Workflow simulation for operational decision support using YAWL and ProM

Simulation is widely used as a tool for analyzing business processes but is mostly focused on examining rather abstract steady-state situations. Such analyses are helpful for the initial design of a business process but are less suitable for operational decision making and continuous improvement. Here we describe a simulation system for operational decision support in the context of work ow management. To do this we exploit not only the work ow's design, but also logged data describing the system's observed historic behavior, and information extracted about the current state of the work ow. Making use of actual data capturing the current state and historic information allows our simulations to accurately predict potential near-future behaviors for dierent scenarios. The approach is supported by a practical toolset which combines and extends the work ow management system YAWL and the process mining framework ProM. This technical report contains a detailed description of how a simulation model including operational decision support can be generated by our software based on the running example

Planning and managing the cost of compromise for AV retention and access

Long-term retention and access to audiovisual (AV) assets as part of a preservation strategy inevitably involve some form of compromise in order to achieve acceptable levels of cost, throughput, quality, and many other parameters. Examples include quality control and throughput in media transfer chains; data safety and accessibility in digital storage systems; and service levels for ingest and access for archive functions delivered as services. We present new software tools and frameworks developed in the PrestoPRIME project that allow these compromises to be quantitatively assessed, planned, and managed for file-based AV assets. Our focus is how to give an archive an assurance that when they design and operate a preservation strategy as a set of services, it will function as expected and will cope with the inevitable and often unpredictable variations that happen in operation. This includes being able to do cost projections, sensitivity analysis, simulation of “disaster scenarios,” and to govern preservation services using service-level agreements and policies

A survey of simulation techniques in commerce and defence

Despite the developments in Modelling and Simulation (M&S) tools and techniques over the past years, there has been a gap in the M&S research and practice in healthcare on developing a toolkit to assist the modellers and simulation practitioners with selecting an appropriate set of techniques. This study is a preliminary step towards this goal. This paper presents some results from a systematic literature survey on applications of M&S in the commerce and defence domains that could inspire some improvements in the healthcare. Interim results show that in the commercial sector Discrete-Event Simulation (DES) has been the most widely used technique with System Dynamics (SD) in second place. However in the defence sector, SD has gained relatively more attention. SD has been found quite useful for qualitative and soft factors analysis. From both the surveys it becomes clear that there is a growing trend towards using hybrid M&S approaches

Risk mitigation decisions for it security

Enterprises must manage their information risk as part of their larger operational risk management program. Managers must choose how to control for such information risk. This article defines the flow risk reduction problem and presents a formal model using a workflow framework. Three different control placement methods are introduced to solve the problem, and a comparative analysis is presented using a robust test set of 162 simulations. One year of simulated attacks is used to validate the quality of the solutions. We find that the math programming control placement method yields substantial improvements in terms of risk reduction and risk reduction on investment when compared to heuristics that would typically be used by managers to solve the problem. The contribution of this research is to provide managers with methods to substantially reduce information and security risks, while obtaining significantly better returns on their security investments. By using a workflow approach to control placement, which guides the manager to examine the entire infrastructure in a holistic manner, this research is unique in that it enables information risk to be examined strategically. © 2014 ACM

Distributed simulation of city inundation by coupled surface and subsurface porous flow for urban flood decision support system

We present a decision support system for flood early warning and disaster management. It includes the models for data-driven meteorological predictions, for simulation of atmospheric pressure, wind, long sea waves and seiches; a module for optimization of flood barrier gates operation; models for stability assessment of levees and embankments, for simulation of city inundation dynamics and citizens evacuation scenarios. The novelty of this paper is a coupled distributed simulation of surface and subsurface flows that can predict inundation of low-lying inland zones far from the submerged waterfront areas, as observed in St. Petersburg city during the floods. All the models are wrapped as software services in the CLAVIRE platform for urgent computing, which provides workflow management and resource orchestration.Comment: Pre-print submitted to the 2013 International Conference on Computational Scienc

Performance modeling of e-procurement workflow using Generalised Stochastic Petri net (GSPN)

This paper proposes a Generalised Stochastic Petri net (GSPN) model representing a generic e-procurement workflow process. The model displays the dynamic behaviour of the system and shows the inter relationship of process activities. An analysis based on matrix equation approach enabled users to analyse the critical system's states, and thus justify the process performance. The results obtained allow users for better decision making in improving e-procurement workflow performance