1999 Volume 8 Issue 1 Pages 17-28
The forms of business processes have been diversifying, though academic research of the processes in engineering discipline was not so developed enough as to guide them. Many business processes use feedback mechanisms through information systems as a control discipline. This paper investigates dynamic properties of such business processes with feedback information systems. The business transaction Petri nets (Sato, 1997c) are employed for that purpose. It will be turned out that periodic behavior comes out, depending on a parallel processing mechanism of business tasks and their processing capacity. A condition on which the cycle time of a business process and the maximal cycle mean of the corresponding Petri net coincides, will be determined.
Based on the result provided, a calculation method for the cycle time of a business process modeled by a data flow diagram will be devised. It uses the fact that the maximal cycle mean of a business transaction Petri net is nothing but the eigenvector of in transition matrix.
