Evolution of business processes and a process simulation tool

Business processes such as workflows are software too. However, development, evolution, and deployment of business processes have different difficulties to general software. Control, introduction, evaluation, and testing of business processes are difficult because multiple processes are related to each other and many people are involved in the processes. To solve these problems, we propose BPT/BPR/BPS (Business Process Tactics, Reengineering, and Simulation) lifecycle, based on a multi-agent groupware model. BPT means activities to control processes dynamically which have already been proposed. The simulation phase is mainly focused upon. A simulation model is presented which has some original aspects, and a prototype simulation tool is shown.