AWSM: Allocation of workflows utilizing social network metrics

The primary contribution of this work is a methodology that serves as a decision support tool to create teams of human actors within an organization to perform workflows, based on optimizing social network (SN) measures of choice, such as group or team cohesiveness. Past literature shows that the constituent activities of the workflows will be performed with greater efficiency and/or effectiveness if the workgroup of actors is optimized along an SN measure such as group cohesiveness. The major contribution here is the creation and implementation of a formal generalized methodology we call AWSM (Allocation of Workflows with Social Network Metrics) that incorporates ideas from two diverse fields: social network theory and workflow modeling, and allows optimization of work groups along any SN metric. In order to implement this model we present newly created algorithms to structure and represent the problem so that standard integer programming solvers can be utilized to solve it. We also present a performance analysis of the AWSM methodology and empirically test its feasibility for solving real world sized problems. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.