Two-Stage Process Modeling for Simulation in BPR

Business Process Simulation on Procedural Graphical Process Models

“…The resource perspective on BPS regarding resource allocation is addressed in about three quarters of the reviewed publications, while there are seven publications that do not mention the allocation of resources to process tasks. It is remarkable that 15 publications addressing resource allocation explain how to support this simulation property in detail (Oberweis 1996;Chan et al 2009;Gruhn and Richter 2009;Kloos et al 2009Kloos et al , 2010Kloos et al , 2011Vasilecas et al 2013;Cimino and Vaglini 2014;Joschko 2014;Kloos 2014;Cartelli et al 2014Cartelli et al , 2015Cartelli et al , 2016D'Ambrogio and Zacharewicz 2016). A few publications propose extensions for modeling languages enabling the allocation of resources, e.g., for BPMN 2.0 via text annotations (Bocciarelli et al 2014a, p. 3015) as well as for the extended Event-Driven Process Chain (eEPC) (e.g., Kloos 2014).…”

“…Branching probabilities are introduced with regard to extending branches with constant probabilities or stochastic approaches such as the roulette wheel method (Cimino and Vaglini 2014, p. 336) or based on a Gaussian distribution (Lu ¨bbecke et al 2015, p. 869). We find more detailed explanations on preparing process alternatives for simulation by extending branches only in eight reviewed publications (e.g., Desel and Erwin 2003; Garcı ´a-Ban ˜uelos and Dumas 2009; Gruhn and Richter 2009;Kloos et al 2009;Cimino and Vaglini 2014;Kloos 2014;Cartelli et al 2015Cartelli et al , 2016. Moreover, many publications do not mention if and how XOR-or OR-operators are executed when simulating the business process -this may be a more technical part of the simulation tool, but it directly affects the simulation and, for XOR-gateways, it is important to ensure that exactly one of the process branches is executed in each process instance (cf.…”

“…1st Dimension of analysis -Overall approach When starting from a conceptual business process model, BPS presupposes enriching the conceptual model with additional information required for simulation (e.g., availability of limited resources and timing of events). Depending on the modeling language used to construct the conceptual process model, the information required for simulation is added to the conceptual process model (provided that precise syntax and semantics are defined by the language) (e.g., Bisogno et al 2016) or is added during or after a model-to-model or model-to-text transformation to a respective simulation language (e.g., Bocciarelli et al 2014a;Gruhn and Richter 2009). Thus, approaches to BPS generally fall into two categories (see also, e.g., Kloos 2014, pp.…”

“…Approaches starting from a UML Activity diagram The sample comprises five contributions starting from UML Activity diagrams. Four UML-based approaches in the review sample propose the direct transformation of UML Activity diagrams into a simulation model (Xie 2008a, b;Han et al 2009b;Gruhn and Richter 2009) while Kloos (2014) suggest an 'indirect transformation approach' requiring an intermediate model. In the following, we briefly describe the approaches.…”

“…Verification builds on the analysis of reachability trees using the Petri net representation of the workflows. A two-step approach for simulation of business processes is suggested in Gruhn and Richter (2009). In a first step, reusable models of a business domain are created as Colored Petri nets by domain experts.…”