Business Process Simulation by Management Consultants? Introduction of a new approach for business process modeling and simulation by management consultants

Abstract

Business process simulation (BPS) provides the possibility to simulate and evaluate the dynamic behavior of business processes, without directly influencing or changing the processes. The main problem is that developing a simulation model is considered to be difficult, time-consuming and expensive. For management consulting companies, BPS could be a useful addition to their current practices. As BPS requires advanced skills to develop a simulation model, a new approach is however required to enable business process simulation by management consultants. A user-centered design approach is applied to increase the likelihood that a designed solution is finally found useful and usable by the management consultants. The new designed approach for modeling and simulation of business processes, is based on Model-Driven Development (MDD) principles. Furthermore, we defined a conceptual modeling language based on the Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) and we adapted it to connect with the consultant's mental model. For each modeling element, a corresponding DEVS-simulation component is defined. To support the transformation from conceptual model to simulation model, a set of model-transformation rules is defined. And finally, several output statistics are specified, related to for instance resource utilization and processing times of entities in a business process. As a proof of concept, a prototype is developed based on the MDD4MS framework. It includes a visual model builder, a set of formally defined model-transformation rules, and the simulation components implemented in Java programming language. The Distributed Simulation Object Library (DSOL) was selected to provide the simulation and execution functionalities of the prototype. The prototype is finally used to model and simulate a sample-case, as well as a usability evaluation with management consultants. We conclude that the proposed design is a fruitful possibility to enable business process simulation by management consultants.