A Petri Net Approach for the Performance Analysis of Business Processes

Recently, many companies have realized that their organization needs to be improved in order to enhance flexibility, efficiency, and effectiveness. Business Process Re-engineering has become the new organization paradigm to reconstitute profitability and competitiveness. Additionally, workflow management systems promise to provide a conceptual framework to describe and automate workflow. Analysts are asking for methods to evaluate alternative process designs for performance objectives, such as cycle time and throughput. These measures are dependent on the dynamic behavior of a process and can hardly be derived by traditional methods. In this paper we will outline an approach to model the dynamic behavior of business processes by Stochastic Petri nets. Our aim is to provide workflow management systems with an analytical evaluation component. We will summarize the problems we encountered following our approach to give directions for further research