Alaska Simulator Toolset for Conducting Controlled Experiments

Alaska Simulator Toolset is an interactive software suite developed at the University of Innsbruck which allows to explore different approaches to process flexibility by using a familiar metaphor, i.e., travel planning and execution. In particular, Alaska Simulator Toolset is used for studying research questions in the context of business process management and other related fields. For this, Alaska Simulator Toolset provides integrated support of different approaches to process flexibility fostering their systematic comparison. Moreover, Alaska Simulator Toolset facilitates the design and execution of controlled experiments through experimental workflow support. Providing effective IT support for business processes has become an essential activity of enterprises in order to stay competitive in today’s market [1]. When assessing the usability of BPM approaches, however, enterprises have to rely on vendor promises or qualitative data rather than on empirical or experimental research [2]. This is rather surprising as these research methods have been successfully applied in similar research areas like software engineering (e.g., [3, 4]). Alaska Simulator Toolset (AST) has been developed to address this need and allows the investigation of strengths and weaknesses of different approaches for process flexibility through the execution of controlled experiments. Due to the many similarities between business processes modeling and execution and journey planning, AST uses a journey as a metaphor. Furthermore, the used metaphor provides an attractive context to be engaged in, thus increasing the willingness of subjects to participate in experiments. AST consists of three major components: Alaska Configurator, Alaska Simulator and Alaska Analyzer. In the following we describe the main functionalities of AST and how design and execution of controlled experiments is supported using the experiment described in [5] as example (cf. Fig. 1 for the experimental design). 1 For a detailed description of the journey metaphor visit the simulator’s website: http://www.alaskasimulator.org Factor Level 1: Few Constraints California A Group 1