Development of process execution rules for workload balancing on agents

  • Authors:

  • Byung-Hyun Ha;Joonsoo Bae;Yong Tae Park;Suk-Ho Kang

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Industrial Engineering, Seoul National University, Seoul, Republic of Korea;Department of Industrial and Information System Engineering, Chonbuk National University, Jeonju, Republic of Korea;Department of Industrial Engineering, Seoul National University, Seoul, Republic of Korea;Department of Industrial Engineering, Seoul National University, Seoul, Republic of Korea

  • Venue:
  • Data & Knowledge Engineering - Special issue: Business process management
  • Year:
  • 2006

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Abstract

BPMS (Business Process Management Systems) is a revolutionary information system that supports designing, administrating, and improving the business processes systematically. BPMS enables the execution of business processes by assigning tasks to human or computer agents according to the predefined definitions of the processes. In this paper, we devise process execution rules using individual worklists and propose task assignment algorithms to maximize the overall process efficiency under the limitation of the agent's capacity. We first transform the business processes into queueing network models, in which the agents are considered as servers. With this step complete, workloads of agents are calculated from server utilization and the task assignment policy can be determined by balancing the workloads. This will serve to minimize the workloads of all agents, thus achieving overall process efficiency. Another application of these results can be capacity planning of agents in advance and business process optimization in the reengineering context. The simulation results and comparisons with other well-known dispatching policies with the shared worklists show the effectiveness of our algorithm.