USING QUERY-DRIVEN SIMULATIONS FOR QUERYING OUTCOMES OF BUSINESS PROCESSES

When decision makers want to know outcomes of business processes in th eir organizations, they often use simulations to do this. Traditionall y, this is achieved by running simulations, collecting statistics and answering questions of interests to the decision makers based on the c ollected statistics. This paper describes an alternative approach to s imulations, called the Query-Driven Simulations (QDS) approach, in whi ch the user first asks the queries of interest and then, depending on the query asked, appropriate simulations are run to answer that query. The QDS approach empowers the end-user by making it easier, faster, a nd more reliable to ask ad-hoc questions about outcomes of business pr ocesses than what is done in traditional simulations. To substantiate this point, the paper describes the types of questions decision makers ask about outcomes of business processes and studies how easy it is t o express these questions in terms of an SQL-like query language SimQL designed for Query-Driven Simulations. In addition, a case study of u sing the QDS approach in a manufacturing application developed by a ma jor management consulting company is presented and the QDS approach is tested on that application.