A Survey of Customization Support in Agent-Based Business Process Simulation Tools

Agent-based business process simulation has grown in popularity, in part because of its analysis capabilities. The analyses depend on the kinds of simulations that can be built, adapted, and extended, which in turn depend on the underlying simulation framework. We report the results of our analysis of 19 agent-based process simulation tools and their simulation frameworks. We conclude that a growing number of simulation tools are using component-based software techniques. Nevertheless, most simulation tools do not directly support requirements models, their transformation into executable simulations, or the management of model variants over time. Such practices are becoming more widely applied in software engineering under the term software product line engineering (SPLE). Based on our analysis, agent-based process simulation tools may improve their customization capacity by: (1) supporting object modeling more completely and (2) supporting software product line engineering issues.