Model-driven engineering in practice: integrated performance decision support for process-centric business impact analysis

Modern businesses and business processes depend on an increasingly interconnected set of resources, which can be affected by external and internal factors at any time. Threats like natural disasters, terrorism, or even power blackouts potentially cause disruptions in an organisation's resource infrastructure which in turn negatively impacts the performance of dependent business processes. In order to assist business analysts dealing with this ever increasing complexity of interdependent business structures a model-driven workbench named Model-Driven Business Impact Analysis (MDBIA) has been developed with the purpose of predicting consequences on the business process level for an organisation in case of disruptions. An already existing Model-Driven Performance Engineering (MDPE) workbench, which originally provided process-centric performance decision support, has been adapted and extended to meet the additional requirements of business impact analysis. The fundamental concepts of the resulting MDBIA workbench, which include the introduction of the applied key models and transformation chain, are presented and evaluated in this paper.