how to estimate / calculate the end date of a process?

[wouterhartog]

I'm in the design phase of a project / process and I'm new to jBPM.

1) The process I'm working on includes many steps that require a certain duration. e.g. ocean transport, road transportation etc.
Is there standard feature I can use to calculate the estimated finish date of a process instance based on the duration of tasks?

2) Also, at the creation of the process instance, we know what the start dates are of certain tasks; e.g. the pickup date for goods at a warehouse and the sail date of an ocean vessel. Is there a standard 'start-date' like attribute on tasks? I could not find or see that anywhere so I thought I'd ask.

Thank you!

[anuragpaliwal]

Both processinstance and taskinstance do have startDate as instance variable...

[kukeltje]

1) no, Business Activity Monitoring is currently under development. The simulation functionality might also be of interest to you

2) From what I read you want the tasks to be automatically started. There is no functionality for this. Use e.g. timers that end a 'wait-state' and transition to a specific task

[wouterhartog]

Thank you both for your quick replies.

The startDate variable seems useful; I will see if I can use that for my 'scheduled start date' that a user needs to input for certain tasks in the process when they start a new process. However, it looks more like the actual date the task was started.
Maybe the scheduled start date should be a custom variable?

Sounds like an interesting development, the Bussiness Activity Monitoring feature.
Where can I find more info on Bussiness Activity Monitoring or the Simulation functionality?

[kukeltje]

The startDate indeed gets a value if the task is started. What you can do is
- make sure the tasks is not auto created (see api/xsd)
- create an action on task-node enter event that puts a 'trigger' on a (message) queue somewhere with a delay to create the task. afaik, most jms implementations support delayed delivery, so maybe that can be used, or maybe even jbpm timers...