Modeling Resources to Simulate Business Process Reliability

The combination of process modeling and simulation-based analysis provides a quantitative approach to analyze business processes, and to evaluate design alternatives before committing the required resources, to properly align operations with business strategies, improve operational efficiency, and gain competitive advantage. However, the use of simulation-based analysis is still limited in practice, mainly because it does not exploit process modeling standards and typically addresses performance-related properties only, such as time and cost. This article proposes a methodology that first extends the standard language for process modeling (i.e., BPMN) to introduce a flexible and accurate specification of business process resources, and then exploits the extended process specification to analyze and predict the process behavior by use of a simulation approach that takes into account reliability-related properties, to consider unexpected failures of process resources. The simulation-based analysis is implemented by use of a domain-specific process simulation language that preserves the BPMN execution semantics. An example application is introduced to show the importance of addressing both performance and reliability properties for the simulation-based analysis of business processes.