Risk-Aware Business Process Modeling: A Comparison of Discrete Event And Agent-Based Approaches

Risk analysis is one of the most challenging task in a business process management perspective. In healthcare, risk management focuses on events having a relevant impact on patients safety. We investigate the context of a blood-bank, which is one of the most critical hospital department, by comparing two different modeling approaches to perform a risk-aware business process management. Our main interest here is to discuss advantages and disadvantages of discrete-event and agent-based modeling approaches. We adopt two specific tools and collected feedback from modelers, staff and decision makers. We identify differences in the analysis of risks from the two perspectives, such as the possibility to include agents-environment interactions, as well as structured approaches to discover potential failures. Our results include assessment for risk management, shedding some light on practical applications of process modeling and simulation in healthcare.