Service enterprise workflow simulation is an important approach to analyze service enterprise business processes dynamically. Traditionally, service workflow simulation is based on the discrete event queuing theory, which lacks flexibility and scalability. To address this problem, this paper proposes a service workflow simulation framework based on multi-agent cooperation. Social rationality of software agents is introduced into the proposed framework. Adopting rationality as a decision making strategy facilitates the implementation of flexible scheduling for activity instances. A simulation system prototype is developed and a business case study is conducted to validate the proposed framework.
The analysis of modern business processes implemented as orchestration of software services demands for new approaches that explicitly take into account the inherent complexity and distribution characteristics of such processes. In this respect, Distributed Simulation (DS) offers a viable tool to cope with such a demand, due to the aggregation, scalability, representativeness and load balancing properties that it allows to achieve. However, the use of DS is mostly limited by the specialized technical know-how and the extra-development that DS requires with respect to approaches based on conventional local simulation. This paper proposes a model-driven method that enables the DS-based analysis of business processes by introducing the automated transformation of business process models into analysis models that are specified as Extended Queueing Network (EQN) models and executed as distributed simulations. The paper also presents an example application to a business process for an e-commerce scenario.
Berzelius failed to make use of Faraday's electrochemical laws in his laborious determination of equivalent weights.