Business Process Simulation with Differentiated Resources: Does it Make a Difference?

Abstract

Business process simulation is a versatile technique to predict the impact of one or more changes on the performance of a process. Mainstream approaches in this space suffer from various limitations, some stemming from the fact that they treat resources as undifferentiated entities grouped into resource pools. These approaches assume that all resources in a pool have the same performance and share the same availability calendars. Previous studies have acknowledged these assumptions, without quantifying their impact on simulation model accuracy. This paper addresses this gap in the context of simulation models automatically discovered from event logs. The paper proposes a simulation approach and a method for discovering simulation models, wherein each resource is treated as an individual entity, with its own performance and availability calendar. An evaluation shows that simulation models with differentiated resources more closely replicate the distributions of cycle times and the work rhythm in a process than models with undifferentiated resources.