Agent-Based Business Process Simulation: A Primer with Applications and Examples

This book provides a conceptual clarification of the interconnections between agent-based modeling and business process management (BPM) and presents practical examples of agent-based models dealing with BPM and simulation in NetLogo.

The book is structured in three parts. Part I starts with the motivation for the work and introduces the general structure of the book. Next, chapter 2 provides a brief introduction to main BPM concepts including the business process lifecycle, which describes the analysis of an organization by means of modeling and simulation, business process performance indicators, and the automatic extraction of information from event data. Chapter 3 then offers a summary of the concept of agent and the studies concerning agent-based approaches that involve business process analysis and management studies. Part II of the book introduces in chapter 4 the NetLogo tool adopted throughout the remaining book. After that, chapter 5 focuses on agent-oriented modeling as a problem domain analysis and design approach for creating decision-support systems based on agent-based simulations. Chapter 6 further describes the topic of agent-based modeling and simulation for business process analysis. The final part III starts with chapter 7 that reviews some BPM applications by introducing programs enabling to manage models represented in standard formats, such as BPMN, Petri nets, and the eXtensible Event Stream standard language. Subsequently, chapter 8 describes a number of case studies from different areas, and eventually, chapter 9 introduces some examples of advanced topics of process mining and agent-based simulation with process discovery, conformance checking, and agent-based applications utilizing Petri nets.

The book is primarily written for researchers and advanced graduate and PhD students who look for an introduction to the fruitful exploitation of agent-based modeling to business process management. The book is also useful for industry practitioners who are interested in supporting their business decisions with computational simulations. The book is complemented by a dedicated web site with lots of additional details and models in NetLogo for further evaluation by the reader.

Emilio Sulis is a researcher and adjunct professor at the Department of Computer Science, University of Turin, Italy. He works on data analysis for business process management, applying computational methods to study and simulate organizational processes. He has worked on machine learning experiments combined with natural language processing techniques and social network analysis, in social simulation and social research projects.

Kuldar Taveter is a researcher and educator at the Institute of Computer Science of the University of Tartu, Estonia. He has spent 15 years conducting research, consulting and teaching on domain analysis, conceptual modelling and requirements engineering for complex sociotechnical systems, such as decision-support systems based on computational simulations and business process management systems. He has also worked in Australia and Finland and has been a visiting professor and consultant in China, Malaysia and USA.