Resource provisioning strategies for BPMN processes: Specification and analysis using Maude

摘要

Business process optimization is a strategic activity in organizations because of its potential to increase profit margins and reduce operational costs. One of the main challenges in this activity is concerned with the problem of optimizing allocation and sharing of resources. Companies are continuously adjusting their resources to their needs following different strategies. However, the dynamic provisioning strategies are hard to compare. This paper proposes an automatic analysis technique to evaluate and compare the execution time and resource occupancy of a business process relative to a workload and a provisioning strategy. Four different strategies are presented, which are guided by, respectively, recent resource usage, recent resource request, predicted behavior, and a combination of available strategies. Such analysis is performed on models conforming to an extension of BPMN with quantitative information, including resource availability and constraints. Within this framework, the approach is fully mechanized using a formal and executable specification in the Maude rewriting logic framework, which relies on existing techniques and tools for simulating probabilistic and real-time specifications. The paper includes results on the extensive experimentation that has been carried out for validation purposes. (C) 2021 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.