Abstract: According to the teachings herein, provisioning operations carried out via electronic processing in a communication network (60) benefit from the use of reordered workflows (20) having task orderings that are at least partly optimized with respect to task failure probabilities and/or resource-blocking penalties. The reordered workflows (20) are obtained by optimizing predefined provisioning workflows (10). Each predefined workflow (10) comprises two or more tasks (12) ordered along one or more task execution paths (14) in a task tree (16), according to a default task ordering that reflects any required inter-task dependencies but, in general, does not reflect any optimization in terms of failure penalties, resource blocking, etc. Among the several advantages provided by the teachings herein, carrying out provisioning operations in accordance with reordered workflows (20) wastes fewer compute cycles and reduces the needless blocking of network resources in the event of provisioning task failures.

Abstract: According to the teachings herein, provisioning operations carried out via electronic processing in a communication network (60) benefit from the use of reordered workflows (20) having task orderings that are at least partly optimized with respect to task failure probabilities and/or resource-blocking penalties. The reordered workflows (20) are obtained by optimizing predefined provisioning workflows (10). Each predefined workflow (10) comprises two or more tasks (12) ordered along one or more task execution paths (14) in a task tree (16), according to a default task ordering that reflects any required inter-task dependencies but, in general, does not reflect any optimization in terms of failure penalties, resource blocking, etc. Among the several advantages provided by the teachings herein, carrying out provisioning operations in accordance with reordered workflows (20) wastes fewer compute cycles and reduces the needless blocking of network resources in the event of provisioning task failures.