Rethinking BPS: A Utility-Based Evaluation Framework

Business process simulation (BPS) is a key tool for analyzing and optimizing organizational workflows, supporting decision-making by estimating the impact of process changes. The reliability of such estimates depends on the ability of a BPS model to accurately mimic the process under analysis, making rigorous accuracy evaluation essential. However, the state-of-the-art approach to evaluating BPS models has two key limitations. First, it treats simulation as a forecasting problem, testing whether models can predict unseen future events. This fails to assess how well a model captures the as-is process, particularly when process behavior changes from train to test period. Thus, it becomes difficult to determine whether poor results stem from an inaccurate model or the inherent complexity of the data, such as unpredictable drift. Second, the evaluation approach strongly relies on Earth Mover's Distance-based metrics, which can obscure temporal patterns and thus yield misleading conclusions about simulation quality. To address these issues, we propose a novel framework that evaluates simulation quality based on its ability to generate representative process behavior. Instead of comparing simulated logs to future real-world executions, we evaluate whether predictive process monitoring models trained on simulated data perform comparably to those trained on real data for downstream analysis tasks. Empirical results show that our framework not only helps identify sources of discrepancies but also distinguishes between model accuracy and data complexity, offering a more meaningful way to assess BPS quality.

PGTNet: A Process Graph Transformer Network for Remaining Time Prediction of Business Process Instances

We present PGTNet, an approach that transforms event logs into graph datasets and leverages graph-oriented data for training Process Graph Transformer Networks to predict the remaining time of business process instances. PGTNet consistently outperforms state-of-the-art deep learning approaches across a diverse range of 20 publicly available real-world event logs. Notably, our approach is most promising for highly complex processes, where existing deep learning approaches encounter difficulties stemming from their limited ability to learn control-flow relationships among process activities and capture long-range dependencies. PGTNet addresses these challenges, while also being able to consider multiple process perspectives during the learning process.