The Simulation Properties for a Flow dialog contains information on processing time, priority and suspending and activation of the flow. There are four options to define the processing time:

 constant

 triangular distribution

 normal distribution

 custom series

 

Constant processing time means that each activation of the flow lasts always the time specified by duration. For triangular distribution three values are given: minimum, mean and maximum. Minimum value is the shortest possible processing time, mean is the most common processing time and maximum value is the longest possible processing time. The actual processing time for each activation is then calculated according to this distribution.

 

For normal distribution the mean value and the standard deviation are specified. Standard deviation specifies the width of the deviation, i.e. how much variation there will be between the actual values and the mean value.

 

Custom series can be used to define special patterns for processing time. During the simulation the processing times in the series are used in the given order and in cycles: when the end of series is encountered the series is started again from the first value.

 

All the processing time information is given in format including optional number of days and the time, e.g. 2d 1:40:00 .

 

Priority of the flow specifies its importance. The higher the priority the more important flow is. A checkbox is provided to indicate whether this flow can be suspended while it is active in simulation and resumed later. A flow can suspend other active process steps or flows, which have a lower priority and take the needed resources from them if the resources are not free. The activation of process steps or flows with lower priority will be resumed later, when the needed resources are free again.

 

The bottom part of the general page is used for activation information. Flows can be self-activating. Self-activating flows start the simulation and have the Start simulation checkbox checked. If the flow is self-activating - i.e. it starts the simulation - the number of activations has to be defined. The number of activations means how many times the flow is activated during the simulation. Also the frequency of these activations has to be specified. The same distributions as for the processing time are available also for defining the interval between the activations.