A resource-aware simulation tool for business processes

Abstract

The deep knowledge of internal and external business processes, along with the capability of governing them, are a key requirement for enterprises to survive. In the dynamic and unpredictable worldwide market, the achievement of business goals depends on the ability of enterprises to adapt to new market conditions by promptly re-engineering their processes. The cost for process re-engineering may be not negligible, if we consider that it may require several refinement steps and that tuning processes on-the-job may impair regular business activities. To this end, there is a growing interest towards tools that allow to simulate process modifications before actually enforcing such changes. In this paper we propose a tool for business process simulation which makes use of modeling specifications such as the Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) and exploits the rigor of the Colored Petri Nets (CPNets) formalism. With respect to other approaches proposed in the literature, the one presented here defines a detailed model of enterprise's resources (both human and non-human) and cost allocation inspired to the Activity Based Costing (ABC) accounting principles. A case study test was conducted on a prototype implementation and related results are presented.