Task Anticipation: A Quantitative Analysis Using Workflow Process Simulation

Traditional Workflow Management Systems (WfMS) are too rigid, posing problems when cooperation and human behavior are important factors. Under these circumstances, there is a need for a relaxation of the end-begin dependency. Task anticipation can provide this, relaxing the flow of control and dataflow among tasks, allowing exchange of results among sequential tasks even before the conclusion of the former task. This anticipation promotes a better cooperation and augments the performance in terms of process execution time. This paper presents some ways to use task anticipation in WfMS, simulating its behavior and comparing its performance to traditional process execution. Simulation results show that using anticipation is statistically better than the traditional approach (presenting profits of up to 33%). Taking into account possible additional effort anticipation shows better performance when initiated before 40% of the predecessors’ execution.