Simulation of Procedural models Sample Clauses

Simulation of Procedural models. ‌ The goal of this feature is to simulate the execution of procedural models (e.g. Business process) in order to gather data about it without the necessity of carrying it out. Often the simulation of processes is used to estimate execution times and costs, but it can also be used to identify the paths in a process and their probabilities. Such data can then be used to look for optimisation potential in the process. Different approaches can be used to achieve the simulation and they have different assumptions and pose different restrictions on the processes (e.g. no loops, no jumps between different paths etc.). While those restrictions have to be considered when creating the models, they are based on the chosen approach and implementation, which is not covered in this section. The main application of this feature is in step 6 of the procedure (see section 2.1.1), but can also be used to generally simulate processes. This feature should be capable to:  Receive a Process, its Initiation event as a starting point and the participants and values necessary for the simulation as input (e.g. when simulating costs then the “Money” value and the influences relations towards it).  Perform the simulation, during which the desired data is gathered. o It is recommended to let the user decide what data should be gathered. Typical data that is gathered:  Costs (e.g. quantity of negative influences relations towards “Money” value)  Running times (e.g. quantity of negative influences relations towards “Time” value or positive influences relations towards “Duration” anti-value)  Resource usage (e.g. requires relations towards any or a specific type of participant)  Value creation and consumption (e.g. quantity of influences relations towards Values) o Additionally the data is usually gathered for the different paths in a process (if more than one exists) and aggregated into a minimum, maximum and average value over all paths. When probabilities for splits in a process sequence are available, then the probability of each path can also be determined. o Also different strategies for collecting the data along a path are necessary. For example when confronted with parallel running actions (or action sequences), costs can simply be summed up while for the time the largest of the parallel running sequences has to be used.  Return the simulation result.