Centralized versus market-based workflow coordination in the presence of uncertainty

While centralised approach has been considered to provide superior performance workflow coordination than market-based approach, most of the extant comparisons have been performed on the assumption that the working environments are static. This paper aims to compare the performance of the two approaches in task allocations of mobile business processes which are characterized with high level of exceptions like traffic congestions, accidents in the middle of task execution, occurrence of higher priority tasks, and so on. A multi-agent based simulation is adopted to represent two identical working environments in which mobile workers are allocated with geographically distributed tasks. In the simulation, the performance of the two approaches is compared in consideration of their ability of exception handling. The results show that the information update frequency and the type of exceptions affect the performance of centralized approach.