Evolutionary Optimization of Business Process Designs

Abstract

Summary. Business process redesign and improvement have become increasingly attractive in the wider area of business process intelligence. Although there are many attempts to establish a qualitative business process redesign framework, there is little work on quantitative business process analysis and optimization. Furthermore, most of the attempts to analyze and optimize a business process are manual without involving a formal automated methodology. Business process optimization can be classified as a scheduling problem, expressed as the selection of alternative activities in the appropriate sequence for the available resources to be transformed and thus satisfy the business process objectives. This chapter provides an overview of the current research about business process analysis and optimization and introduces an evolutionary approach. It demonstrates how a business process design problem can be modeled as a multi-objective optimization problem and solved using existing techniques. An illustrative case study is presented to demonstrate the results obtained through three multi-objective optimization algorithms. It is shown that multi-objective optimization of business processes is a highly constrained problem with fragmented search space. However, the results demonstrate a successful attempt and highlight the directions for future research in the area.