Online Business Process Model Simulator
Name
Viljar Kärgenberg
Abstract
Business process modelling and also business process simulation are important components of Business Process Management. Business process simulation is a widely used technique for analyzing business process models in terms of performance measures such as time, cost and resource utilisation. Companies are improving their performance by a constant evaluation of the value added in all parts of their processes. Business processes are in a continuous improvement cycle in which design and redesign play an important role [3].
As a part of his master’s thesis Madis Abel developed a business process simulator named BIMP - a scalable and high-performance business process simulation engine capable of handling advanced constructions in the process models that are used to represent real-life processes. The simulation tool was only usable from command line and additional simulation specific metadata had to be added manually to the model. From a user’s perspective this solution was cumbersome and constituted a barrier to the adoption of BIMP in a wider setting.
During a team-based software project, an initial prototype of an online interface for BIMP was developed. The project was short-term – 3 months. As a result, the prototype produced from this project was insufficiently tested, had performance issues, was not integrated with other modelling tools, and was not designed for extensibility. This thesis aims at addressing these shortcomings.
The contributions of this thesis are the following:
1. A detailed documentation of the BIMP web-application architecture;
2. An automated testing infrastructure to support future development of BIMP;
3. Integration of BIMP with a commercial process modelling tool;
4. Several improvements and bug-fixes to BIMP based on feedback from automated testing and user testing;
Graduation Thesis language
English
Graduation Thesis type
Bachelor - Information Technology
Supervisor(s)
Marlon Dumas, Meelis Kull
Defence year
2012