Thesis (Ph.D.) - Cairo University - Faculty of Computers and Artificial Intelligence - Department of Information Systems

The economic downturn and enormous advances in digital technology are forcing organizations to find a way to sustainable and efficient usage of their resources to deliver competitive products and services built upon a set of related activities called business processes (BPs). For managing processes, simulation provides a key role in continuously improving business processes by detecting deficiencies (e.g., inefficient processes and bottlenecks) using various "What-if" questions, that reflect several performance metrics, such as cycle time, cost and resource utilization. However, many organizations are not using business process simulation (BPS) for several drawbacks appeared in existing approaches, such as the vague problem definition, insufficient integration with other software, and inappropriate representation of the resource perspective, which is considered the most significant problem that leads to incorrect and misleading simulation results. Typically, the restructuring of BPs applied to magnify efficiency depends on how we adequately provisioning resources. However, resources are only identified as individuals or roles, while further requirements should be established in the simulation experiment, such as availability, execution duration, share-ability, context switching overhead, and execution preferences

Issued also as CD