RimsTool: a Hybrid Simulator for Business Processes

Business Process Simulation represents a powerful instrument for business analysts when analyzing and comparing business processes. Most of the state-of-the-art business process simulators, however, rely on Discrete event simulation, which requires various unrealistic assumptions and simplifications to perform experiments. Predictive Process Monitoring, on the other hand, offers a viable way to complete ongoing traces or to generate entire traces from scratch, via predictions of the next activities and their attributes. Predictive models, though, are usually based on black-box approaches that make it difficult to reason on what-if scenarios. RIMSTool is a hybrid business process simulator that aims at combining predictive models built from data and Discrete event simulation at runtime in a white-box manner. The proposed tool, thus, is able to exploit the strengths and avoid the limitations of both approaches.