Simulating Business Process Scenarios for Event-Based Systems

Today’s networked business environment requires systems which are adaptive and easy to integrate. Event-based systems have been developed and used to control business processes with loosely coupled systems. Research and product development focused so far on efficiency issues, but neglected simulation support to build robust and efficient event-driven applications. In this paper, we propose a simulation model that allows imitating real-world operations of business processes in order to improve efficiency and effectiveness of event-based systems. Our approach uses discrete eventsimulation and a graphical model for defining event sequences for business process scenarios. For better handling the complexity and variability of business processes, we use a hybrid simulation approach, which is able to combine various ways to compose event sequences and generate representative event data. As an example, we show how annotated WS-BPEL process descriptions can be used to automatically generate event sequences representing typical process execution paths for simulation purposes.