A cloud-based service-oriented architecture for business process modeling and simulation

The adoption of Modeling & Simulation (M&S) approaches is widely recognized as a valuable solution for enacting a timely analysis of business processes (BPs). Despite their relevance, the effective introduction of such approaches in the BP lifecycle is still limited, due to the know-how and skills for building and implementing a simulation model and to the cost and effort for setting up and maintaining the execution platform. In this respect, this paper proposes a cloud-based architecture that exploits the M&S as a Service (MSaaS) paradigm and containerization technology for the flexible and dynamic composition of M&S services, so to allow business analysts to carry out an effortless and effective M&S-based BP analysis. An example case study dealing with an e-commerce scenario is also presented in order to show the actual application of the proposed approach.