Red Hat JBoss BPM Suite (BPMS) 6.3 is an open source BPM suite that combines business process management and business rules management, enabling business and IT users to create, manage, validate, and deploy business processes and rules. BPMS 6.3 provides advanced business process management capabilities compliant with the widely adopted BPMN 2.0 standard. The primary goal of BPMN is to provide a notation that is readily understandable by all business users, from the business analysts that create the initial drafts of the processes, to the technical developers responsible for implementing the technology that will perform those processes, and finally, to the business people who will manage and monitor those processes. Thus, BPMN creates a standardized bridge for the gap between the business process design and process implementation.

BPMS 6.3 comes with a choice of modeling tools; it includes a business-user-friendly, web-based authoring environment as well as an Eclipse plugin for developers, to enable all project stakeholders to collaborate effectively and build sophisticated process and decision automation solutions. The inclusion of Red Hat JBoss Business Rules Management System (BRMS) adds seamless integration with business rules and complex event processing functions to ease the development and facilitate the maintenance of processes in the face of rapidly changing requirements. Business activity monitoring (BAM) and process dashboards provide invaluable information to help manage processes while process simulation helps refine business processes by enabling their analysis and assessment of the dynamic behavior of processes over time.

Red Hat JBoss BPM Suite also includes Business Resource Planner. Business Resource Planner is a lightweight, embeddable planning engine that optimizes planning problems.

Red Hat JBoss BRMS and JBoss BPM Suite use a centralized repository where all resources are stored. This ensures consistency, transparency, and the ability to audit across the business. Business users can modify business logic and business processes without requiring assistance from IT personnel (reference official Red Hat BPM Suite documentation for more information).

BPMS 6.3 also includes Realtime Decision Server and Intelligent Process Server, both which serve as standalone, out-of-the-box components that can be used to instantiate and execute rules in provisioned containers through interfaces available for REST, JMS or a Java client side application. These self-contained environments encapsulate a compiled rule package and deployed rule instance, thus allowing for a looser coupling of rules and the execution code of the application. Created as a web deployable WAR file, these servers can be deployed on any web container.

Both decision servers ship with default extensions for JBoss BRMS & Business Resource Planner, with Intelligent Process Server also adding extensions for the BPM Suite. These servers, based on the KIE Execution Server, have low footprints, with minimal memory consumption, and therefore, can be deployed easily on a cloud instance. Each instance can open and instantiate multiple KIE Containers which allows execution of multiple rule services in parallel. Containers generated via execution servers can be managed from within Business Central via Rule Deployment. In future BPM Suite releases, the currently-utilized Business Central execution server functionality is slated to be replaced with the newer KIE execution server variations. Currently, when KIE execution server derivatives are employed, Business Central only allows for management of the runtime servers; no runtime aspects, such as Process Definition, Process Instances, Tasks, etc., can be used. Such functionality is currently slated for inclusion in version 7. Even so, should you wish to take advantage of the KIE Servers' advantages of decoupling rules execution from authorship and maintenance, more information on the deployment, management, and interacting with the Realtime Decision & Intelligent Process Servers can be found in the Red Hat JBoss BRMS 6.3 User Guide.

Process simulation allows users to simulate a business process based on the simulation parameters and get a statistical analysis of the process models over time, in form of graphs. This helps to optimize pre and post execution of a process, minimizing the risk of change in business processes, performance forecast, and promote improvements in performance, quality and resource utilization of a process.

The simulation process runs in the simulation engine extension, which relies on the possible execution paths rather than process data. On simulation, the engine generates events for every simulated activity, which are stored in the simulation repository.

The Path Finder helps identify the various possible paths that a process execution can take. In the web process designer, this tool is available from the toolbar.

Running a simulation requires that simulation properties be correctly set up for each individual element in the process model. This includes setting a probability for each sequence flow leaving a diverging gateway. For an XOR gateway, the sum of all the probability values should be 100%.

Run validation on the process and correct any issues before attempting process simulation. Viewing all issues in the web process designer helps find various simulation-related issues as well.

To run process simulation, specify the number of process instances that are to be started. The interval between process instances can be specified in units as small as millisecond and as large as days. This, coupled with realistic properties set up on each process element, such as the availability of user task actors and minimum and maximum processing time for various automatic and manual tasks can help provide a useful analysis of future process performance.

Once process simulation successfully executes, the results are presented in various charts and tables. Use the legend provided in the graphs to filter out items such as minimum or maximum values.

For further details, refer to the official Red Hat documentation.

Red Hat JBoss Dashboard Builder is a web-based dashboard application that provides Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) support in the form of visualization tools for monitored metrics (Key Performance Indicators or KPIs) in real time. It comes integrated in the Business Central environment under the Dashboards menu.

The included dashboard requests information from the BPMS execution engine and provides real-time information on its runtime data; however, custom dashboards may also be built over other data resources.

The Dashboard Builder is accessed directly from the Dashboards menu of the Business Central application:

The Dashboard Builder can establish connections to external data sources including databases. These connections are then used for creating data providers that obtain data from the data sources. The Dashboard Builder is connected to the local BPMS engine by default and queries it for the required data for its jBPM Dashboard indicators (widgets with visualizations of the data available on the pages of the jBPM Dashboard workspace).

If operating over a database, the data provider uses a SQL query to obtain the data and if operating over a CVS file, the data provider automatically obtains all the data from the file. So it is the data providers that keep the data you work with. For more information, refer to the official Red Hat documentation.

Representational State Transfer (REST) is a style of software architecture of distributed systems (applications). It allows for a highly abstract client-server communication; clients initiate requests to servers to a particular URL with potentially required parameters and servers process the requests and return appropriate responses based on the requested URL. The requests and responses are built around the transfer of representations of resources. A resource can be any coherent and meaningful concept that may be addressed (such as a repository, a process, a rule, etc.).

Refer to the official Red Hat documentation for further details on the REST API and its usage.