Business Process simulation with the cloud-based Massive Multi-Agent System MARS

Analyzing and understanding large-scale, distributed business applications and enterprise architectures is particularly important to align an enterprise's overall business with the supporting IT infrastructure. It is necessary to model and simulate the dynamic complexity properly as well as capture possible emergent effects in real-world enterprise architectures and process landscapes. So technologies and methods that extend static analyses, like delivered by typical enterprise architecture tools, are needed. This work proposes an approach for such dynamic analyses in which agent based modeling and simulation is utilized through the MARS System, a cloud-based massive multi-agent system. The system continuously simulates the operation and transformation of the application landscape in order to support advancing business scenarios. Agents in this approach may represent any entity. They may be customers and suppliers as well as users and stakeholders of the business application, but may also represent any internal component of the enterprise system like servers, services or certain applications. MARS is an MSaaS (Modeling & Simulation as a Service) system, which enables users to setup and control complex, distributed massive multi-agent simulations from within a web application. Models can make use of GIS data and integrate it with arbitrary information from other sources, thus creating a multi-layer environment which depicts the whole business application landscape. This paper presents the current state and possibilities of the MARS system and discusses an example model to showcase the agent-based simulation approach and its possible advantages for dynamic and continuous enterprise architecture analysis.