Reconciliation of business and systems modelling via discrete event simulation

Modeling techniques have been productively applied to business process (BP) redesign. They have been also successfully employed to assist information technology (IT) applications design and development. However, although BP and IT interact in practice, suggesting that modelling in those areas should also be done in parallel, surprisingly few works have addressed the issue of integrated BP/IT modelling. In this paper, we discuss the potential of discrete-event business process simulation (BPS) and computer network simulation (CNS) models to work in parallel to provide a link between the BP and IT modelling domains. To this end, we propose a modelling framework and a methodology for linking BPS and CNS models, and present an example case that demonstrates the practical feasibility and efficacy of the approach.