A Method for Systematic Adaptation and Synchronization of Healthcare Processes

International organizations, as the World Health Organization (WHO) and national governments are constantly defining (or modifying) new healthcare protocols and procedures. Those changes have a significant impact, on one side, on the organizational concerns of a great number of healthcare institutions and centers, and on the other side, on their health information systems that need to be adapted according to the new (or modified) procedures. Administrative workflows are commonly defined by a high level entity and they must then be applied on different institutions ruled by this high level entity. Those workflows must then be adapted to the particular circumstances of each institution, complying with the general regulations of the process established at the top level. This problem, called Hierarchical Adaptation Problem, also implies establishing the methods to evolve together the high level regulation. Such methods must maintain the consistency among the different levels by means of the propagation of the changes to all the different adaptations of the original workflow. To solve this problem, this work introduces the Hierarchical Adaptation Method. A method based on ontologies to define the rules that must be satisfied by a generic workflow to be considered adaptable to different application cases and the rules that must be satisfied by its adapted versions. Moreover, it provides the operations to facilitate both adaptation of administrative workflows and propagation of changes

An approach to control collaborative processes in PLM systems

Companies that collaborate within the product development processes need to implement an effective management of their collaborative activities. Despite the implementation of a PLM system, the collaborative activities are not efficient as it might be expected. This paper presents an analysis of the problems related to the collaborative work using a PLM system. From this analysis, we propose an approach for improving collaborative processes within a PLM system, based on monitoring indicators. This approach leads to identify and therefore to mitigate the brakes of the collaborative work

Methodological concepts for integrated assessment of agricultural and environmental policies in SEAMLESS-IF

Agricultural and Food Policy, Environmental Economics and Policy, Farm Management, Land Economics/Use,

Service Orchestration and Federation for Verticals

The next generation mobile transport networks shall transform into flexible and agile SDN/NFV-based transport and computing platforms, capable of simultaneously supporting the needs of different vertical industries, e.g., automotive, e-health and media, by meeting a diverse range of networking and computing requirements. Network slicing, has emerged as the most promising approach to address this challenge by enabling per-slice management of virtualized resources and provisioning and managing slices tailored to the needs of different vertical industries. Service orchestration is the key enabler for slicing that allows efficient placement of virtual network functions over the infrastructure as well as optimal allocation of virtual resources among all network slices to deliver guaranteed, reliable and scalable services of different verticals. Besides, due to the limited footprint of infrastructure operators, it is also required to enable the interconnection and federation of multiple administrative domains, to effectively allow services to span across several providers. This paper presents the design of Service Orchestrator (SO) in the 5G- TRANSFORMER system, which deals with service orchestration and federation across multiple domains.This work has been partially funded by the EU H2020 5G-TRANSFORMER Project (grant no. 761536

An Evaluation of Inter-Organizational Workflow Modelling Formalisms

This paper evaluates the dynamic aspects of the UML in the context of inter-organizational workflows. Two evaluation methodologies are used. The first one is ontological and is based on the BWW (Bunge-Wand-Weber) models. The second validation is based on prototyping and consists in the development of a workflow management system in the aerospace industry. Both convergent and divergent results are found from the two validations. Possible enhancements to the UML formalism are suggested from the convergent results. On the other hand, the divergent results suggest the need for a contextual specification in the BWW models. Ce travail consiste en une évaluation des aspects dynamiques du language UML dans un contexte de workflow inter-organisationnel. Le choix du language par rapport à d'autres est motivé par sa richesse grammaticale lui offrant une très bonne adaptation à ce contexte. L'évaluation se fait par une validation ontologique basée sur les modèles BWW (Bunge-Wand-Weber) et par la réalisation d'un prototype de système de gestion de workflows inter-organisationnels. À partir des résultats convergents obtenus des deux différentes analyses, des améliorations au formalisme UML sont suggérées. D'un autre coté, les analyses divergentes suggèrent une possibilité de spécifier les modèles BWW à des contextes plus particuliers tels que ceux des workflows et permettent également de suggérer d'autres améliorations possibles au langage.Ontology, Conceptual study, Prototype Validation, UML, IS development methods and tools., Ontologie, étude conceptuelle, validation du prototype, UML, méthodes et outils de développement IS