Motivated by the prevalence of collaboration in work flows, we study networks where some activities require simultaneous processing by multiple types of multitasking resources. Collaboration imposes constraints on the capacity of the process since multiple multitasking resources need to be simultaneously at the right place. With these synchronization requirements, idleness of the bottleneck resources may be unavoidable: even when the network is continuously busy (processing at capacity), bottleneck resources can never be fully utilized. Equating the network capacity with the bottleneck capacity is, in these settings, incorrect. I will introduce the notions of collaboration architecture and unavoidable bottleneck idleness to map the relationship between a network’s collaboration structure and its capacity. Time permitting, I will discuss follow-up work that considers the dynamic control of collaborative networks and centers on the conflict, inherent in collaborative networks, between prioritization (the favoring of certain queues over others) and utilization.

This talk is based on joint work with Jan Van Mieghem