommendation. Tickets of
 “medium” are those where no exact rule set exists and there is
a need of information acquisition and evaluation. Here, the RS can
provide a partial processing support in a form of drop-down menu
templates (multiple-choice recommendations). In case of 
“high”, the RS will offer a minimal assistance while listing the
history of similar implemented tickets.
      </p>
      <p>In a general IT ticket context, one can differentiate between
three types of complexity: 1) ticket processing complexity a)
perceived while reading the ticket and b) real complexity reported
after the ticket is processed; 2) ticket implementation complexity
related to the technical execution of the ticket related tasks. The
scope of the proposed RS is targeted at 1a. At the moment of the IT
ticket entry, the BP worker receives the textual description of the
request characterized by the following parameters influencing the
perception of request processing complexity: quality of the written
text (comprehension of the request), urgency of the request and
type of the requested activity. According to these factors,
corresponding criteria and measures were selected in the scope of
the present RS: quality of the written text measured by  , urgency
– by  and type of the activity – by  .</p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-4">
      <title>3.1 Conceptual Framework</title>
      <p>
        In the context of the present research, we refer to the
recommendation problem as an MCDM problem and use the
conceptual notation by [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref22">22</xref>
        ]. Accordingly, we specify the RS
concepts for the present research as follows below.
      </p>
      <p>
        Defining the object of decision. Object of decision is item  that
belongs to the set of all candidate items. In the case study of the
research, the objects of the decision  are classified into three
categories based on the identified 
: 1) one-to-one ticket
templates   where  is a number of the ticket template in the
database; 2) drop-down menu templates   where  is the number
of the drop-down menu suggestion; 3) similar tickets in the
database history   where  is the number of the ticket record in
the database. The elements of this set are specified as alternatives
to which four types of decision problems (choice, sorting, ranking,
and description) can be applied [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref22">22</xref>
        ]. In the current research, we
refer to sorting (classification of alternatives into a number of
predefined three categories) and choice (selection of a more
appropriate alternative). To sum up, O ∈ {  ,   ,   }.
Family of criteria. Performance fit of alternatives is analyzed upon
a set of criteria. In the paper, fit of alternatives from the three
categories mentioned above is evaluated upon a set of criteria for
each incoming ticket text   . As fairly stated by [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref22">22</xref>
        ], the design of
a consistent family of criteria for a given recommendation
application has been largely ignored in the RS literature and
constitutes an important problem for future research. Here, a family
of three measurable quantitative-qualitative criteria  = { 1 ,  2 ,
 3 } is applied on the   in order to predict and generate a
recommendation  (see also Section 3.2 for more details). The
choice of the criteria and especially corresponding measures is
justified by the textual nature of the input data. As the unstructured
textual BP requests serve as the basis for recommendation, the
technologies used for criteria extraction come from the domains of
      </p>
      <sec id="sec-4-1">
        <title>Applied</title>
      </sec>
      <sec id="sec-4-2">
        <title>Linguistics,</title>
        <p>Stylistics,</p>
        <p>Sentiment</p>
        <p>Analysis,
and
Taxonomies. The approaches have been selected based on and
therefore</p>
        <p>are covering the three common levels of text
understanding: objective (answering the who, what, where, when,
etc. questions, e.g. taxonomies and ontologies), subjective (who has
which
opinion
about
what, e.g. Sentiment</p>
        <p>
          Analysis) and
metaknowledge (what can be extracted about the text apart from its
contents, e.g. with Stylistics or Stylometry) [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref6">6</xref>
          ].
        </p>
        <p>
          Thus, the first criterion  1 is suggested to be Readability 
measured by Stylistic Patterns (SP) [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref19">19</xref>
          ]. SP of ticket texts are
considered to influence the BP worker’s perception of the
contextual complexity of the ticket processing and express the
quality of the written text affecting the understanding of the request
(metaknowledge). In the present RS concept, SP are defined as a
function of Syntactic Structure (SynS) and Wording Style (WS) for
the different length values  of the BP text   . Hereby, SynS is a
syntactic structure of text   calculated as relative distributions σ
of  
and unique  
, where  
are words organized as per
part of speech (PoS) of nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. WS
is the wording style of   text bringing in relation rank-frequency
and quantity-frequency of words [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref32">32</xref>
          ] in   approximated with
coefficients  and b in a form of ( + ) [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref27">27</xref>
          ].
        </p>
        <p>The second criterion  2 is suggested to be Perceived
Anticipated Effort (</p>
        <p>
          ) measured by Business Sentiment (BS)
representing emotional component of ticket complexity or also
urgency of the request (subjective knowledge) [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref21">21</xref>
          ]. BS is
calculated based on the lexicon approach with the help of relative
distributions of identified BS-loaded PoS of negative, positive and
neutral valences σ( 
,  
,  
), where  
,  
,  
are
words with the corresponding valence of positive, neutral or
negative.
        </p>
        <p>The third criterion  3 is suggested to be Business Process
Cognition (</p>
        <p>
          ) measured by semantic nature of activities in the
ticket identified with Decision-Making Logic (DML) Taxonomy
(objective knowledge) [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref20">20</xref>
          ]. DML Taxonomy is built while
extracting semantically loaded  
and calculating their relative
distributions in   σ(  ,   ,   ).   ,   ,   are DML elements
(words) indicating routine, semi-cognitive and cognitive activities
organized as PoS according to RTCC Framework (nouns ( ) as
        </p>
      </sec>
      <sec id="sec-4-3">
        <title>Resources, verbs ( ) as Techniques, adjectives (</title>
        <p>) as Capacities,
adverbs (</p>
        <p>) as Choices) into three classes of routine (r),
semicognitive (sc) and cognitive (c).</p>
        <p>
          Global preference (recommendation) model. The development of a
global preference model provides a way to aggregate the values of
each criterion  = { 1,  2,  3} in order to express the preferences
between the alternatives. In the paper, the most established
approach of a value-focused model is pursued [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref1">1</xref>
          ]. Marginal
preferences upon each criterion are synthesized into a total value
function, also known as utility function [
          <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref13">13</xref>
          ]. The utility-based
formulation of the multi-criteria recommendation problem in the
present research is formulated with the help of context dependent
rule sets which determine the meaningfulness or the weight of each
criterion in the specific context (see Section 3.2 and 4 for more
details).
        </p>
      </sec>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-5">
      <title>3.2 Case Study Application</title>
      <p>
        Based on the qualitative interviews and literature reviews, the
following assumptions are introduced: 1) ticket length  is
accepted as a parameter indicating 
. We discovered while
performing the survey that case study BP workers usually receive
short texts in case of simple, explicit and already familiar requests.
To a certain extent, this fact is also supported by the theory of the
least effort [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref31">31</xref>
        ]. Based on the case study contextual specificity
calculated with the help of statistical analysis, a threshold 
has to
be set; 2) the distribution σ of PoS has a direct impact on contextual
readability. Information in the tickets rich in unique nouns (BP
Resources) and with low number of other PoS (for example, BP
Techniques) is easy to perceive and systemize for a BP worker; 3)
in case of word frequencies (Zipf's coefficient  ), a threshold  has
to be set; 4) while implementing the approaches 
, 
and 
{
6, 
, the rule sets 
∈ {
1, 
2}, {
3, 
4, 
5 } and
7,
      </p>
      <p>8 } have to be developed based on the specific
statistical values of the case study in focus. First, we describe the
extraction and interpretation of the knowledge aspects related to the
three suggested criteria. After, we show how the extracted aspects
and related criteria are used to feed the RS.</p>
      <p>
        Readability ( 1). There are certain Stylistic Patterns (SP) embedded
in the BP (ticket) texts influencing the worker’s perception of the
contextual complexity of the task processing [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref19">19</xref>
        ]. It is proposed to
measure the SP with relative distributions of PoS and unique PoS
(SynS) and Zipf’s word frequencies (WS).
Input: incoming ticket   with   (  ,  ,  ,  ), accepted
threshold  for the ticket length  and accepted threshold  for
coefficient  in the corpus 
Output: exclusive qualitative values of  1 “telegraphic”,
“effortless” and “involving effort”
for all   ∈   do
if  &lt; and σ( )&gt;0 and σ( ,  ,  )=0 and b=0 then
 1=“telegraphic”
if  &lt;  and σ( ,  )&gt;0 and σ( )&gt;σ( ,  ,  ) and
σ( )&gt;σ(∃!  ) and  &lt;  then  1=“effortless”
else  1=“involving effort”
end
The algorithm considers that: 1)  depends on  , short tickets
being the simple ones; 2) the tickets containing only nouns are
written in a very condensed telegraphic way, i.e. either BP worker
already knows what needs to be done or the ticket is complex and
this complexity will be captured with criteria  2 or  3 depending on
their meaningfulness in the case study context; 3) ticket texts
containing high relative number of BP Resources (nouns), which
are also unique, are easy to understand. The WS ( ) indicates the
information presentation flow, i.e. condensed versus disperse.
Perceived Anticipated Effort (  2 ).  reflects the emotional
component of the ticket contextual complexity perceived by the BP
worker while reading the ticket text [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref21">21</xref>
        ]. It is proposed to be
measured by the specified Business Sentiment.
      </p>
      <p>
        Input: incoming ticket   in the corpus  , manually created BS
lexicon-computed valence values of   ,   ,   , case study
specific rule set  ∈ {  1,  2} [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref21">21</xref>
        ]
Output:  2 exclusive qualitative values “low”, “medium”, “high”
for all   ,   ,   ∈   do
,   )= 1 then  2=“low”
      </p>
      <p>,   )= 2 then  2=“medium”
if σ(  ,</p>
      <p>if σ(  ,  
else  2=“high”
end
The algorithm reproduces the computation of the emotional
component of the BP contextual complexity expressed by urgency
and task complexity.</p>
      <p>
        Business Process Cognition (  3 ). The algorithm presents the
identification of semantic nature of activities in the ticket texts by
means of DML Taxonomy. The knowledge aspects are extracted
with the help of the mentioned RTCC Framework whereby nouns
( ) express Resources, verbs ( ) – Techniques, adjectives ( ) –
Capacities, and adverbs ( ) – Choices. It is suggested to classify
the BPs (tickets) into three categories of routine, semi-cognitive
and cognitive based on the semantically implied complexity [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref20">20</xref>
        ].
Input: incoming ticket   in the corpus  , manually created DML
Taxonomy from  with   ,   ,   organized as PoS in RTTC
Framework [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref20">20</xref>
        ], case study specific rule set  ∈
{ 3,  4,  5}
Output:  3 exclusive qualitative values “routine”,
“semicognitive”, “cognitive”
for all   ,   ,   ∈   do
if σ(  ,   ,   ) =  3 then  3 =“cognitive”
if σ(  ,   ,   ) =  4 then  3 =“routine”
      </p>
      <p>if σ(  ,   ,   )=  5 then  3=“semi-cognitive”
end
The algorithm follows semantic tagging approach which classifies
the activities described in tickets into three pre-defined categories.
Multi-Criteria Recommendations. Computed criteria values and
inferred  are used to feed multi-criteria knowledge-based RS.
Based on  , the recommendation  from ∈ {  ,   ,   }
alternatives should be offered to the BP worker.</p>
      <p>Input: computed qualitative values for  1 (  ),  2(  ),  3(  ), the
case study specific rule sets determining the meaningfulness or
weight of each criterion in the case study context  ∈
{ 6,  7,  8}
Output:  and a recommendation for the BP worker
for  1 (  ),  2(  ),  3(  ) do
if  1, 2, 3= 6 then 
if  1, 2, 3= 7 then 
if  1, 2,  3= 8 then 
 ={  ,   }
= “low” and  =  
= “medium” and  =  
=“high” and
end
In the experimental session, we evaluated the knowledge aspects
extraction according to  = { 1,  2,  3} on the case study data set
and calculated case study specific threshold parameters and rule
sets which were iteratively adjusted based on the computed 
and its quantitative and qualitative evaluation. These values and an
experimental set-up of the proposed RS on the example of a
randomly selected ticket are presented in the section below.
4</p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-6">
      <title>Experiments and Evaluation</title>
      <p>In the experimental and evaluation phase, we conducted
quantitative (experiments) and qualitative (interviews) analyses as
shown on the Figure 2 below.
First (see point 1 on Figure 2), initial experiments were carried out
in order to set up initial values of case study threshold parameters
&amp; rule sets. The computational analyses were conducted based on
the pre-processed data set comprising CSV-formatted 28,157 text
entries (tickets) in English language. The approaches of specified
knowledge aspects extraction were executed on the data set
subsequently. Inline and in the tables below, we present the final
values for the threshold parameters and rule sets obtained after the
evaluation rounds described in this section: 1) accepted threshold
 for the ticket length  – 25 words ( ); 2) accepted threshold 
for coefficient  – 3; 3) accepted rule set  ∈ {  1,  2} for
 computation is presented in Table 1; 4) accepted rule set
 ∈ {  3,  4,  5} for  computation is presented in Table
2; 5) accepted rule set  ∈ { 6,  7,  8} of  is presented
in Table 3 (the values in each of the cell of the table represent
possible alternatives).</p>
      <p>In the evaluation phase (see point 2 and 3 on Figure 2), we
conducted quantitative and qualitative analyses iteratively in order
to fine tune the threshold parameters and rule sets from point 1 on
Figure 2. While discussing the  with the case study BP
workers, it was discovered that there is no such a complexity
definition as  in the current case study context. However,
another type of complexity (real complexity of the ticket processing
mentioned in 1b, see Section 3.1.) can be measured based on the
historical ticket data from the IT ticketing system. These data
included configuration items, specifically affected applications
(which is closely related to the number of tasks in the case study
context), number of tasks, risk type of the ticket, and
implementation type (online vs offline). Real complexity can be
calculated on the ordinal scale yielding to the values of “low”,
“medium” and “high”, those applied in the  computation, and
thus can be used for the evaluation of  .</p>
      <p>Consequently, quantitative analysis with a new data set from
the same case study comprising 4,625 ticket text entries in English
was performed to compute the  of each of the ticket (see point
2 on Figure 2). To compute real complexity, we used mentioned
historical data from the IT ticketing system. Following the rules
provided by the case study BP workers, we calculated the real
complexity for each of the ticket also classifying it into “low”,
“medium” and “high”.</p>
      <p>As shown in point 3 on Figure 2, we iteratively consulted with
the case study BP workers and conducted qualitative evaluation of
the RS in a form of the interviews. An overall conceptual
framework was introduced to the team of 13 managers of the case
study department responsible for the correct ticket processing. For
this purpose, a semi-structured interview approach was developed
with a planned set of questions regarding the feasibility and
applicability of the  computation and the development of
recommendations based on the  .</p>
      <p>
        The qualitative evaluation was divided into three parts. First,
we introduced the objectives, research motivations, theoretical and
methodological background. Second, the RS concept, specifically
the  computation, was illustratively presented using a set of 60
randomly selected IT tickets containing 54% of correctly and 46%
of incorrectly identified  from the case study data set. The
estimation of correctness was performed using the computed real
complexity values. The case study BP workers were asked to
critically evaluate the quality of the  and real complexity,
especially the rules and data applied for the computation of real
complexity. Based on the discussions evolved with the BP workers,
both real complexity and  threshold parameters and rule sets
were adjusted. All the presented inline and in tables below 
parameters and rule sets as well as evaluation numbers (see Table
5) are based on the obtained final values. Third, in order to assess
the practical implications of the  and RS, we conducted a short
Q&amp;A session using a so-called funnel model [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref23">23</xref>
        ], i.e. we started
with open questions and moved towards more specific ones
regarding possible practical value of the RS. Hereby, not only
providing “physical” recommendations in a form of templates or
historical ticket data received a positive feedback but also the
prioritization of an incoming ticket as a dashboard for correct time
and workforce management in the team.
In Table 4, we present the example of a manually selected ticket.
According to the algorithm described in Section 3.2., the predicted
 is low and recommendation  would be   , i.e. one-to-one
template from the database.
   : “telegraphic”
  ( )
installation, release, application, SAP XYZ
      </p>
      <p>(∃!  )
installation, release, application, SAP XYZ
b
0
   : “medium”
low (  )</p>
      <p>medium (  )
installation
high (  )</p>
      <p>: “routine”</p>
      <p>installation, release, application
 
 
 index: “low”
Recommendation  : template  
BPC
cog
cog
rout
rout
semi-cog
semi-cog</p>
      <p>PPC</p>
      <p>
        In addition to the handcrafted rules for real complexity developed
with the case study team and in order to be able to compare the
evaluation results, we applied a technology based approach – the
recursive partitioning classification and regression trees (CART)
method [
        <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref18">18</xref>
        ] with complexity parameter cp=0.056 and measures of
the error in classification xerror=0.39. For this purpose, we used
the mentioned set of manually evaluated 60 IT tickets as a training
sample and data set of 4,625 tickets as a test sample.
Hereby, the distribution values show the qualitative characteristic
of the data set on the total, i.e. what is the proportion of the BPs
with low, medium and high complexity. Overall precision is the
relative number of correctly identified PPC as compared to the
whole number of identified real complexity. Recalls are calculated
for each of the PPC values and represent a fraction of relevant
values that have been retrieved over the total amount of relevant
values. As it can be concluded from the table, the values from both
approaches reveal similar evaluation results, the CART-based
method showing slightly higher (0.5% increase) precision and
better recalls in case of low (1.7% increase) and high (9.5%
increase) values.
5
      </p>
    </sec>
    <sec id="sec-7">
      <title>Limitations and Future Work</title>
      <p>In this paper, we presented a multi-criteria knowledge-based RS
approach, which exploits three core knowledge aspects of the BP
textual descriptions to build a recommendation. The main
contributions of this work are a construction of a set of criteria for
a recommendation problem in the context of unstructured BP texts
and provision of a method to efficiently extract the necessary
knowledge aspects and transform them into actionable insights,
representing a methodological guide for BP decision support. As
shown in the experiments, the conceptual framework has proven to
be a meaningful approach having obtained positive quantitative and
qualitative evaluation results. The main limitations are related to:
1) testing of the approach in the real environment of the same case
study, 2) applying of the framework on the case study from a
different domain and 3) currently strong focus on the empirical
handcrafted rules, i.e. absence of a “learning” component of the RS.
As a part of future work, we will encode the algorithms to build a
proof-of-concept of the suggested multi-criteria knowledge-based
RS. Subsequently, the prototype will be evaluated on the case study
data set and by the BP workers. In parallel, we will search for a case
study from a different domain to test the framework.</p>
    </sec>
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