14. Human Resource Behaviour Simulation in Business Processes

The structure and dynamics of a modern business environment are very hard to model using traditional methods. Such complexity raises challenges to effective business analysis and improvement. The importance of applying business process simulation to analyse and improve business activities has been widely recognised. However, one remaining challenge is the development of approaches to human resource behaviour simulation. To address this problem, we describe a novel simulation approach where intelligent agents are used to simulate human resources by performing allocated work from a workflow management system. The behaviour of the intelligent agents is driven a by state transition mechanism called a hierarchical task network (HTN). We demonstrate and validate our simulator via a medical treatment process case study. Analysis of the simulation results shows that the behaviour driven by the HTN is consistent with design of the workflow model. We believe these preliminary results support the development of more sophisticated agent-based human resource simulation systems.