A BPMN extension to support discrete-event simulation for healthcare applications:an explicit representation of queues, attributes and data-driven decision points

Stakeholder engagement in simulation projects is important, especially in healthcare where there is a plurality of stakeholder opinions, objectives and power. One promising approach for increasing engagement is facilitated modelling. Currently, the complexity of producing a simulation model means that the ‘model coding’ stage is performed without the involvement of stakeholders, interrupting the possibility of a fully-facilitated project. Early work demonstrated that with currently-available software tools we can represent a simple healthcare process using Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) and generate a simulation model automatically. However, for more complex processes, BPMN currently has a number of limitations, namely the ability to represent queues and data-driven decision points. To address these limitations, we propose a conceptual design for an extension to BPMN (BPMN4SIM) using Model Driven Architecture. Application to an elderly emergency care pathway in a UK hospital shows that BPMN4SIM is able to represent a more-complex business process

Woflan 2.0 - A Petri-net-based Workflow Diagnosis Tool

. Workflow management technology promises a flexible solution facilitating the easy creation of new business processes and modification of existing ones. Unfortunately, most of today's workflow products allow for erroneous processes to be put in production: these products lack proper verification mechanisms in their process-definition tools for the created or modified processes. This paper presents the workflow diagnosis tool Woflan, which fills this gap. Using Petri-net based techniques, Woflan diagnoses process definitions before they are put into production. These process definitions can be imported from commercial workflow products. Furthermore, Woflan guides the modeler of a workflow process definition towards finding and correcting possible errors. 1 Introduction Today's workflow management systems are ill suited to dealing with frequent changes: there are hardly any checks to assure some minimal level of correctness on the process [Aal98,AH00]. Even a simple change li..