Dynamic instance queuing in process-aware information systems

Abstract

Reducing the processing time of instances at critical activities is essential for many application domains. We refer to an activity as being critical if due to restricted resources assigned to the activity, the arrival of a certain number of process instances might lead to a waiting queue. So far, queuing has been adopted for process optimization in a merely static manner, i.e., the strategy in which order the instances are processed from the queue is fixed. We argue that determining the processing strategy for instance queues at runtime (dynamic queuing) offers the potential to reduce the processing time at critical activities. The core idea is that instances arriving at critical activities are first clustered based on similar features and are then distributed to dynamic queues accordingly. The decision on the processing order for the resulting queues requires a state management for allocating the appropriate number of resources during runtime. For this, a configurable performance index is used. The proposed dynamic queuing approach is prototypically implemented and evaluated based on a realistic data set.

Application of Dynamic Instance Queuing to Activity Sequences in Cooperative Business Process Scenarios

“…Note that this paper grounds on our previous work presented in Ref. 27, but extends and elaborates it in many ways: first of all, DIQ is applied to activity sequences (DIQS) instead of single activities. Moreover, a detailed description of implementing and integrating DIQ into a PAIS architecture is provided.…”

“…Such process activities are referred to as critical activities. 27 To tackle this problem for the laboratory process, the preparation and execution of the automatic sample check was scheduled to certain time frames (e.g. every fourth day at 9 am) in order to batch as many instances as possible and hence achieve a reduction of costs and time.…”

“…Hence, it could be promising to investigate the means for dynamic instance queuing (DIQ) during runtime of the processes. 27 …”

“…aggregating incoming instances at critical activities based on automatic decisions during runtime. 27 For understanding the conceptual extensions provided in the paper at hand, we want to first draw the reader's attention to the following two cases: either we can think of dynamically queuing instances at one (critical) activity (denoted as DIQA 27 ) or dynamic instance queuing can be applied over a sequence of activities (denoted as DIQS) as we will analyze in this paper. In Fig.…”

“…27 Usually business processes are composed of different structural patterns such as sequences, parallel/alternative branchings, or loops. 41 Could throughput times be further reduced when applying DIQ on process patterns instead of single activities?…”