Tools for modeling and simulating business processes - a comparative analysis

The purpose of this article is to compare selected tools for modeling and simulating business processes. The comparative study concerned Bizagi, Adonis, Bonita Studio and Visual Paradigm tools. The analysis has the aim to identify the best tool according to the criteria. The article explains the concepts related to business processes and analyzes the existing literature. Research scenarios containing evaluation criteria will be created for the analysis. The conducted research indicated that the best tool among the considered: Bizagi, Adonis, Bonita Studio, Visual Paradigm is Bizagi

Análisis comparativo de los lenguajes de simulación discreta BPSim y SIMAN en el proceso de atención por teleconsulta de un hospital

La finalidad del presente proyecto de investigación es abordar un estudio comparativo entre los lenguajes de simulación discreta BPSim y SIMAN mediante la utilización de las herramientas Bizagi Modeler y Arena Simulation en un caso de estudio. Lo anterior, con la finalidad de determinar qué lenguaje presenta mejores capacidades para simular el proceso de negocio elegido (proceso de servicio) y optimizar la simulación en términos de tiempo de procesamiento. Los datos proporcionados contarán con el aval del Hospital Emergencias Grau Essalud. Asimismo, la metodología empleada en la presente investigación se ajusta al desarrollo de un modelo de simulación inicial en la primera etapa (AS-IS) y a dos modelos rediseñados bajo la teoría del autor Marlon Dumas (TO-BE) en la segunda y tercera etapa respectivamente. Es importante precisar que el desarrollo de los modelos en cada una de las etapas se ajusta a los cuatro niveles de simulación que propone el lenguaje BPSim y al enfoque basado en procesos relativo a SIMAN. Finalmente, si bien esta instancia del presente estudio nos mostró que las principales distinciones cualitativas se evidencian en la facilidad con la que se puede simular un proceso de negocio bajo la metodología de BPSim en relación con SIMAN, los resultados cuantitativos arrojan una diferencia significativa en la reducción de los tiempos de simulación al utilizar el lenguaje SIMAN respecto a BPSim para simular los escenarios rediseñados.The purpose of this research project is to conduct a comparative study between the discrete simulation languages BPSim and SIMAN using the Bizagi Modeler and Arena Simulation tools in a case study. This is done to determine which language presents better capabilities for simulating the chosen business process (service process) and optimizing the simulation in terms of processing time. The data provided will be backed by the Grau Essalud Emergency Hospital. Furthermore, the methodology used in this research is in line with the development of an initial simulation model in the first stage (AS-IS) and two redesigned models under the author Marlon Dumas' theory (TO-BE) in the second and third stage, respectively. It is important to note that the development of the models in each of the stages is in line with the four levels of simulation proposed by the BPSim language and the process-based approach for SIMAN. Finally, although this instance of the present study showed us that the main qualitative differences are evidenced in the ease with which a business process can be simulated using the BPSim methodology in relation to SIMAN, the quantitative results show a significant difference in the reduction of simulation times when using the SIMAN language over BPSim when simulating the redesigned scenarios

Business models for distributed-simulation orchestration and risk management

Nowadays, industries are implementing heterogeneous systems from different domains, backgrounds, and operating systems. Manufacturing systems are becoming more and more complex, which forces engineers to manage the complexity in several aspects. Technical complexities bring interoperability, risk management, and hazards issues that must be taken into consideration, from the business model design to the technical implementation. To solve the complexities and the incompatibilities between heterogeneous components, several distributed and cosimulation standards and tools can be used for data exchange and interconnection. High-level architecture (HLA) and functional mockup interface (FMI) are the main international standards used for distributed and cosimulation. HLA is mainly used in academic and defense domains while FMI is mostly used in industry. In this article, we propose an HLA/FMI implementation with a connection to an external business process-modeling tool called Papyrus. Papyrus is configured as a master federate that orchestrates the subsimulations based on the above standards. The developed framework is integrated with external heterogeneous components through an FMI interface. This framework is developed with the aim of bringing interoperability to a system used in a power generation compan

Capturing and modeling complex manufacturing systems: extending and embedding BPMN in DES

Business process models are developed for the purpose of understanding the system behaviour and identifying the possible areas for performance improvement. Among existing process modelling languages, Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) was selected to be assessed and extended, as it is the leading standard for business process modelling. The BPMN is currently gaining great attention in various business practices; it is an easy and flexible way to construct business process models, and thus it was hard to be overlooked by authors who are concerned with improving manufacturing processes. The introduction of BPMN to the manufacturing domain potentially allows all stakeholders to take advantage of the simplicity of this language in gaining full understandings for manufacturing processes through simple representations of the process models. Only limited work can be found addressing the use of BMPN in the modelling of manufacturing systems, and it is still not clear how powerful BPMN is in realizing performance improvements. This work proposes Manufacturing Process Model and Notation (MPMN) as an extension to BPMN; it offers a set of new and adapted notations that represent manufacturing processes. In order to add the ability to optimise or improve the system under study, MPMN is further extended and integrated with a full discrete-event simulation package to be able to easily build and simulate models of manufacturing systems. MPMN simulator is created to be a generic and reusable tool. It has a drag and drop library for non- simulation experts, to model and simulate MPMN models in the ExtendSim environment. This integration is considered a substitution to BPSim, the Business Process Simulation Standard that integrates BPMN and Simulation to model and execute business processes. The MPMN simulator combines both, models that are understood by all stakeholders and a simulation tool that is expressive enough to handle the varying levels of complexity in the manufacturing domain. This will strengthen the analysis and the evaluation of the current and future status of a system under study. The effectiveness of the developed system is demonstrated by application to two case studies covering different industry sectors

Verslo procesų prognozavimo ir imitavimo taikant sisteminių įvykių žurnalų analizės metodus tyrimas

Business process (BP) analysis is one of the core activities in organisations that lead to improvements and achievement of a competitive edge. BP modelling and simulation are one of the most widely applied methods for analysing and improving BPs. The analysis requires to model BP and to apply analysis techniques to the models to answer queries leading to improvements. The input of the analysis process is BP models. The models can be in the form of BP models using industry-accepted BP modelling languages, mathematical models, simulation models and others. The model creation is the most important part of the BP analysis, and it is both time-consuming and costly activity. Nowadays most of the data generated in the organisations are electronic. Therefore, the re-use of such data can improve the results of the analysis. Thus, the main goal of the thesis is to improve BP analysis and simulation by proposing a method to discover a BP model from an event log and automate simulation model generation. The dissertation consists of an introduction, three main chapters and general conclusions. The first chapter discusses BP analysis methods. In addition, the process mining research area is presented, the techniques for automated model discovery, model validation and execution prediction are analysed. The second part of the chapter investigates the area of BP simula-tion. The second chapter of the dissertation presents a novel method which automatically discovers Bayesian Belief Network from an event log and, furthermore, automatically generates BP simulation model. The discovery of the Bayesian Belief Network consists of three steps: the discovery of a directed acyclic graph, generation of conditional probability tables and their combination. The BP simulation model is generated from the discovered directed acyclic graph and uses the belief network inferences during the simulation to infer the execution of the BP and to generate activity data dur-ing the simulation. The third chapter presents the experimental research of the proposed network and discusses the validity of the research and experiments. The experiments use selected logs that exhibit a wide array of behaviour. The experiments are performed in order to test the discovery of the graphs, the inference of the current process instance execution probability, the predic-tion of the future execution of the process instances and the correctness of the simulation. The results of the dissertation were published in 9 scientific publica-tions, 2 of which were in reviewed scientific journals indexed in Clarivate Analytics Science Citation Index