Advanced Concepts
In this section we will introduce advanced concepts, which contribute to a more realistic simulation configuration and for this reason increase the benefit of the experiment reports.
Resources
Resources in IYOPRO are used to map real life scarce entities to the BPMN model. A resource can be a human, a machine or something else that you consider to be a resource.
A Participant, that is part of the execution of an activity, can be assigned to every activity. Although the Participant normally represents a human resource, you are free to expand the term to machines, storage capacities, and so on.
Prerequisites
If you want to assign resources to your models, you need to define them in organization diagrams . More information can be found in this IYOPRO documentation.
The raw process to create a model with resources is as follows:
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Create a BPI-Project
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Create the organization diagram like the one from Figure 1
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Add a collaboration diagram
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Import the roles at any activity or pool / lane from the organization diagram
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Now you can chose the roles at every activity or pool / lane
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Examples: Please refer to Chapter 7 of the Simulation Tutorial for a how-to on Resources.
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You can access the current state of resources within python scripts.
Costing
Combining process simulation with cost accounting permits the assignment of costs to processes and/or products. The result is a table-based costing overview, where row headers represent the types of cost and column headers represent processes or cost-driving products.
Using cost accounting within simulation requires at least three steps:
The activity-based mapping of resource costs (e.g. human workers or machines) to processes or products requires additional steps:
If you define products, you can map the costs on these products. Also the process behaviour may depend on current products.
The result section explains the expected result table, in particular the meaning of the different rows.