Modelling and evaluation of time aspects in business processes

There is a need for modelling and performance evaluation techniques and tools for a fast and reliable design of workflow systems. This paper introduces a modelling methodology based on coloured stochastic Petri nets. It allows the integration of control flow, organizational, information related and timing aspects in one modelling framework. The processing delays include stochastic distributions in addition to deterministic times. Several workflows and the effects of constrained shared resources needed for different tasks can easily be described and analysed together. Control flow and organizational aspects are modelled separately in resource and workflow models. These models are automatically compiled into one model, which can then be used for qualitative analysis or performance evaluation. The proposed modelling and evaluation method is supported by the software tool TimeNET. An application example shows its use.