Managing service requests with common renewable resources

This article discusses managing fulfillment of requests for services that have dependencies on common human and computing resources. The objective of this research is to minimize the duration of a group of requests that utilize partially overlapping sets of renewable resources. Minimizing the latency between the fulfillments is a critical design consideration in managing these requests. A reduction in latency could lead to the minimization of the total span of a group of requests, and is the key to achieving high levels of a resource's usage and cost-effective process management. It is evident that these latency problems must be either drastically reduced or effectively hidden. The approach described in this article is an interesting hybrid of the two, providing both the significant latency reduction, as well as the mechanism for hiding some of remaining delays. © 2011 Chinese Institute of Industrial Engineers.