Page 257 -

8.6 Bringing It All Together 239

Fig. 8.16 Approach to come to a fully integrated model covering the organizational, time, and
case perspectives

Short-Term Simulation
As stressed earlier, it is essential that events in the log are connected to model
elements. This allows for the projection of dynamic information onto models:
the event log “breathes life” into otherwise static process models. Moreover,
the merging of the various perspectives into a single model depends on this.
Establishing a good connection between an event log and model may be dif-
ficult and require several iterations. However, when using a BPM system, this
connection already exists; BPM systems are driven by explicit workflow mod-
els and provide excellent event logs. Moreover, internally such systems also
have an explicit representation of the state of each running case. This enables
a new type of simulation called short-term simulation [84, 95]. The key idea
is to start all simulation runs from the current state and focus the analysis
of the transient behavior. This way a “fast forward button” into the future is
provided.
Figure 8.16 sketches how a simulation model could be obtained that closely
matches reality. The current state obtained from the BPM system, i.e., the
markings of all cases and related data elements, can be loaded into the simu-
lation as a realistic initial state.