Business Process Simulation with Differentiated Resources: Does it Make a Difference?

TL;DR

This paper investigates whether modeling resources as individual entities with unique performance and availability improves the accuracy of business process simulations compared to traditional undifferentiated resource pooling.

Contribution

It introduces a novel simulation approach and a model discovery method that treat each resource as a distinct entity, addressing limitations of existing models.

Findings

Differentiated resource models better replicate cycle time distributions.

Models with individual resources capture work rhythm more accurately.

Simulation accuracy improves with resource differentiation.

Abstract

Business process simulation is a versatile technique to predict the impact of one or more changes on the performance of a process. Mainstream approaches in this space suffer from various limitations, some stemming from the fact that they treat resources as undifferentiated entities grouped into resource pools. These approaches assume that all resources in a pool have the same performance and share the same availability calendars. Previous studies have acknowledged these assumptions, without quantifying their impact on simulation model accuracy. This paper addresses this gap in the context of simulation models automatically discovered from event logs. The paper proposes a simulation approach and a method for discovering simulation models, wherein each resource is treated as an individual entity, with its own performance and availability calendar. An evaluation shows that simulation models with differentiated resources more closely replicate the distributions of cycle times and the work rhythm in a process than models with undifferentiated resources.