Evolutionary Multi-Objective Optimization of business process designs with pre-processing

Abstract

This paper discusses the problem of business process optimization within a multi-objective evolutionary framework. Business process optimization (BPO) is considered as the problem of constructing feasible business process designs with optimum attribute values such as duration and cost. The proposed approach involves a pre-processing stage and the application of a series of Evolutionary Multi-Objective Optimization Algorithms (EMOAs) in an attempt to generate a series of diverse optimized business process designs for the same process requirements. The proposed optimization framework introduces a quantitative representation of business processes involving two matrices one for capturing the process design and one for calculating and evaluating the process attributes. It also introduces an algorithm that checks the feasibility of each candidate solution (i.e. process design). The work presented in this paper is aimed to investigate the benefits that come from the utilization of a pre-processing stage in the execution process of the EMOAs. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed optimization framework is capable of producing a satisfactory number of optimized design alternatives considering the problem complexity and high rate of infeasibility. The addition of the pre-processing stage appears to have a positive effect on the framework by producing more non-dominated solutions in reduced time frames.