Resource Management for Business Process Scheduling in the Presence of Availability Constraints

Date
2016-10-01
Authors
Xu, J
Liu, C
Zhao, X
Yongchareon, S
Ding, Z
Supervisor
Item type
Journal Article
Degree name
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery
Abstract

In the context of business process management, the resources required by business processes, such as workshop staff, manufacturing machines, etc., tend to follow certain availability patterns, due to maintenance cycles, work shifts and other factors. Such availability patterns heavily influence the efficiency and effectiveness of enterprise resource management. Most existing process scheduling and resource management approaches tend to tune the process structure to seek better resource utilisation, yet neglect the constraints on resource availability. In this article, we investigate the scheduling of business process instances in accordance with resource availability patterns, to find out how enterprise resources can be rationally and sufficiently used. Three heuristic-based planning strategies are proposed to maximise the process instance throughput together with another strategy based on a genetic algorithm. The performance of these strategies has been evaluated by conducting experiments of different settings and analysing the strategy characteristics.

Description
Keywords
Business process management , Business process scheduling , Resource management , Resource planning
Source
ACM Transactions on Management Information Systems (TMIS), 7(3), 9.
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