Business process modeling and simulation with DPMN: processing activities

ABSTRACTThe Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) has been established as a modeling standard in Business Process (BP) Management. However, BPMN lacks several important elements needed for BP simulation and is not well-aligned with the Queueing Network paradigm of Operations Research and the related BP simulation paradigm pioneered by the Discrete Event Simulation (DES) languages/tools GPSS and SIMAN/Arena. The Discrete Event Process Modeling Notation (DPMN) proposed by Wagner (2018) is based on Event Graphs (Schruben 1983), which capture the DES paradigm of Event-Based Simulation. By allowing to make flowchart models of queueing/processing networks with a precise semantics, DPMN reconciles (the flowchart approach of) BPMN with DES. DPMN is the first visual modeling language that supports all important DES approaches: event-based simulation, activity-based DES and Processing Network models, providing a foundation for harmonizing and unifying the many different terminologies/concepts and diagram languages of established DES tools.