A Transformation Approach to Enact the Design-Time Simulation of BPMN Models

Abstract

Simulation is a key technique for enabling business process analysts to predict the process behavior at design time. However, some issues limit the effectiveness of business process simulation (e.g., lack of simulation know how, costs and difficulties for gathering process data, semantic gap between the business process model and the simulation model). This paper proposes a model-driven method that automates the generation of executable business process simulation code. In order to address the increasing complexity and to take into account the inherent collaborative aspects of modern business processes, the simulation code produced by the proposed method replicates the business process distributed structure (in terms, e.g., of a service-oriented architecture) by including a set of simulation services that are orchestrated into a distributed simulation execution. The characterization of business processes in terms of the required performance properties is introduced through standard BPMN annotations according to a well-defined syntax, thus avoiding the need of additional languages. The implementation of the executable simulation code is based on the eBPMN language, a domain-specific language that preserves the semantic behavior of the original BPMN standard.