Public administration workflows re-engineering: an agent-based M&S approach

Workflows in Public Administration (PA) can be mainly classified as inter-organization processes and cannot be modeled using standard methods such as Petri-nets or WF-Nets, but need new modeling paradigms to describe: i) the structure of the organization; ii) the factors that influence the execution of the workflow and iii) the actors (humans and IT systems) that interact with the workflow, generating the workload. This chapter describes the experience matured by the authors in the design and implementation of an agent-based modeling and simulation framework to support the re-engineering of Public Administration workflows. The project, started in late 2003, faced the challenge of analyze, evaluate the performance and finally re-engineer a Public Administration process of the Presidency of Counseil of Ministers: the IT infrastructure management and the service provisioning process. The project was developed at the Italian Prime Minister Office for Informatics and Telematics headed by the second Author. From the solution initially developed to solve this specific problem we built a general framework to support Public Administration processes re-engineering. This framework, named Wf-Simulator, has been successfully used in real workflow modeling and simulation. The chapter describes the initial project, the Wf-Simulator framework and three real case studies: service provisioning in PA, day hospital surgery admission and blood examination management.