On a somewhat more abstract level, one may regard a business process simulation as consisting of data, flowing through the process, and handlers -- datahandlers -- performing some action on the data, such as transportation or specific operations.
Accordingly, BPSIM provides two base classes underlying
the classes corresponding to LBM entities:
An
operation takes time, and is executed by an employee. Sometimes
an operation results in more than one outgoing dataflow,
for instance when it
issues a request for additional information from a different
department.
A waitqueue functions as a regular queue if
it has one incoming dataflow, i.e. transport.
When there are more incoming
flows, it functions as a synchronized queue.
Data from one flow is not passed on to the
next datahandler until the data from the other flow has arrived.
This happens for instance when work on a case cannot continue
until additional information has arrived.
An external agent can either generate data
according to some random number distribution, or take
data, process it and pass it on to the next datahandler. In the latter
case the agent functions as a black box: we only
care how long the processing takes, not how it is exactly performed.
In addition, BPSIM offers
the classes
means (which can be used to model resources
that are necessary to perform certain operations), and
employee (which models the
different people that perform the operations).
As one can see, the entities task and
organization unit
from LBM have no specific counterpart in BPSIM.
The reason for this is that having no other datahandler
between two operations already implies that those
operations belong to the same task. Consequently they are
executed with no time in between and by the same employee.
Also, the fact
that tasks are executed in
different organization units does not add any
information that changes
the behaviour of the simulation. If it takes time to transport
information between different units,
then that time can be represented by
the object of class transport between those units.
For the gathering and analyzing of results, the SIM classes
histogram and
analysis are used.
The class agent, for example,
can be given a histogram to track the lead time
of data it has generated.
As an aside, LBM contains no symbol for data as it only
depicts the objects that handle the information.
Derived from datahandler class:
The classes depicted in slide bpsim-classes are derived from
the datahandler class.
They realize the corresponding entities in LBM.
A script interface for BPSIM
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Hush Online Technology
hush@cs.vu.nl
12/30/99 |
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