3D Support for Business Process Simulation

Simulation is a key technique for the design and redesign of business processes and is used to evaluate new business process models with respect to key performance indicators. The increasing complexity of today’s business processes hampers a quick identification of weak points of a business process design that were uncovered during simulation. In this paper we add a third dimension into the description of process and data objects, which enables a compact 3D view of objects in process modeling as well as simulation. The benefits are statistical analysis of simulation results based on volume and size changes of 3D process and data objects as well as customized 3D simulation views. First evaluations indicate the effectiveness of our approach, which goes beyond conventional simulation tools for business processes.