  Planning is concerned with the automated solution of action sequencing
problems described in declarative languages giving the action preconditions and
effects. One important application area for such technology is the creation of
new processes in Business Process Management (BPM), which is essential in an
ever more dynamic business environment. A major obstacle for the application of
Planning in this area lies in the modeling. Obtaining a suitable model to plan
with -- ideally a description in PDDL, the most commonly used planning language
-- is often prohibitively complicated and/or costly. Our core observation in
this work is that this problem can be ameliorated by leveraging synergies with
model-based software development. Our application at SAP, one of the leading
vendors of enterprise software, demonstrates that even one-to-one model re-use
is possible.
  The model in question is called Status and Action Management (SAM). It
describes the behavior of Business Objects (BO), i.e., large-scale data
structures, at a level of abstraction corresponding to the language of business
experts. SAM covers more than 400 kinds of BOs, each of which is described in
terms of a set of status variables and how their values are required for, and
affected by, processing steps (actions) that are atomic from a business
perspective. SAM was developed by SAP as part of a major model-based software
engineering effort. We show herein that one can use this same model for
planning, thus obtaining a BPM planning application that incurs no modeling
overhead at all.
  We compile SAM into a variant of PDDL, and adapt an off-the-shelf planner to
solve this kind of problem. Thanks to the resulting technology, business
experts may create new processes simply by specifying the desired behavior in
terms of status variable value changes: effectively, by describing the process
in their own language.
