Q-learning Algorithm for Task Allocation Based on Social Relation

Social relation has a great impact on task allocation of a workflow management system. Most methods only focus on analyzing the effect of the handover relation. However, a workflow is a team process since many resources work on various tasks together to complete an instance. So the influence of the previous resources (called SR) should be considered during dynamic task allocation. This paper proposes a method to compute the social relation between two resources. Then we present a model to capture the influence of the previous resources on the candidate resources and implement a Q-learning algorithm for dynamic task allocation based on flow time perspective. Comparison experiments show that the algorithm with SR has almost 53% improvement of a real data set and 40% improvement of a simulation data set in flow time perspective. There is a higher throughput than the algorithm without SR. Experiment results confirm the existence of such relationship and prove that it is necessary to consider the influence of all previous resources during dynamic task allocation.