In: Simulation & Gaming, Vol. 27, No. 4, pages 484-506. Sage Publications, Inc., December 1996.
Abstract: The modeling and simulation of the dynamic behaviour of organizational systems is essential for understanding their current functionality and for supporting business process analysis and reengineering. The behaviour of organizational systems is viewed here in terms of the behaviour of their business processes. Multilevel Modified Petri Nets are used as the underlying formalism for modeling and simulating organizational systems behaviour at various abstraction levels. Each level of abstraction corresponds to one or more levels of the involved part of the organizational hierarchy. The constructed models represent existing or redesing business processes. Simulation and graphical animation are used for discovering problems in existing business processes as well as in the proposed solutions. The whole approach is supported by a development environment called ERMIS.
Keywords: animation; business improvement; business process modeling; dynamic modeling; Multilevel Petri Nets; organizational modeling; reengineering; simulation.