Workload Balancing on Agents for Business Process Efficiency based on Stochastic Model

통계적 모형의 업무부하 균일화를 통한 비즈니스 프로세스의 효율화

  • Ha, Byung-Hyun (Department of Industrial Engineering, Seoul National University) ;
  • Seol, Hyeon-Ju (Department of Industrial Engineering, Seoul National University) ;
  • Bae, Joon-So (Division of E-Commerce, Sungkyul University) ;
  • Park, Yong-Tae (Department of Industrial Engineering, Seoul National University) ;
  • Kang, Suk-Ho (Department of Industrial Engineering, Seoul National University)
  • 하병현 (서울대학교 산업공학과) ;
  • 설현주 (서울대학교 산업공학과) ;
  • 배준수 (성결대학교 전자상거래학부) ;
  • 박용태 (서울대학교 산업공학과) ;
  • 강석호 (서울대학교 산업공학과)
  • Published : 2003.12.31

Abstract

BPMS (Business Process Management Systems) is aninformation system that systematically supports designing, administrating, and improving the business processes. It can execute the business processes by assigning tasks to human or computer agents according to the predefined definitions of the processes. In this research we developed a task assignment algorithm that can maximize overall process efficiency under the limitation of agents' capacity. Since BPMS manipulates the formal and predictable business processes, we can analyze the processes using queuing theory to achieve overall process efficiency. We first transform the business processes into queuing network model in which the agents are considered as servers. After that, workloads of agents are calculated as server utilization and we can determine the task assignment policy by balancing the workloads. This will make the workloads of all agents be minimized, and the overall process efficiency is achieved in this way. Another application of the results can be capacity planning of agents in advance and business process optimization in reengineering context. We performed the simulation analysis to validate the results and also show the effectiveness of the algorithm by comparing with well known dispatching policies.

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