Resource modelling for the rule- and context-based dynamic business process simulation

Abstract

Resource definition and allocation is a crucial task for improvement of a business process (BP) performance. Although some methods and recommendations have been proposed to resource models and resource allocation, there is little effort to extended resource model and dynamic resource allocation. This paper proposes a novel approach, in which an extended resource model is defined and resource allocation is performed dynamically before execution of an activity, but not before execution of all BP. To support dynamic resource allocation in the context of rule- and context-based dynamic BP instances running concurrently, a priority and rules are used to deal with resource conflicts. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is evaluated with a simulation scenario, and the simulation results indicate that the proposed resource model is suitable for simulating of rule- and context-based dynamic BP.