A Cost-centric Model for Context-aware Simulations of Business Processes

Vincenzo Cartelli, Giuseppe Di Modica, Orazio Tomarchio

2015

Abstract

Business process modeling is recognized as being one of the most crucial step in the management of the Business Process life cycle. Models which either are incorrect or do not accurately represent the desired process dynamics may seriously impair the achievement of an enterprise’s business goals. There is a growing interest towards simulative tools that take in input a process model and provide an estimate of the costs incurred by an hypothetical process execution. It is then of paramount importance that the input model be as accurate as possible, otherwise actual process execution costs may dramatically diverge from the estimates. In this paper we propose the definition of a comprehensive Business Process Model which inspires to the basic principles of the Activity Based Costing (ABC) analysis to provide a cost-centric perspective of the Business Processes to be executed. Emphasis is put on the need to represent the process Context, i.e., the resources processes need to consume and the environment where processes will execute. The introduced process context model is proposed as an extension to the BPMN standard. Further, we implemented a Business Process Simulator capable of simulating business processes defined according to the newly proposed model. A case study example was simulated and results are presented in the paper.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Cartelli V., Di Modica G. and Tomarchio O. (2015). A Cost-centric Model for Context-aware Simulations of Business Processes . In Proceedings of the 7th International Joint Conference on Knowledge Discovery, Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management - Volume 3: RDBPM, (IC3K 2015) ISBN 978-989-758-158-8, pages 303-314. DOI: 10.5220/0005637803030314

in Bibtex Style

@conference{rdbpm15,
author={Vincenzo Cartelli and Giuseppe Di Modica and Orazio Tomarchio},
title={A Cost-centric Model for Context-aware Simulations of Business Processes},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 7th International Joint Conference on Knowledge Discovery, Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management - Volume 3: RDBPM, (IC3K 2015)},
year={2015},
pages={303-314},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0005637803030314},
isbn={978-989-758-158-8},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF
JO - Proceedings of the 7th International Joint Conference on Knowledge Discovery, Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management - Volume 3: RDBPM, (IC3K 2015)
TI - A Cost-centric Model for Context-aware Simulations of Business Processes
SN - 978-989-758-158-8
AU - Cartelli V.
AU - Di Modica G.
AU - Tomarchio O.
PY - 2015
SP - 303
EP - 314
DO - 10.5220/0005637803030314