11,008 research outputs found
M2Flex: a process metamodel for flexibility at runtime
International audienceExisting design and development methods do not meet designers' and developers' needs. They are difficult to learn and to use; they are complex, sequential and rigid and thus far from being adapted, reliable and efficient. This paper presents M2Flex, a process metamodel for highly supporting flexibility. M2Flex is based on a recent definition of flexibility along four dimensions: (1) versatility, the ability of the metamodel to provide various equivalent choices, (2) granularability, the possibility of defining components with several levels of details, (3) completeness, the possibility of defining optional components and pre-defined reusable results and (4) distensibility, the capacity of the resulting process model to be extended or reduced at runtime. This paper shows how M2Flex is original by the flexibility it offers to designers and developers at runtime
A Process Modelling Framework Based on Point Interval Temporal Logic with an Application to Modelling Patient Flows
This thesis considers an application of a temporal theory to describe and model the patient journey in the hospital accident and emergency (A&E) department. The aim is to introduce a generic but dynamic method applied to any setting, including healthcare. Constructing a consistent process model can be instrumental in streamlining healthcare issues. Current process modelling techniques used in healthcare such as flowcharts, unified modelling language activity diagram (UML AD), and business process modelling notation (BPMN) are intuitive and imprecise. They cannot fully capture the complexities of the types of activities and the full extent of temporal constraints to an extent where one could reason about the flows. Formal approaches such as Petri have also been reviewed to investigate their applicability to the healthcare domain to model processes.
Additionally, to schedule patient flows, current modelling standards do not offer any formal mechanism, so healthcare relies on critical path method (CPM) and program evaluation review technique (PERT), that also have limitations, i.e. finish-start barrier. It is imperative to specify the temporal constraints between the start and/or end of a process, e.g., the beginning of a process A precedes the start (or end) of a process B. However, these approaches failed to provide us with a mechanism for handling these temporal situations. If provided, a formal representation can assist in effective knowledge representation and quality enhancement concerning a process. Also, it would help in uncovering complexities of a system and assist in modelling it in a consistent way which is not possible with the existing modelling techniques.
The above issues are addressed in this thesis by proposing a framework that would provide a knowledge base to model patient flows for accurate representation based on point interval temporal logic (PITL) that treats point and interval as primitives. These objects would constitute the knowledge base for the formal description of a system. With the aid of the inference mechanism of the temporal theory presented here, exhaustive temporal constraints derived from the proposed axiomatic system’ components serves as a knowledge base.
The proposed methodological framework would adopt a model-theoretic approach in which a theory is developed and considered as a model while the corresponding instance is considered as its application. Using this approach would assist in identifying core components of the system and their precise operation representing a real-life domain deemed suitable to the process modelling issues specified in this thesis. Thus, I have evaluated the modelling standards for their most-used terminologies and constructs to identify their key components. It will also assist in the generalisation of the critical terms (of process modelling standards) based on their ontology. A set of generalised terms proposed would serve as an enumeration of the theory and subsume the core modelling elements of the process modelling standards. The catalogue presents a knowledge base for the business and healthcare domains, and its components are formally defined (semantics). Furthermore, a resolution theorem-proof is used to show the structural features of the theory (model) to establish it is sound and complete.
After establishing that the theory is sound and complete, the next step is to provide the instantiation of the theory. This is achieved by mapping the core components of the theory to their corresponding instances. Additionally, a formal graphical tool termed as point graph (PG) is used to visualise the cases of the proposed axiomatic system. PG facilitates in modelling, and scheduling patient flows and enables analysing existing models for possible inaccuracies and inconsistencies supported by a reasoning mechanism based on PITL. Following that, a transformation is developed to map the core modelling components of the standards into the extended PG (PG*) based on the semantics presented by the axiomatic system.
A real-life case (from the King’s College hospital accident and emergency (A&E) department’s trauma patient pathway) is considered to validate the framework. It is divided into three patient flows to depict the journey of a patient with significant trauma, arriving at A&E, undergoing a procedure and subsequently discharged. Their staff relied upon the UML-AD and BPMN to model the patient flows. An evaluation of their representation is presented to show the shortfalls of the modelling standards to model patient flows. The last step is to model these patient flows using the developed approach, which is supported by enhanced reasoning and scheduling
Votación obligatoria y desigualdad del ingreso en una muestra representativa de paÃses
(Disponible en idioma inglés únicamente) En este trabajo se analiza la vinculación entre la votación obligatoria y la distribución del ingreso en una muestra representativa de paÃses de todo el mundo. Nuestro análisis empÃrico de un grupo representativo de 91 paÃses durante el perÃodo de 1960 a 2000 muestra que la votación obligatoria, cuando se hace cumplir estrictamente, mejora la distribución del ingreso según el coeficiente Gini y los ingresos del quintil más bajo de la población. Nuestros hallazgos son valederos ante cambios y adiciones a nuestra base comparativa especificada. Dado que los paÃses más pobres sufren de una desigualdad del ingreso relativamente mayor, puede tener sentido fomentar tales mecanismos de votación en regiones en desarrollo como América Latina. En esta propuesta se supone que los costos burocráticos del diseño y la puesta en práctica de dichos mecanismos no son prohibitivos.
Elastic Business Process Management: State of the Art and Open Challenges for BPM in the Cloud
With the advent of cloud computing, organizations are nowadays able to react
rapidly to changing demands for computational resources. Not only individual
applications can be hosted on virtual cloud infrastructures, but also complete
business processes. This allows the realization of so-called elastic processes,
i.e., processes which are carried out using elastic cloud resources. Despite
the manifold benefits of elastic processes, there is still a lack of solutions
supporting them.
In this paper, we identify the state of the art of elastic Business Process
Management with a focus on infrastructural challenges. We conceptualize an
architecture for an elastic Business Process Management System and discuss
existing work on scheduling, resource allocation, monitoring, decentralized
coordination, and state management for elastic processes. Furthermore, we
present two representative elastic Business Process Management Systems which
are intended to counter these challenges. Based on our findings, we identify
open issues and outline possible research directions for the realization of
elastic processes and elastic Business Process Management.Comment: Please cite as: S. Schulte, C. Janiesch, S. Venugopal, I. Weber, and
P. Hoenisch (2015). Elastic Business Process Management: State of the Art and
Open Challenges for BPM in the Cloud. Future Generation Computer Systems,
Volume NN, Number N, NN-NN., http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.future.2014.09.00
Paying for Altruism: The Case of Organ Donation Revisited
Although many commentators have called for increased efforts to incentivize organ donations, theorists and some evidence suggest these efforts will be ineffective or even could perversely crowd out altruistic efforts. Prior papers examining the impact of tax incentives for donations generally report zero or negative coefficients. We argue these studies incorrectly define their tax variables, and rely on difference-in-differences methods despite likely failures of the requisite parallel trends assumption. We therefore aim to identify the causal effect of tax incentive legislation to serve as an organ donor on living related and unrelated kidney donation rates in the U.S states using more precise tax data and allowing for heterogeneous and time-variant causal effects. Employing a synthetic control method, we find that the passage of tax incentive legislation increased living unrelated kidney donation rates by about 52 percent in New York relative to a comparable synthetic New York in the absence of legislation. We show that this causal effect is robust to the exclusion of any particular state as well as to the use of a very small number of comparison states
Workflows for Quantitative Data Analysis in The Social Sciences
The background is given to how statistical analysis is used by quantitative social scientists. Developing statistical analyses requires substantial effort, yet there are important limitations in current practice. This has motivated the authors to create a more systematic and effective methodology with supporting tools. The approach to modelling quantitative data analysis in the social sciences is presented. Analysis scripts are treated abstractly as mathematical functions and concretely as web services. This allows individual scripts to be combined into high-level workflows. A comprehensive set of tools allows workflows to be defined, automatically validated and verified, and automatically implemented. The workflows expose opportunities for parallel execution, can define support for proper fault handling, and can be realised by non-technical users. Services, workflows and datasets can also be readily shared. The approach is illustrated with a realistic case study that analyses occupational position in relation to health
A novel workflow management system for handling dynamic process adaptation and compliance
Modern enterprise organisations rely on dynamic processes. Generally these processes cannot be modelled once and executed repeatedly without change. Enterprise processes may evolve unpredictably according to situations that cannot always be prescribed. However, no mechanism exists to ensure an updated process does not violate any compliance requirements.
Typical workflow processes may follow a process definition and execute several thousand instances using a workflow engine without any changes. This is suitable for routine business processes. However, when business processes need flexibility, adaptive features are needed. Updating processes may violate compliance requirements so automatic verification of compliance checking is necessary. The research work presented in this Thesis investigates the problem of current workflow technology in defining, managing and ensuring the specification and execution of business processes that are dynamic in nature, combined with policy standards throughout the process lifycle.
The findings from the literature review and the system requirements are used to design the proposed system architecture. Since a two-tier reference process model is not sufficient as a basis for the reference model for an adaptive and compliance workflow management system, a three-tier process model is proposed. The major components of the architecture consist of process models, business rules and plugin modules. This architecture exhibits the concept of user adaptation with structural checks and dynamic adaptation with data-driven checks.
A research prototype - Adaptive and Compliance Workflow Management System (ACWfMS) - was developed based on the proposed system architecture to implement core services of the system for testing and evaluation purposes. The ACWfMS enables the development of a workflow management tool to create or update the process models. It automatically validates compliance requirements and, in the case of violations, visual feedback is presented to the user. In addition, the architecture facilitates process migration to manage specific instances with modified definitions. A case study based on the postgraduate research process domain is discussed
An approach to enacting business process models in support of the life cycle of integrated manufacturing systems
The complexity of enterprise engineering processes requires the application of
reference architectures as means of guiding the achievement of an adequate level of
business integration. This research aims to address important aspects of this
requirement by associating the formalism of reference architectures to various life cycle
phases of integrating manufacturing systems (IMS) and enabling their use in addressing
contemporary system engineering issues.
In pursuit of this aim, the following research activities were carried out: (1) to
devise a framework which supports key phases of the IMS life cycle and (2) to populate
part of this framework with an initial combination of architectures which can be
encapsulated into a computer-aided systems engineering environment. This has led to
the creation of a workbench capable of providing support for modelling, analysis,
simulation, rapid-prototyping, configuration and run-time operation of an IMS, based
on a consistent set of models associated with the engineering processes involved. The
research effort concentrated on selecting and investigating the use of appropriate
formalisms which underpin a selection of architectures and tools (i. e. CIM-OSA, Petrinets,
object-oriented methods and CIM-BIOSYS), this by designing, implementing,
applying and testing the workbench.
The main contribution of this research is to demonstrate that it is possible to
retain an adequate level of formalism, via computational structures and models, which
extend through the IMS life cycle from a conceptual description of the system through
to actions that the system performs when operating. The underlying methodology
which supported this contribution is based on enacting models of system behaviour
which encode important coordination aspects of manufacturing systems. The strategy
for demonstrating the incorporation of formalism to the IMS life cycle was to enable
the aggregation into a workbench of knowledge of 'what' the system is expected to
achieve (i. e. 'problems' to be addressed) and 'how' the system can achieve it (i. e
possible 'solutions'). Within the workbench, such a knowledge is represented through
an amalgamation of business process modelling and object-oriented modelling
approaches which, when adequately manipulated, can lead to business integration
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