On the optimization of information workflow

Workflow management systems allow for visibility, control, and automation of some of the business processes. Recently, nonbusiness domains have taken an interest in the management of workflows and the optimal assignment and scheduling of workflow tasks to users across a network. This research aims at developing a rigorous mathematical programming formulation of the workflow optimization problem. The resulting formulation is nonlinear, but a linearized version is produced. In addition, two heuristics (a decoupled heuristic and a greedy randomized adaptive search procedure (GRASP) heuristic) are developed to find solutions quicker than the original formulation. Computational experiments are presented showing that the GRASP approach performs no worse than the other two approaches, finding solutions in a fraction of the time.