**1. Introduction**

We have to answer problems related to the small settlement development and enlargement, landscape care and overall efforts to improve the quality of life and the level of democracy while

© 2016 The Author(s). Licensee InTech. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. © 2018 The Author(s). Licensee IntechOpen. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

preserving the conditions of the sustainable development (addressing living standard, cultural and historic value, agricultural and industrial production, transport infrastructure construction, tourism potential, etc.). Technophobia of local people significantly increases this problem because the low-level knowledge of local people is strongly contrasting with high knowledge of external people and (owners and investors for example) penetrating the rural area, who use good information and communication technologies (ICT) (especially geographical information systems and project management) and process management knowledge.

We have recognised that there is a low level of knowledge about participation possibilities in business and workflow processes of territorial planning and development. According to several political declarations by the European Union like Spatial Planning Charter and Aarhus agreement by the European Council, we have to accept that ICT has potential to resolve the

The Role of Computer Simulation Tools in Improving the Quality of Life in Small Settlements…

http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.81244

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The expected result of modelling and simulation activities is represented by structured data (tables, lists, forms…) that can be directly used as an instrument for knowledge improvement or implementation of some systems or an organisational change in the way of management consulting services. This is why there are the following main dangers described by [1, 2]:

**1.** *inability*—some important details cannot be expressed due to the deficiency of used

**2.** *oversimplification*—we are forced to simplify the modelled subject while trying to finish its

The organisation modelling is a necessary ingredient for the start of the whole system development life cycle. Darnton [3] and Taylor [4] say that the main obstacle (defined from the perspective of the software application development) with this step of the requirement analysis of socio-technical systems stands in the early steps of the whole system life cycle. The first step of any modern approach should contain two steps. The first one is the designation of the requirements in the form of business processes and their participants. The second one is the formation of a model, often called an essential object model or business object model, developed as a set of domain-specific subjects and participants known as essential elements. These two steps should be completed with the active participation of the domain experts, because they are able to guarantee that the accurate model will be made. Obviously, every modelling tool used at these early stages should be intelligible to the domain experts, because they are typically not skilled in ICT. Furthermore, these instruments must not damage or

The most used approach for business-process modelling in current object-oriented methodologies is use case modelling as the origin of the documentation process in UML. Jacobson founded the concept of use cases in the early 1990s [5]. The principal information source on UML is the website [6]. Ambler [7] says, use cases are usually the basis of most object-oriented development methods. Use case modelling consists of the identification of actors, which are external subjects communicating with the software sec-

It is our experience that the accurate description of the system boundary is a troublesome duty, which usually needs deep knowledge of the proposed system, which must be included in the phase of system requirements specification. Some insufficiencies in this

low level of local people participation, which decreases their quality of life.

method.

visualisation.

**3. Organisation modelling**

badly simplify requirement information.

tion of the modelled system.

Business process models show the collaboration of more participants within the solved system. They also can be visually animated in case of need to teach participating people their roles. We need this approach for simulation, validation and verification of the real world problems from the area of agriculture, landscape management and country planning. A fundamental purpose of such a business model is to create and simulate a complex interconnected system, where local actors, citizens, regional government, various interested organisations and partners and other participants mutually communicate. In addition to that, business process models are also the foundation of subsequent system modelling activities of software engineering, organisational design and management consulting. The typical method of performing these activities is to start directly by drawing process maps without performing the initial interviews. However, we present the idea, which for better modelling, we need to use a specific textual technique, which helps us to recognise, define and refine our initial set of business process participants and their properties before performing any graphical modelling activity.

In our experience, any modelling and simulation diagramming technique or instrument aimed for some real and practical projects should be intelligible to the stakeholders who are not typically well educated in ICT. Furthermore, these models must not inadequately simplify or distort requirement information. We recognised that the correct visualisation of the problem into the model and subsequent optional simulation is a challenging but essential task for standard diagramming techniques. We believe that the business community still lacks a powerful yet easy-learned tool for process modelling; capable of performing a comparable function to that operated by Flow-Charts, Entity-Relation Diagrams or Data-Flows Diagrams over the past decades. One of the strengths of these old techniques and tools was that they included only a restricted set of concepts (about 5) and were understandable by problem domain professionals after few minutes of learning. Regrettably, Unified Modelling Language (UML) and Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) approach lost this advantage of clearness and simplicity.
