Chapter 10 Simulating a Business Process Model


Defining Simulation Properties

Before simulating a BPM in SIMUL8, you have to prepare the BPM objects for a SIMUL8 model export.

When the SIMUL8 XEM is attached to your BPM, you can define extended attributes, which are specific to SIMUL8 from the Simulation tab of the following PowerDesigner objects property sheet:

Simulation properties described in each of the following sections are the only ones supported in PowerDesigner. All other non-described simulation properties such as "High Volume" (for work centers) or "Unlimited Arrivals" (for work entry points) for example are not supported.

PowerDesigner provides default values for simulation properties that allow you to rapidly simulate your BPM. However, you may want to customize some properties to suit your personal needs. In that case and for valuable simulation results, you should begin to redefine first properties relative to:

Domain Property to use...
Time unit and processing time TimeUnit, SimulationRunningTime (diagram property sheet) and Duration (process property sheet)
Declaration and assignment of resources on processes NumberAvailable (resource property sheet) and ResourcePriority (process property sheet
Probability estimation on conditional flows RoutingOutPercent (flow property sheet)
Cost estimation on processes, resources etc. Profit plug-in that allows you to add financial information to your simulation so that results can be seen directly in terms of costs improvement

For more information on the Profit plug-in, see section Launching a Simulation and Analyzing the Results.

 


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