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viously considered by work on BPM.
We used an auction mechanism to illustrate a pos-
sible instantiation of the problem formalisation and
different outcomes, depending on the cost focus: en-
ergy, price and makespan. They have been analyzed
using three what-if scenarios, to show how business
managers can consider the consequences of consider-
ing energy during the resource allocation process.
Considering energy as a key component in
scheduling and resourcing business process execu-
tions offers interesting challenges. For example, for
an organisation to adhere to the ISO norms of be-
ing energy efficient and also consuming green energy
(ISO, 2011), an organisation may choose to negotiate
a deal with the energy provider based on the energy
signature (or energy consumption shape curve) for
a particular day. Energy providers can offer special
rates for those companies that adhere to their expected
energy shape (i.e. energy usage at different hours of
the day).
This leads to other interesting scenarios such as
companies offering auctions on excess surplus en-
ergy to those that need some additional energy, simi-
lar to the dynamic coalition formation scenario con-
sidered for the construction of virtual power plants
(Mihailescu et al., 2011). One approach to address
this problem is to enable Workflow Management Sys-
tems (Ehrler et al., 2005) in charge of business pro-
cess resource allocations to coordinate their activities
with Energy Management Systems (EnMS) that are in
charge of company energy policy (Roche et al., 2010).
An EnMS can facilitate choosing external resources
that closely align with the energy objective functions
of a given organisation.
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