Integrating business process simulation and information system simulation for performance prediction

Abstract

Business process (BP) designs and enterprise information system (IS) designs are often not well aligned. Missing alignment may result in performance problems at run-time, such as large process execution time or overloaded IS resources. The complex interrelations between BPs and ISs are not adequately understood and considered in development so far. Simulation is a promising approach to predict performance of both BP and IS designs. Based on prediction results, design alternatives can be compared and verified against requirements. Thus, BP and IS designs can be aligned to improve performance. In current simulation approaches, BP simulation and IS simulation are not adequately integrated. This results in limited prediction accuracy due to neglected interrelations between the BP and the IS in simulation. In this paper, we present the novel approach Integrated Business IT Impact Simulation (IntBIIS) to adequately reflect the mutual impact between BPs and ISs in simulation. Three types of mutual impact between BPs and ISs in terms of performance are specified. We discuss several solution alternatives to predict the impact of a BP on the performance of ISs and vice versa. It is argued that an integrated simulation of BPs and ISs is best suited to reflect their interrelations. We propose novel concepts for continuous modeling and inteCommunicated by Prof. Wil M.P. van der Aalst. grated simulation. IntBIIS is implemented by extending the Palladio tool chain with BP simulation concepts. In a reallife case study with a BP and IS from practice, we validate the feasibility of IntBIIS and discuss the practicability of the corresponding tool support.

Comprehensive Simulation and Redesign System for Business Process and Organizational Structure

“…Moreover, they did not consider redesigning the process or organizational structure. In particular, even though most studies use the simulation techniques to more effectively predict the effects of process redesign [23,35,[45][46][47][48][49] and business analysts simulated redesigned processes to validate the processes and identify possible problems caused by the changes in process [10,23,24,47,50], existing methodologies do not consider business process and organizational structure comprehensively to redesign them.…”

Integración de procesos, gestión del riesgo y automatización en la gestión de las unidades militares

“…Esta investigación fue motivada por la identificación de inconvenientes en la gestión de la información en los procesos administrativos y de seguridad de las unidades militares de la Fuerza Aérea Ecuatoriana (FAE), especialmente, en lo que se refiere a la del talento humano, seguridad operacional y física. Estas debilidades tienen la capacidad potencial de afectar el Escuela de Postgrados Fuerza Aérea Colombiana las principales causas de los inconvenientes presentados en su desarrollo, obteniendo así información y un diagnóstico sobre el impacto en el rendimiento de la totalidad del subproceso bajo criterios, condiciones y demoras aleatorias similares a las observadas empíricamente, como una aproximación al entorno real para estimar el impacto en términos de optimización, con miras al rediseño de los procesos que serán automatizados (Heinrich et al, 2017).…”

Challenges in Aligning Enterprise Application Architectures to Business Process Access Control Requirements in Evolutional Changes

“…In contrast, AcsALign works with de facto standard modeling languages to require low additional effort for organizations. The approach around IntBIIS (Heinrich et al, 2017) also addresses mutual dependencies between business processes and architecture but focuses on performance predictions rather than access control. (Ramadan et al, 2017) proposes an approach to align architecture models and business processes with regard to security policies.…”