Mining Resource Availability for Data-driven Business Process Simulation
Date
2021
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Tartu Ülikool
Abstract
Business process simulation (BPS) is a set of techniques to analyze a process model
regarding identified performance metrics. BPS helps analysts decide whether to
apply the process model to real-life production based on a set of statistics produced
by a simulator. The accuracy of the output, accordingly, the simulation process’s
value withdrawn, is affected by the correctness of the business process model and the
simulation parameters used as input. Therefore, data-driven simulation techniques
are introduced to generate a process model from the process execution data recorded
by the organization’s information system to resemble reality. However, simulation
models tend to be oversimplified due to some limitations of the existing simulation
tools. One of the common limitations that need to be tackled is addressed towards
resource availability and behavior. For example, it is assumed that resources are
always available while, in reality, they have a work schedule, could have a part-time
contract or are out of reach under certain conditions. In this respect, the existing
business process simulators accept timetables to specify resource availability. On
the one hand, providing a resource timetable to the simulator will increase the
results’ accuracy. On the other hand, a formal employee timetable most likely
does not reflect the actual resource schedules. To this end, this research study
presents a data-driven methodology that uses the execution log of the process under
consideration to capture the reality of resource availability. The calendar discovery
algorithm presented is integrated with the data-driven business process simulation
tool, Simod [4]. As expected, the results show an increase in the precision of the
discovered business process simulation model. The evaluation was carried out on
four real-life logs as well as a synthetic data set.
Description
Keywords
Business Process Management, Business Process Simulation, Process Mining, Event logs, Resource Availability, Timetables