Resource Allocation vs. Business Process Improvement: How They Impact on Each Other

Resource management has been recognised as an important topic for the execution of business processes since long time ago. Yet, most exiting works on resource allocation have not paid enough attentions to process characteristics, such as structural and task dependencies. Furthermore, no effort has been made on optimising resource allocation by improving business processes. To address this issue, we propose an approach that optimises the use of resources in an enterprise by exploring the structural features of a business process and adapting the structures of the business process to better fit the resources available in the enterprise. After a motivating example, we describe a role-based business process model for resource allocation. Then we present strategies for resource allocation optimisation and discuss the relationship between resource allocation and business process improvement. A set of heuristic rules are discussed and algorithms based on these rules are designed for optimising resource allocation with a particular optimisation goal.