1. Upload your model

You can upload standard BPMN 2.0 models created using a standard-compliant BPMN 2.0 tool such as BPMN.io or Signavio.

2. Enter the simulation scenario

After uploading a BPMN model, you will be prompted to create a simulation scenario including the following information:

• Number of business process instances that will be started and what is the arrival rate (interval between two started process instances).
• Optional warm-up and cool-down period provided as a percentage of first and last process instances to exclude from statistics.
• Resources (e.g. workers) working on tasks, how many are available, their work schedules and hourly cost.
• Duration and fixed cost of each task and event. We support uniform, normal, exponential, triangular, gamma, log-normal and complex combined distributions for duration.
• Branching probabilities for each conditional branch in the model.
• Work schedule (timetables) of resources and "default" timetable used for creation of new process instances.
• Thresholds for cost and duration of each task. Additional stats will be generated for values exceeding thresholds.

You can save your simulation scenario as a BPMN file for later use so that you do not have to re-enter simulation parameters again the next time.

3. Simulate the process and analyze results

After running your simulation scenario, BIMP will provide you a dashboard with diagrams and data tables including:

• Costs of the process execution. You will see total cost of the scenario, minimum, average and maximum costs of individual process instance and diagram of the process instance cost distribution.
• Bottlenecks in the process. If there are not enough resources to handle the volume in the scenario, then tasks will be enqueued and cause high waiting and cycle times in process instances. Distribution of the process waiting times will be shown in a diagram.
• Resource utilization. You will be provided average utilization (percentage of the total cycle time) for each resource in the simulation scenario.
• Cycle times (process duration). The simulator will provide the total cycle time for given scenario. Distribution of the cycle times is visualized by bar chart diagrams. In-timetable cycle time does not include the periods when resources were not working (e.g. weekends).
• Individual task/element statistics for cost, duration, waiting time and thresholds
• Visual heat-map of the business process model based on waiting times, counts, costs and duration.
• You can also export the simulation logs in MXML format. MXML logs can be imported in the ProM toolset for in-depth analysis.

REST API and Java library can be used to integrate the simulator with any software, see Products page for more details.

Samples

Credit Card Application handling

The credit card application handling business process model is taken from the book "Fundamentals of Business Process Management" by M. Dumas, M. la Rosa, J. Mendling, H. A. Reijers.