Optimizing Business Processes through Parallel Task Execution

Abstract

Optimization of business processes is a persistent topic and a key goal in business process management (BPM). In this work, we investigate how a given resource allocation in business processes can drive optimizations in an underlying BPMN diagram. More specifically, the main contribution is a proposal to leverage a variant of representation of processes as Refined Process Structure Trees (RPSTs) with a view to enabling novel resource allocation-driven task re-ordering in a principled manner. The re-orderings targeted enforce the parallelism redesign heuristic that allows for multiple resources operating concurrently, which yields improvements in the process cycle time.