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Advanced Simulation of Resource Constructs in Business Process Models

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Business Process Management Forum (BPM 2018)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing ((LNBIP,volume 329))

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Abstract

Simulation is often used as a tool to assess the performance of business processes. However, current business process simulation engines do not support advanced resource constructs, such as work allocation strategies and case attributes. Using only basic resource constructs leads to performance metrics that deviate significantly from the real process performance. Therefore, a clear need arises for simulation engines that incorporates advanced resource constructs. Addressing this need, we present the resource patterns that should be supported by simulation engines, a conceptual model to support them, and a prototype implementation of this conceptual model. The model and engine are evaluated in a simulation experiment that highlights utilization rates under different conditions. This experiment shows that the advanced resource constructs significantly outperform the basic resource constructs. From this we can also conclude that existing simulation engines must be extended with advanced resource constructs to properly simulate processes from practice that use these constructs.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Downloadable from: https://github.com/rmdijkman/simulator.

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Acknowledgment

The research described in this paper is supported by the Dutch Organization for Scientific Research as part of the DATAS project with grant number 438-15-507.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Eindhoven University of Technology, Eindhoven, The Netherlands

    Sander P. F. Peters, Remco M. Dijkman & Paul W. P. J. Grefen

Authors
  1. Sander P. F. Peters
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  2. Remco M. Dijkman
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  3. Paul W. P. J. Grefen
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Sander P. F. Peters .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Hasso-Plattner Institute, University of Potsdam, Potsdam, Germany

    Mathias Weske

  2. Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Bolzano, Italy

    Marco Montali

  3. Data61, CSIRO, Eveleigh, New South Wales, Australia

    Ingo Weber

  4. University of Liechtenstein, Vaduz, Liechtenstein

    Jan vom Brocke

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Peters, S.P.F., Dijkman, R.M., Grefen, P.W.P.J. (2018). Advanced Simulation of Resource Constructs in Business Process Models. In: Weske, M., Montali, M., Weber, I., vom Brocke, J. (eds) Business Process Management Forum. BPM 2018. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, vol 329. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98651-7_10

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98651-7_10

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-98650-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-98651-7

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