There is no reason why we shouldn’t translate what we might know from one domain (manufacturing optimization) into another (business process modeling), if there are parallels and similarities between the two. The manufacturing industry has been working on optimization methodologies (in light of production constraints) for a long time. Now, researchers are looking at new ways of observing business processes in business process management systems, including viewing a process as an optimization under given constraints.

The authors present a good literature overview on this subject and the recent developments in the field; show the modeling of the business process, examples, and formulations of problems using mixed-integer programming; and provide near-optimal solutions to the optimization problem using genetic algorithms.

While the tools are not new, the implementation context is; thus, this paper, which is a good balance of theory and examples, is worth reading for businesspeople, manufacturing engineers, mathematicians, and computer scientists alike.