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Towards Reliable Business Process Simulation: A Framework to Integrate ERP Systems

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Enterprise, Business-Process and Information Systems Modeling (BPMDS 2021, EMMSAD 2021)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing ((LNBIP,volume 421))

Abstract

A digital twin of an organization (DTO) is a digital replication of an organization used to analyze weaknesses in business processes and support operational decision-making by simulating different scenarios. As a key enabling technology of DTO, business process simulation provides techniques to design and implement simulation models that replicate real-life business processes. Existing approaches have been focusing on providing highly flexible design tools and data-driven evidence to improve the accuracy of simulation models. Provided with such tools and evidence, business analysts are required to reflect comprehensive aspects of reality with subjective judgments, including the design of ERP systems and the organizational interaction with the system. However, given the complexity of ERP systems, it is infeasible and error-prone to manually incorporate the business logic and data restrictions of the system into simulation models, impeding the faithfulness and reliability of the following analysis. In this work, we propose a framework to integrate ERP systems in business process simulation to overcome this limitation and ensure the reliability of the simulation results. The framework is implemented in ProM using the SAP ERP system and CPN Tools.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    http://ocel-standard.org/.

  2. 2.

    https://cpntools.org/.

  3. 3.

    http://www.promtools.org.

  4. 4.

    https://www.sap.com/.

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Acknowledgements

We thank the Alexander von Humboldt (AvH) Stiftung for supporting our research.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Process and Data Science Group (PADS), Department of Computer Science, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany

    Gyunam Park & Wil M. P. van der Aalst

Authors
  1. Gyunam Park
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  2. Wil M. P. van der Aalst
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Gyunam Park .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Melbourne, Parkville, VIC, Australia

    Adriano Augusto

  2. University of Technology Sydney, Ultimo, NSW, Australia

    Asif Gill

  3. University Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, Paris, France

    Selmin Nurcan

  4. University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel

    Iris Reinhartz-Berger

  5. Munich University of Applied Sciences, Munich, Germany

    Rainer Schmidt

  6. Stockholm University, Kista, Sweden

    Jelena Zdravkovic

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Park, G., van der Aalst, W.M.P. (2021). Towards Reliable Business Process Simulation: A Framework to Integrate ERP Systems. In: Augusto, A., Gill, A., Nurcan, S., Reinhartz-Berger, I., Schmidt, R., Zdravkovic, J. (eds) Enterprise, Business-Process and Information Systems Modeling. BPMDS EMMSAD 2021 2021. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, vol 421. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79186-5_8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79186-5_8

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-79185-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-79186-5

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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