Simulating business processes with EPML.SIM

Business Process Simulation (BPS) is widely acknowledged as an effective technique to increase the chance for success of Business Process (re-)Engineering projects and, in general, to drive strategic business decisions. Business Processes are complex entities resulting from the coordination of several users and software systems, potentially spanning across different organizations. Simulating a Business Process is then not just about modeling the structure of the process but also its logic (the decisions that have to be taken during a process), the structure of the interested organization(s) and the environment the process operates in. Most of the existing BPS tools, however, assume rather simple models which can turn out to be a limiting factor when they do not fit the real world Business Process that has to be simulated. In this paper we present a tool that can be used to simulate business processes with complex structure and logic and eases the interaction with complex organizational and environment models, addressing the limitations of the existing simulation tools.