Agent assignment for process management

Abstract

Workflow Management Systems not only need to provide a mechanism to represent the organizational elements involved during the execution of workflow processes but they also must provide the mechanism for continuous improvements within these elements. But, in almost, all workflow management systems the role concept is determined once at the introduction of a workflow application and is not reevaluated to observe how successfully certain processes are performed by the authorized agents. This paper describes an approach which evaluates whether agents assigned to a process are working successfully and feed this information back for future agent assignments promising best business benefit for the enterprise. The approach is called Agent Performance Evaluation (APE) and is based on data mining technique combined with post processing technique.

Agent Assignment for Process Management: Agent Performance Evaluation Framework

“…In order to compute the competency of an agent, the Analysis phase makes use of pre-tuned mining methods like PAPE [3], CAPE [4] and OAPE. Which method is chosen, again, depends on the interpretation of the context of a process (as given in the goal definition).…”

“…These are the contexts where agents have predominant expertise, therefore, demands for the adoption of context specific competency profiles into organizational database; otherwise generic agent competency profiles are optimally adopted. For further detail we refer to [4].…”

“…As a matter of fact, history of workflow execution is neither evaluated nor incorporated into future assignment strategies. As a result, agents simply continue with their processes even if some of them have an awful "success history" [3] [4]. This situation is unsatisfactory as it has a negative impact on the overall business performance [5].…”