Integrating the Conceptualization and Simulation of Business Processes: A Modeling Method and Arena Template

Abstract

Redesigning organizational processes and their coordination often involves the construction of conceptual models, empirical models, and change alternatives. Modeling of organizational processes can be a very time-consuming activity, and during the redesign phase of an organization, time is a scarce resource. During the phase of translating process models of an organization into simulation models for analysis, diagnosis, and design, a lot of time is spent on translating conceptual models into simulation models. Furthermore, the resulting simulation models often lack any resemblance to the original conceptual models. This makes the communication, verification, and change activities within the simulation study quite difficult. This paper describes a template that was built in the simulation language Arena, which decreases the gap between the conceptualization activities and the translation into a simulation model. This paper describes the requirements for the template, a prototype implementation, and a case example to test the applicability of the template.