[HL] Automatic Resource Allocation in Business Processes: A Systematic Literature Survey

Luise Pufahl presented her SLR on resource allocation in business processes at Weizenbaum Institute today!

Resource allocation is a complex problem as resources can have different competences, capabilities and rights. So, together with her colleagues, she posed the question:“What is the state-of-the-art of system-initiated resource allocation approaches for business processes?”

Some interesting findings:
- Papers may use models or execution data but rarely both
- Most papers decide based on previous performance and workload, but some include other interesting perspectives
- Most papers don’t deliver a prototypical implementation!

- Rule-based solutions are most used and have lowest execution cost,yet also propose the worst strategies
- Exact algorithms do the opposite: globally optimal solutions at the price of prohibitively long computations
- Approaches based on ML or (meta-)heuristics are in between

They also identified future work directions:
- Leveraging more execution data
- Exploring additional aspects of resource and task characteristics
- Increasing adaptability and flexibility of algorithms
- Benchmarking

Want to learn more? Then read the pre-print by Luise Pufahl, Sven Ihde, Fabian Stiehle, Mathias Weske & Ingo Weber here: https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.07264

P.S. Arxiv currently has an older version of the pre-print but it will be updated soon.