Mining Resource Scheduling Protocols

In service processes, as found in the telecommunications, financial, or healthcare sector, customers compete for the scarce capacity of service providers. For such processes, performance analysis is important and it often targets the time that customers are delayed prior to service. However, this wait time cannot be fully explained by the load imposed on service providers. Indeed, it also depends on resource scheduling protocols, which determines the order of activities that a service provider decides to follow when serving customers. This work focuses on automatically learning resource decisions from events. We hypothesize that queueing information serves as an essential element in mining such protocols and hence, we utilize the queueing perspective of customers in the mining process. We propose two types of mining techniques: advanced classification methods from data mining that include queueing information in their explanatory features and, heuristics that originate in queueing theory. Empirical evaluation shows that incorporating the queueing perspective into mining of scheduling protocols improves predictive power.