Advanced Queueing Models for Quantitative Business Process Analysis

Quantitative analysis of business processes facilitates the computation of quantitative properties of a business process, such as the average sojourn time and cost of cases of the process. Moreover, it allows for what-if analysis, by enabling the computation of such properties for alternative business process designs, without requiring those designs to be implemented in practice. This paper presents a novel technique for quantitative analysis that is both fast and generally applicable. The technique is developed as an extension of the state-of-the-art in queueing network analysis, by lifting some of the restrictions that are imposed by existing techniques. In particular, it enables precise quantitative analysis of business process models that contain many-to-many relations between tasks and resources (via roles). As a consequence, the technique presented in this paper allows for quantitative analysis that is more generally applicable than existing queueing network analysis techniques and only takes a fraction of the execution time required by existing simulation techniques. In doing so, it paves the way to advanced analysis techniques, such as prescriptive analytics.