Management-Oriented Models of Business Processes

Abstract

This contribution addresses the relevance of Petri nets to the management of business processes in a general way. It is organized in three steps: (a) sorting out business processes are suitable to being represented by means of Petri nets; (b) setting up a comprehensive list of the typical questions a management-oriented model should help answer; (c) suggesting ways to answer questions in (b) for business processes sorted out in (a) by means of Petri net-based methods. In particular, we discuss how to obtain such answers by grafting algorithms of applied mathematics onto Petri net models. As a demonstration, a specific business problem—decision-making over alternative plan executions characterized by fuzzy properties—is worked out.