THE ESSENCE OF THE MATHEMATICAL BUSINESS PROCESS MODELS DISCIPLINE FOR COMPUTER SCIENCE STUDENTS

The necessity of such a discipline for computer science students comes from the real practice of information system implementation that has to be preceded by business process (BP) investigation. Disregard of this stage leads to the chaos automation as it is said by those who are engaged in BP consulting. It should be noted that the problem of quantitative BP evaluation and optimization remains actual throughout the course of the whole lifetime of an information system.

The graduates from computer science and technology department having fundamental skills in mathematics are at the same time feeling the lack of knowledge in BP modeling. The term “modeling” has many senses. With regard to our case modeling concerns the problem of BP model creation that is adequate enough to be the basis of formal methods of BP evaluation and optimization.

There are two closely related tasks to be fulfilled whilst creating the program of BP modeling. Firstly it is needed to choose real life typical statements of the problem of BP temporal and cost indicators evaluation. Both temporal and cost BP indicators are obviously connected because of natural transformation of BP duration into its expanses. Secondly every typical BP evaluation problem has to be associated with mathematical model preferably leading to closed forms of solution. There are popular BP metrics such as Activity Based Costing, Balanced Scorecarding, etc. The problem is to gain an insight into exact formalism of BP metric having no more than its verbal description.

An experience of delivering BP modeling lecture course for the senior students of computer science area shows that their body of knowledge is quite enough to feel confident in analytical BP temporal models, in particular network planning models with its Method of Critical Path and Performance Evaluation and Review Technique, workflow graphs with Graphic Evaluation and Review Technique, networks of queues with exact method for Jackson Networks and two-moment approximations for non-markovian networks. We arrive at the same conclusion about the models of above mentioned BP metrics. Some of BP metrics models, particularly of Activity Based Costing go to the models of Linear Algebra. The course is delivered in Peter the Great St. Petersburg Polytechnic University since 2012 till now. Its previous version was delivered to the post graduate students in Helsinki Technological University (now Aalto University) in 2004 and 2005 years. The report contains the detail course survey with all the topics, formal models descriptions and examples of assignments.