Xu, JLiu, CZhao, XYongchareon, SDing, Z2017-09-182017-09-182016-10-012016-10-01ACM Transactions on Management Information Systems (TMIS), 7(3), 9.2158-656X2158-6578https://hdl.handle.net/10292/10808In 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.Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies show this notice on the first page or initial screen of a display along with the full citation.Business process managementBusiness process schedulingResource managementResource planningJournal ArticleOpenAccess10.1145/2990197