A MSaaS Platform for Business Process Modeling & Simulation

MSaaS (Modeling & Simulation as a Service) is an emerging paradigm in which service orientation and cloud computing infrastructures are jointly exploited to carry out M&S efforts. A MSaaS platform defines an ecosystem of resources that gives users the opportunity to manage the lifecycle of M&S studies. While MSaaS approaches can be effectively applied in various application domains, this paper focuses on the use of MSaaS for enabling the simulation-based analysis of business processes. In this context, this paper introduces BPSaaS (Business Process Simulation as a Service), a MSaaS platform for managing the various steps of a M&S study applied to the analysis of BPs: process modeling, model parameterization, model implementation, model execution and output analysis. To illustrate the features offered by the proposed platform, the paper includes an example application that specifically focuses on the parameterization step and shows how a given BPMN model, edited with a BPMN-compliant tool, can be retrieved and annotated by use of the BPSim standard, and then conveniently transformed into a format ready to be executed on a business process simulation engine.