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Resource Allocation with Dependencies in Business Process Management Systems

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Business Process Management Forum (BPM 2016)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing ((LNBIP,volume 260))

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Abstract

Business Process Management Systems (BPMS) facilitate the execution of business processes by coordinating all involved resources. Traditional BPMS assume that these resources are independent from one another, which justifies a greedy allocation strategy of offering each work item as soon as it becomes available. In this paper, we develop a formal technique to derive an optimal schedule for work items that have dependencies and resource conflicts. We build our work on Answer Set Programming (ASP), which is supported by a wide range of efficient solvers. We apply our technique in an industry scenario and evaluate its effectiveness. In this way, we contribute an explicit notion of resource dependencies within BPMS research and a technique to derive optimal schedules.

Funded by the Austrian Research Promotion Agency (FFG) grant 845638 (SHAPE).

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Commonly referred as scheduling.

  2. 2.

    Since several sets of restrictions can be provided, e.g. for activity \(a_1\) resources with either role \(r_1\) or skill \(s_1\) are required.

  3. 3.

    We have adopted the vocabulary used in BPM for resource allocation [19, 31].

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Vienna University of Economics and Business, Vienna, Austria

    Giray Havur, Cristina Cabanillas, Jan Mendling & Axel Polleres

Authors
  1. Giray Havur
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  2. Cristina Cabanillas
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  3. Jan Mendling
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  4. Axel Polleres
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Giray Havur .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Queensland University of Technology , Brisbane, Queensland, Australia

    Marcello La Rosa

  2. DFKI, Universität des Saarlandes, Saarbrücken, Saarland, Germany

    Peter Loos

  3. Universidad Politècnica de Valencia , Valencia, Spain

    Oscar Pastor

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Havur, G., Cabanillas, C., Mendling, J., Polleres, A. (2016). Resource Allocation with Dependencies in Business Process Management Systems. In: La Rosa, M., Loos, P., Pastor, O. (eds) Business Process Management Forum. BPM 2016. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, vol 260. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-45468-9_1

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