Praise for the Third Edition: "This is one of the best books available. Its excellent organizational structure allows quick reference to specific models and its clear presentation . . . solidifies the understanding of the concepts being presented."IIE Transactions on Operations EngineeringThoroughly revised and expanded to reflect the latest developments in the field, Fundamentals of Queueing Theory, Fourth Edition continues to present the basic statistical principles that are necessary to analyze the probabilistic nature of queues. Rather than presenting a narrow focus on the subject, this update illustrates the wide-reaching, fundamental concepts in queueing theory and its applications to diverse areas such as computer science, engineering, business, and operations research.This update takes a numerical approach to understanding and making probable estimations relating to queues, with a comprehensive outline of simple and more advanced queueing models. Newly featured topics of the Fourth Edition include:Retrial queuesApproximations for queueing networksNumerical inversion of transformsDetermining the appropriate number of servers to balance quality and cost of serviceEach chapter provides a self-contained presentation of key concepts and formulae, allowing readers to work with each section independently, while a summary table at the end of the book outlines the types of queues that have been discussed and their results. In addition, two new appendices have been added, discussing transforms and generating functions as well as the fundamentals of differential and difference equations. New examples are now included along with problems that incorporate QtsPlus software, which is freely available via the book's related Web site.With its accessible style and wealth of real-world examples, Fundamentals of Queueing Theory, Fourth Edition is an ideal book for courses on queueing theory at the upper-undergraduate and graduate levels. It is also a valuable resource for researchers and practitioners who analyze congestion in the fields of telecommunications, transportation, aviation, and management science.

Fundamentals of Queueing Theory

Publications are essential for scientific communication. Access to publications is provided by conventional libraries, digital libraries operated by learned societies or commercial publishers, and a huge number of web sites maintained by the scientists themselves or their institutions. Comprehensive meta-indices for this increasing number of information sources are missing for most areas of science. The DBLP Computer Science Bibliography of the University of Trier has grown from a very specialized small collection of bibliographic information to a major part of the infrastructure used by thousands of computer scientists. This short paper first reports the history of DBLP and sketches the very simple software behind the service. The most time-consuming task for the maintainers of DBLP may be viewed as a special instance of the authority control problem; how to normalize different spellings of person names. The third section of the paper discusses some details of this problem which might be an interesting research issue for the information retrieval community.

The DBLP Computer Science bibliography: Evolution, research issues, perspectives

Several methods for enterprise systems analysis rely on flow-oriented representations of business operations, otherwise known as business process models. The Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) is a standard for capturing such models. BPMN models facilitate communication between domain experts and analysts and provide input to software development projects. Meanwhile, there is an emergence of methods for enterprise software development that rely on detailed process definitions that are executed by process engines. These process definitions refine their counterpart BPMN models by introducing data manipulation, application binding, and other implementation details. The de facto standard for defining executable processes is the Business Process Execution Language (BPEL). Accordingly, a standards-based method for developing process-oriented systems is to start with BPMN models and to translate these models into BPEL definitions for subsequent refinement. However, instrumenting this method is challenging because BPMN models and BPEL definitions are structurally very different. Existing techniques for translating BPMN to BPEL only work for limited classes of BPMN models. This article proposes a translation technique that does not impose structural restrictions on the source BPMN model. At the same time, the technique emphasizes the generation of readable (block-structured) BPEL code. An empirical evaluation conducted over a large collection of process models shows that the resulting BPEL definitions are largely block-structured. Beyond its direct relevance in the context of BPMN and BPEL, the technique presented in this article addresses issues that arise when translating from graph-oriented to block-structure flow definition languages.

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From business process models to process-oriented software systems

Measuring the performance of business processes has become a central issue in both academia and business, since organizations are challenged to achieve effective and efficient results. Applying performance measurement models to this purpose ensures alignment with a business strategy, which implies that the choice of performance indicators is organization-dependent. Nonetheless, such measurement models generally suffer from a lack of guidance regarding the performance indicators that exist and how they can be concretized in practice. To fill this gap, we conducted a structured literature review to find patterns or trends in the research on business process performance measurement. The study also documents an extended list of 140 process-related performance indicators in a systematic manner by further categorizing them into 11 performance perspectives in order to gain a holistic view. Managers and scholars can consult the provided list to choose the indicators that are of interest to them, considering each perspective. The structured literature review concludes with avenues for further research.

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Business process performance measurement: a structured literature review of indicators, measures and metrics

Business Process Management (BPM) includes methods, techniques, and tools to support the design, enactment, management, and analysis of operational business processes. It can be considered as an extension of classical Workflow Management (WFM) systems and approaches. Although the practical relevance of BPM is undisputed, a clear definition of BPM and related acronyms such as BAM, BPA, and STP are missing. Moreover, a clear scientific foundation is missing. In this paper, we try to demystify the acronyms in this domain, describe the state-of-the-art technology, and argue that BPM could benefit from formal methods/languages (cf. Petri nets, process algebras, etc.).

Business Process Management: A Survey

Modern business performance management (BPM) comprises modeling, analyzing and monitoring of business processes. A variety of different approaches for business performance management have emerged recently. One issue common to these approaches is the inability to link the business process schema to the information gathered during the relevant phases. In this paper, we present a Petri net-based approach for process-oriented business performance management. Our approach is based on a new type of high-level Petri nets, so called XML nets. In XML nets business process objects, performance indicators and the performance measurement system are represented with XML. Being a consistent and comprehensible methodology for the whole process life cycle, XML nets support integrated process-oriented business performance management. We also demonstrate the modules and basic functions of a Petri net-based software prototype designed to support process-oriented BPM.

Process-oriented business performance management with Petri nets

Performance management of collaborative business processes refers to the modeling, analyzing and monitoring of interrelated production, logistics and information processes on an operational level. In this context it is essential to figure out how critical situations can be detected in time, and how important changes can be discovered as early as possible. In particular analyzing potential exceptional states of performance indicators and matching counter measures in target-oriented simulation scenarios before implementing collaborative business processes is not supported by the current approaches. In this paper, we present a process-oriented approach to performance management of collaborative business processes, based on high-level Petri nets. By employing Petri-nets performance management as a whole can be improved. We will also demonstrate the modules and basic functions of a Petri net-based, software prototype, called INCOME2010 designed to support the complete process life cycle of process-oriented performance management.

A Petri-net based approach to performance management of collaborative business processes

The management of collaborative business processes refers to the design, analysis, and execution of interrelated production, logistics and information processes, which are usually performed by different independent enterprises in order to produce and to deliver a specified range of goods or services. The effort to interconnect independently developed business process models and to map them to process-implementing software components is particularly high. The implementation of such collaborative inter-organizational business process models is assisted by so-called choreography languages that can be executed by software applications. In this paper, we present a Petri net based approach for process-model driven deduction of BPEL code. Our approach is based on a specific type of high-level Petri nets, so-called XML nets. We use XML nets both for modeling and coordinating business processes implemented as Web services and for deriving BPEL elements of the Web service based components. Our approach provides a seamless concept for modeling, analysis and execution of business processes.

A petri net based approach for process model driven deduction of BPEL code

Due to a steadily increasing market for IT services, providers need to set apart from their competitors in order to successfully assert with their service offerings in the market As a result the improvement of the quality of service process provisioning is becoming a major aspect In this paper we propose a Petri-net based approach in order to model and simulate service processes in terms of availability levels Supported by a tool service providers can perform a priori estimations during design time on the potential impact and interaction of availabilities of services involved in provisioning processes We additionally show how obtained results can be taken into account for negotiating availability levels in Service Level Agreements (SLA)

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Simulation of IT Service Processes with Petri-Nets

Because of a steadily increasing market for IT services, providers need to set apart from their competitors in order to successfully assert with their service offerings in the market. As compliance with negotiated service levels is becoming more and more important for service providers, the improvement of the quality of operational IT service support processes is coming to the fore. In this paper we present an approach based on discrete-event simulation in order to do a priori estimations on ticket workloads within a skills-based IT service desk. Service providers can perform tool-supported capability planning (analysis & optimization) during design time based on the potential impact of ticket workloads to agreed service levels. We additionally show how obtained results can be taken into account for determining service levels in Service Level Agreements (SLA).

Marco Mevius

Papers

Process-oriented business performance management with Petri nets

A Petri-net based approach to performance management of collaborative business processes

A petri net based approach for process model driven deduction of BPEL code

Simulation of IT Service Processes with Petri-Nets

Simulation Environment for IT Service Support Processes: Supporting Service Providers in Estimating Service Levels for Incident Management