Your to-be scenario

Use the following options to configure your to-be scenario of a simulation.

Process evolutions

In process evolutions, you can configure the following settings for the chosen activities:

  • Workforce availability
  • Workforce allocation on activity
  • Automate activities
  • Pathway probability
  • Activity minimum waiting time
  • Activity execution time

Follow the on-screen information to understand each setting.

The settings are preconfigured with the information that is retrieved from the filtered baseline process. You can change the information based on the scenario that you want to simulate.

Note: You need to configure workforce availability according to your needs. Other process evolutions are optional.

The following table presents the settings of process evolutions that you can change.

Setting Description
Roles The number of resources available for each role. Realistic values are set by default, but you can modify them to provide an accurate number of resources in your process. If you did not specify any roles in the project, a default role is assigned to all the resources in the project.
Percentage of involvement The percentage of involvement of each role in the selected activity. The roles and the initial values are preconfigured according to the baseline process. You can change the values based on the scenario you want to simulate. Make sure that the values you input are whole numbers greater than or equal to 0 and less than or equal to 100. The sum of the percentages assigned to all roles must add up to 100%.
Robots
Robotic quote
The percentage of the activity that is managed by robots.
Number of robots
The number of robots that work in parallel with the staff to run the activity.
Pathway probability The probability of reaching each subsequent activity. The pre-set probability of each event is based on the number of process transitions. The probability of all events must sum up to 100%.
Time metrics
Service time and Working time
The service time of a robot is equal to its working time, as no interruptions occur during the robotic activities. For more information, see Activity working time.
Waiting time after completion of the previous activity
The time that is elapsed between the end of the last activity and the beginning of the current activity. You can change the waiting time of both manual and robotic tasks for any incoming activities. The default values are automatically retrieved from the data source. For more information about Waiting time and its components, see IBM Support If you need to configure or change the waiting time for a certain activity, try to estimate the average transit time, that is the waiting time that regularly occurs, even if no queue is generated. Do not change the waiting time of activities that you want to behave as the As-Is. If you expect no transit time, but the only waiting time is due to queue, set the waiting time to 0.

Configuration

When you create a new simulation, IBM Process Mining automatically generates a pre-calculated simulation specification based on historical and contextual data of the process.

Update following requirements to run the simulation:

Version
You can create multiple versions to generate simulations with different evolutions.
Number of instances
Number of cases that the simulation generates. It is not recommended to use a high number of instances.
Base time unit
By default, the time for an interval is precise to minutes. You can also set the precision to seconds. This setting is not available with Simulation from BPMN option.
Adapt Staff Availability to Full-Time Equivalent (FTE)
The number of full-time resources that are allocated to an activity to obtain its As-Is performance based on the Working time. This number is not the recommended FTE for the activity as the As-Is performance might not be optimal. FTE can be fixed or pre-calculated. FTE is used as Staff Availability when Staff Availability is lower than the FTE calculated by IBM Process Mining. Since Staff Availability is derived from the real process, the measure can be inconsistent when the Resource field does not correspond to a specific resource.
Timestamp start date
Starting date of the simulated events.
Arrival distribution
The distribution of the generation of cases. They can be generated by the following distribution algorithms:
  • Uniform
  • Exponential
  • Logarithmic
  • Historical
Note: Historical distribution algorithm reproduces the reality from the actual process. This option is not available with Simulation from BPMN option.
Interval
The time frame of the process to be considered in the simulation.