Activity Details

This section of the report deals with activity details. These statistics are part of the process' local dynamics, whose understanding has a crucial impact on the comprehension and improvement of the entire process.

Concurrently existing activities

The table from Figure 1 depicts the concurrently existing activities. We learn that there have been approximately 6 instances of each of the activities active at the same time.

Report Activities Concurrently Existing Actuv
Figure 1. Report: Activity details - Concurrently existing activities

Run-times and waiting times

Figure 2 shows the activity run-times and the waiting times of activities.

  • The runtime or lead time of an activity is the time between starting (reaching) an activity and completing (leaving) it.

  • The table contains

    • the observations of finished activities,

    • its lead time’s mean,

    • standard deviation,

    • minimum and maximum values

    • Just like the table for the process' lead time.

  • A waiting time only occurs when an activity has to wait for a message or a resource.

  • Since we did not add any message flows or resources to the simulation model, there are no waiting times in the table below.

Explanation

  • In our example process the activity "Work" lasts constantly twelve hours.

    • This is not a surprise, because we set a constant distribution with the value twelve hours for this activity.

  • The activity’s "Prepare to go home" duration has been assigned a normal distribution with a mean of twelve and a standard deviation of three hours.

    • As you see the actual mean value of the duration is 12 hours 24 minutes and 1 second.

    • This does not match twelve hours, which we set to be the mean value.

    • Still, this is right. Since we simulated only 240 hours, this value cannot be exactly twelve hours.

    • It will converge towards "our" mean value the longer we simulate.

    • Also, if we set another seed this value will be different.

    • That is the reason, why it is extremely important to simulate the model several times* with different seeds, before making any decisions.

Report Activities Runtimes and Wating Times
Figure 2. Report: Activity details - Activity run-times and waiting times

Distributions

Finally the table from Figure 3 shows the activities' distribution statistics.

In this case we get statistics for the two distributions we have specified in the model (constant distribution and Normal distribution).

  • The distributions' seeds are not equal to the general seed (12345).

  • These local seeds are generated from the general seed

    • which means that they will always be the same as long as you always use the same general seed.
Report Evens Distributions
Figure 3. Report: Activity details - Distribution statistics
Title

Name of the process

Obs

The number of started process instances.

Type

An abbreviated denomination of the distribution’s type. E. g. Cont Normal for the Normal distribution

Parameter 1*

The value for the distribution’s first parameter.

Parameter 2*

The value for the distribution’s second parameter.

Parameter 3*

The value for the distribution’s third parameter.

Seed

The distribution’s seed value.

The amount of parameters changes depending on the distribution type. E. g. the normal distribution needs two parameters, the Constant distribution though needs only one.