Patent ID: 8634543

Claim:
A method, comprising: receiving, at a work assignment engine, a work item; considering, by the work assignment engine, every resource in a resource pool as a potential resource for assigning to the work item, wherein resources in the resource pool that are considered as a potential resource include available, non-available, qualified and non-qualified resources; determining, by the work assignment engine, a selected resource from the resource pool for processing the work item; and assigning, by the work assignment engine, the work item to the selected resource, wherein determining a selected resource from the resource pool comprises: determining an attribute combination for the work item, wherein the attribute combination for the work item comprises one or more attributes associated with processing requirements of the work item; analyzing every resource in the resource pool to determine whether each resource comprises an attribute combination sufficient to fulfill the processing requirements of the work item as determined by the attribute combination of the work item; based on the analyzing step, determining a group of qualified resources that have the requisite attribute combination; and analyzing one or more attributes of each resource in the group of qualified resources to determine the selected resource.