USING QUERY-DRIVEN SIMULATIONS FOR QUERYING OUTCOMES OF BUSINESS PROCESSES

Abstract

When decision makers want to know outcomes of business processes in their organizations, they often use simulations to do this. This paper describes how a new Query-Driven Simulation (QDS) approach can be used by decision makers to obtain information about future outcomes of business processes in a more declarative, flexible, and interactive way than the traditional approach of running simulations and then gathering statistics about simulation outcomes. The paper also describes the types of questions decision makers ask about outcomes of business processes and studies how easy it is to express these questions in terms of an SQL-like query language SimQL designed for Query-Driven Simulations. It also identifies the types of applications that are especially well-suited for QDS. Finally, the paper describes the Query-Driven Simulation Modeling Lifecycle and how QDS provides a feedback loop in the model development process.