Optimisation of Business Processes with Differentiated Resources

Abstract

Business process optimisation focuses on improving one or more performance measures in a business process model. Improving a business process can be achieved by making changes to the resource allocations within that process. Resource allocation is the distribution of available resources in a process to fulfill the organisation goals. The misconfiguration of resource allocations can heavily impact the cost and cycle time of the process. To address this issue, optimisation approaches have to be adapted to include differentiated resources. Differentiated resources each have their calendar, allowing for better customisability of the resource allocation and in turn better optimisation of the process model. This thesis proposes a multi-objective resource allocation optimisation approach for business processes with differentiated resources to minimise the cost and cycle time. The approach heuristically searches the space of possible resource allocations using simulation models to evaluate each resource allocation. An empirical evaluation shows that iteratively optimising resource allocations in conjunction with resource calendars lead to superior cost-time tradeoffs for optimising these allocations and calendars separately. Additionally, this thesis implements a web application to facilitate the interaction experience with the proposed optimisation algorithm.