Minimizing Processing Costs in an Automated Office System

The availability of automated office systems with capabilities such as composition of forms and text on cathode-ray tube (CRT) displays, electronic storage, and retrieval of information, etc., introduces many possibilities for improving the effectiveness of information processing in offices. For offices characterized by well-defined procedures, a descriptive model for flow of information and activities in an office and a method for optimizing processing time effectiveness of a given automated system is presented in this paper. The processing of jobs by the office is modeled as a tree structure and the average processing cost per job is minimized by a dynamic progmming algorithm.