Generation of Business Process Simulation

This paper describes ongoing work to develop a generic simulation capability for business processes. The goal of the simulation process is to support the process planning function, by allowing alternative process plans and schedules to be evaluated. The system is built as a specialisation of a more generic simulation kernel which can be customised to suit different domains; business process simulation has been selected as the target domain because of the range of challenges it poses. The design of the system is differentiated from more conventional approaches in a number of ways. One key difference is that both the generic simulation kernel and the customisation of it to form a business process simulation system are generated automatically from formalised specifications. These specifications are developed in EXPRESS (ISO 10303-11)[EXPRESS] as a set of information models and then processed by various tools to create complete implementations in Java. The research is still at a relatively early stage of development.