Quantitative Effects of Advanced Resource Constructs in Business Process Simulation

Simulation is often used to provide quantitative predictions on the performance of business processes. However, the current available business process simulation engines only support basic resource constructs and even these are sometimes lacking. This leads to simulated performance metrics that can deviate significantly from the real process performance. This paper provides an overview of the quantitative effects of incorporating these advanced resource constructs in business process simulation. Experiments are conducted to assess whether there are significant differences between the effects of using basic resource constructs and using their advanced counterparts. The main conclusions are: that the allocation strategy deployed by the resources is of significant influence on the performance of the process; that the ability to assign resources to multiple roles has a significant influence; and that simulation replications are absolutely necessary to produce reliable simulation results. These insights can be used by researchers and practitioners to understand the validity of the results of their simulation studies and as a direction for future research.