KPI-based activity planning for people working in flexible processes

Planning human activities within business processes often happens based on the same methods and algorithms as are used in the area of manufacturing systems. However, human resources are more complex than machines. Their performance depends on a number of factors, including stress, personal preferences, etc. In this paper we describe an approach for planning activities of people that takes into account business rules and optimises the schedule with respect to one or more KPIs. Taking a task list, a set of rules or constraints and a KPI calculation model as input, we automatically create an executable model that captures all the possible scheduling scenarios. The state space of this executable model is explored to find an optimal schedule.