Analyzing the Effects of Reordering Work List Items for Selected Control Flow Patterns

Efficient resource management is an important requirement for many process-oriented applications. Typically, work items are assigned to resources through their work lists. There are many reasons for reordering work items in a resource's work list. For process scheduling, for example, swapping process instances constitutes a mean to keep due times. At the same time, reducing the throughput time of the global process is typically not the primary goal. For process optimization, in turn, the implications of reordering work items on the overall temporal performance of the process might be crucial. In this paper, we investigate how reordering work items affects performance parameters that are typically associated with a first-in-first-out processing mechanism at resources. The analysis is conducted for single process tasks and for typical control flow patterns such as sequence as well as parallel and alternative branchings. It is shown that the implications on the global throughput time are less than expected, while the effects on instance based parameters strongly depend on the control-flow pattern in which the reordering mechanism is implemented. The results are supported by means of a simulation.