IMPLEMENTATION OF THE PROCESS INTERACTION APPROACH IN A GENERAL-PURPOSE LANGUAGE

Two types of approaches are distinguished in the process interaction world view. Depending on the type of elements that own a process, the transaction view and the real process interaction view are defined. In the transaction view all activities are performed by the flowing elements. In the real process interaction view the resources are active. The process interaction view is widely used in the simulation community, but the majority of applications use the transaction view. Contrary to this, the development of business models is nowadays completely based upon process models, which closely connect to the real process interaction view. This paper shows a single-threaded implementation of the real process interaction in Delphi by means of stack contents swapping. By this it becomes possible to translate business models almost directly into simulation models. Above that, the implementation in a general purpose language like Delphi is fast, cheap and extendable. The major problems of implementing process interaction will be explained and tackled. The implementation as a whole is available as free source.