Extending the BPMN Specification to Support Cost-Centric Simulations of Business Processes

Business Process Simulation is considered by many a very useful technique to analyze the impact of some important choices designers take at process design or optimization time, right before processes are actually implemented and deployed. In order for the simulation to provide accurate and reliable results, process models need to take into account not just the workflow dynamics, but also many other important factors that may impact on the overall performance of process execution, and that form what we refer to as the Context of a process. In this paper we formalize a new Business Process Model that encompasses all the features of a business process in terms of workflow and execution Context respectively. The model allows designers to build a cost-centric perspective of a business process. Also, we propose an extension to the Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) specification with the aim of enhancing the power of the BPMN to also model resources and the process execution environment. In the paper we provide some details of the implementation of a novel Business Process Simulator capable of simulating the newly introduced process model. To prove the overall approach’s viability, a case study is finally discussed.