If you are looking to control basic aspects of the transformation:

• What maps/topics to publish
• What DITAVAL conditions to use
• What parameters to set
• Where to put the output files

then perhaps DITA-OT project files might be useful to you:

Publishing with project files (dita-ot.org)

Here is a blog post that describes how we use preprocessing to implement some additional functionality:

Preprocessing DITA-OT Project Files (blog.oxygenxml.com)

The upcoming Oxygen v25 release will provide a handy new feature to publish deliverables from a project button just by clicking a "Publish" button beside the deliverable. Or, you can publish them from the command line with

dita --project my-project-file.xml --deliverable my-deliverable-name

If you have any questions, feel free to ask!

 - Chris