Concurrent processes scheduling with scarce resources in small and medium enterprises

Scarce resources,precedence and non-determined time-lag are three constraints commonly found in small and medium manufacturing enterprises(SMEs),which are deemed to block the application of workflow management system(WfMS). To tackle this problem,a workflow scheduling approach is proposed based on timing workflow net(TWF-net) and genetic algorithm(GA). The workflow is modelled in a form of TWF-net in favour of process simulation and resource conflict checking. After simplifying and reconstructing the set of workflow instance,the conflict resolution problem is transformed into a resource-constrained project scheduling problem(RCPSP),which could be efficiently solved by a heuristic method,such as GA. Finally,problems of various sizes are utilized to test the performance of the proposed algorithm and to compare it with first-come-firstserved(FCFS) strategy. The evaluation demonstrates that the proposed method is an overwhelming and effective approach for scheduling the concurrent processes with precedence and resource constraints.