Resource Allocation with Dependencies in Business Process Management Systems

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.