Modelling and evaluation of time aspects in business processes
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#2002 Operational Research Society Ltd. All rights reserved. 0160-5682/02 $15.00 www.palgrave-journals.com/jors
Modelling and evaluation of time aspects in business processes J Dehnert1*, J Freiheit2 and A Zimmermann2 1
Kommunikations- und Softwaretechnik, Technische Universita¨t Berlin, Berlin, Germany; and 2Prozeßdatenverarbeitung und Robotik, Technische Universita¨t Berlin, Berlin, Germany There is a need for modelling and performance evaluation techniques and tools for a fast and reliable design of workflow systems. This paper introduces a modelling methodology based on coloured stochastic Petri nets. It allows the integration of control flow, organizational, information related and timing aspects in one modelling framework. The processing delays include stochastic distributions in addition to deterministic times. Several workflows and the effects of constrained shared resources needed for different tasks can easily be described and analysed together. Control flow and organizational aspects are modelled separately in resource and workflow models. These models are automatically compiled into one model, which can then be used for qualitative analysis or performance evaluation. The proposed modelling and evaluation method is supported by the software tool TimeNET. An application example shows its use. Journal of the Operational Research Society (2002) 53, 1038–1047. doi:10.1057/palgrave.jors.2601416 Keywords: performance evaluation; stochastic Petri nets; simulation; insurance case study
Introduction Because of the increasing demand for business process (re-)engineering, business processes and their design have gained much interest recently. Many companies around the world try to reorganize their business processes in order to gain competition advantages. This development increases the demand for tools and techniques to support the identification, planning, and evaluation of business processes. It is clear that this can only be done using a more or less formal and abstract description of the process, namely a business process model, that serves as a basis for further analysis. Such a model of a business process reflects the control flow between tasks carried out by the organization as well as the correct document processing therein. The methodology presented in this paper is based on Petri nets, a graphical representation of systems including synchronizations and concurrency. Petri nets have been applied to numerous areas successfully, among them business processes. The suitability of Petri nets for this field of application has been examined and discussed extensively in the literature.1,2 Some important requirements for this application domain are discussed in the following. During the identification of business process steps as well as during later reorganizations the business process model is the common basis of communication. Thus, it has to be easy to understand for non*Correspondence: J Dehnert, Kommunikations- und Softwaretechnik, Technische Universita¨t Berlin, Sekr. E-N 7, Einsteinufer 17, 10587 Berlin,
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