Model 2 - Parallel Gateways

Goals of this lesson

  • Getting to know how the semantics of the parallel gateway work

How-to

This model shows a business process with parallel gateways. When the sequence flow hits a branching parallel gateway, it starts a sub-process for every outgoing link

model 2
Figure 1. Model 2 - Parallel Gateway / IYOPRO-Link

Explanation

  • In the model (in the illustration above) the first gateway starts two sub-processes (or analogical two tokens will be send on the path), that will be merged in the second gateway.

    The merging gateway will not fire until both sub-processes (tokens) have arrived.
  • Model 2 defines a constant duration of 4 time units (TU, hours in this case) for the upper activity and a constant duration of 1 TU for the lower activity.

  • This means, the bottom sub-process has to wait 3 TU until it is merged by the gateway.

  • The total lead time (or processing time) of the business process will always be 4 TU.

Report

See below for the run configuration, which we set up to receive the report statistics from below.

Please refer to the section Experiment Results for more information on the report specific data.

Run configuration

  • Stochastic Seed: 12345

  • Simulation start date: 1/1/2014 12:00:00 a.m.

  • Simulation stop time: 240

  • Simulation stop time unit: Hours

Report statistics

  • As you might notice, the process cycle time is always 4 hours

  • There is no standard deviation because we set up constant durations for both activities

  • And as mentioned before, this model’s process cycle time depends on the activity with the longest duration

    • The merging parallel gateway has to wait for all sequence flows to arrive

    • That is why the process cycle time is always 4 hours, which is the top activity’s duration

  • Also note: The box-plot from Figure 2 below is nearly invisible.

    • It is reduced to a simple line, because all the statistics are equal (Min-, Max-value, etc.)

model2 report
Figure 2. Process cycle times of Model 2