Towards Look-Ahead Strategies for Work Item Selection

We introduce look-ahead strategies to sort the work-items in work lists of process agents in order to improve key performance indicators for the execution of business processes. In contrast to well known strategies relying solely on local information like first-in first-out (FIFO) or earliest-deadline-first (EDF), our look-ahead approach utilizes structural, organizational, empirical, and current workload information of the process to provide a heuristics for computing recommendations for actors, which work-item should be selected next for execution. We describe the look ahead strategies and report and discuss the results of simulation experiments for checking the feasibility of the approach.