Title: Modelling e-business processes: a component-based simulation approach

Authors: Pavel Albores, Peter Ball, Jill MacBryde

Addresses: Operations and Information Management, Aston University, Birmingham B4 7ET, UK. ' Manufacturing Systems Centre, Manufacturing Department, School of Applied Sciences, Cranfield University, Cranfield, Bedfordshire MK43 0AL, UK. ' Department of Management Science, University of Strathclyde, Graham Hills Building, 40 George Street, Glasgow G1 1EQ, UK

Abstract: With new and emerging e-business technologies to transform business processes, it is important to understand how those technologies will affect the performance of a business. Will the overall business process be cheaper, faster and more accurate or will a sub-optimal change have been implemented? The use of simulation to model the behaviour of business processes is well established, and it has been applied to e-business processes to understand their performance in terms of measures such as lead-time, cost and responsiveness. This paper introduces the concept of simulation components that enable simulation models of e-business processes to be built quickly from generic e-business templates. The paper demonstrates how these components were devised, as well as the results from their application through case studies.

Keywords: case studies; e-business templates; simulation components; modelling; electronic business; agile systems.

DOI: 10.1504/IJASM.2007.015792

International Journal of Agile Systems and Management, 2007 Vol.2 No.3, pp.242 - 262

Published online: 18 Nov 2007 *

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