A Business Process Management System based on a General Optimium Criterion

Business Process Management Systems (BPMS) provide a broadrange of facilities to manage operational business processes. These systemsshould provide support for the complete Business Process Management (BPM)life-cycle [16]: (re)design, configuration, execution, control, and diagnosis ofprocesses. BPMS can be seen as successors of Workflow Management (WFM)systems. However, already in the seventies people were working on officeautomation systems which are comparable with today’s WFM systems.Recently, WFM vendors started to position their systems as BPMS. Our paper’sgoal is a proposal for a Tasks-to-Workstations Assignment Algorithm (TWAA)for assembly lines which is a special implementation of a stochastic descenttechnique, in the context of BPMS, especially at the control level. Both cases,single and mixed-model, are treated. For a family of product models having thesame generic structure, the mixed-model assignment problem can be formulatedthrough an equivalent single-model problem. A general optimum criterion isconsidered. As the assembly line balancing, this kind of optimisation problemleads to a graph partitioning problem meeting precedence and feasibilityconstraints. The proposed definition for the "neighbourhood" function involvesan efficient way for treating the partition and precedence constraints. Moreover,the Stochastic Descent Technique (SDT) allows an implicit treatment of thefeasibility constraint. The proposed algorithm converges with probability 1 toan optimal solution.