Abstract
Human resources are of central importance for executing and supervising business processes. An optimal resource allocation can dramatically improve undesirable consequences of resource shortages. However, existing approaches for resource allocation have some limitations, e.g., they do not consider concurrent process instances or loops in business processes, which may greatly alter resource requirements. This paper introduces a novel approach for automatically allocating resources to process activities in a time optimal way that is designed to tackle the aforementioned shortcomings. We achieve this by representing the resource allocation problem in Answer Set Programming (ASP), which allows us to model the problem in an extensible, modular, and thus maintainable way, and which is supported by various efficient solvers.
Funded by the Austrian Research Promotion Agency (FFG), grant 845638 (SHAPE).
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Notes
- 1.
From now on resources for the sake of brevity.
- 2.
Our encoding and the problem instances are provided at http://goo.gl/lzf1St.
- 3.
Please, note that events are instantaneous, and hence, they take zero time units.
- 4.
Since in the following we only consider instances of the same Petri Net, we will drop the subscript N in the predicates.
- 5.
Recall: in Petri nets representing business processes, activity transitions are empty squares while silent transitions are represented in filled squares (cf. Fig. 1a).
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Havur, G., Cabanillas, C., Mendling, J., Polleres, A. (2016). Automated Resource Allocation in Business Processes with Answer Set Programming. In: Reichert, M., Reijers, H. (eds) Business Process Management Workshops. BPM 2016. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, vol 256. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-42887-1_16
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