Adaptive Guideline-based Treatment Workflows with AdaptFlow

One goal in modern medicine is to increase the treatment quality. A major step towards this aim is to support the execution of standardized, guideline-based clinical protocols, which are used in many medical domains, e.g., for oncological chemotherapies. Standardized chemotherapy protocols contain detailed and structured therapy plans describing the single therapy steps (e.g., examinations or drug applications). Therefore, workflow management systems offer good support for these processes. However, the treatment of a particular patient often requires modifications due to unexpected infections, toxicities, or social factors. The modifications are described in the treatment protocol but not as part of the standard process. To be able to further execute the therapy workflows in case of exceptions running workflows have to be adapted dynamically. Furthermore, the physician should be supported by automated exception detection and decision support for derivation of necessary modifications. The AdaptFlow prototype offers the required support for the field of oncological chemotherapies by enhancing a workflow system with dynamic workflow adaptation and rule based decision support for exception detection and handling

Compliance of Semantic Constraints - A Requirements Analysis for Process Management Systems

Key to the use of process management systems (PrMS) in practice is their ability to facilitate the implementation, execution, and adaptation of business processes while still being able to ensure error-free process executions. Mechanisms have been developed to prevent errors at the syntactic level such as deadlocks. In many application domains, processes often have to comply with business level rules and policies (i.e., semantic constraints). Hence, in order to ensure error-free executions at the semantic level, PrMS need certain control mechanisms for validating and ensuring the compliance with semantic constraints throughout the process lifecycle. In this paper, we discuss fundamental requirements for a comprehensive support of semantic constraints in PrMS. Moreover, we provide a survey on existing approaches and discuss to what extent they meet the requirements and which challenges still have to be tackled. Finally, we show how the challenge of life time compliance can be dealt with by integrating design time and runtime process validation

Integration and verification of semantic constraints in adaptive process management systems

Adaptivity in process management systems is key to their successful applicability in practice. Approaches have been already developed to ensure system correctness after arbitrary process changes at the syntactical level (e.g., avoiding inconsistencies such as deadlocks or missing input parameters after a process change). However, errors may be still caused at the semantical level (e.g., violation of business rules). Therefore, the integration and verification of domain knowledge will flag a milestone in the development of adaptive process management technology. In this paper, we introduce a framework for defining semantic constraints over processes in such a way that they can express real-world domain knowledge on the one hand and are still manageable concerning the effort for maintenance and semantic process verification on the other hand. This can be used to detect semantic conflicts (e.g., drug incompatibilities) when modeling process templates, applying ad hoc changes at process instance level, and propagating process template modifications to already running process instances, even if they have been already individually modified themselves; i.e., we present techniques to ensure semantic correctness for single and concurrent changes which are, in addition, minimal regarding the set of semantic constraints to be checked. Together with further optimizations of the semantic checks based on certain process meta model properties this allows for efficiently verifying processes. Altogether, the framework presented in this paper provides the basis for process management systems which are adaptive and semantic-aware at the same time

On Enabling Integrated Process Compliance with Semantic Constraints in Process Management Systems

Key to broad use of process management systems (PrMS) in practice is their ability to foster and ease the implementation, execution, monitoring, and adaptation of business processes while still being able to ensure robust and error-free process enactment. To meet these demands a variety of mechanisms has been developed to prevent errors at the structural level (e.g., deadlocks). In many application domains, however, processes often have to comply with business level rules and policies (i.e., semantic constraints) as well. Hence, to ensure error-free executions at the semantic level, PrMS need certain control mechanisms for validating and ensuring the compliance with semantic constraints. In this paper, we discuss fundamental requirements for a comprehensive support of semantic constraints in PrMS. Moreover, we provide a survey on existing approaches and discuss to what extent they are able to meet the requirements and which challenges still have to be tackled. In order to tackle the particular challenge of providing integrated compliance support over the process lifecycle, we introduce the SeaFlows framework. The framework introduces a behavioural level view on processes which serves a conceptual process representation for constraint specification approaches. Further, it provides general compliance criteria for static compliance validation but also for dealing with process changes. Altogether, the SeaFlows framework can serve as formal basis for realizing integrated support of semantic constraints in PrMS

SmartPM: automatic adaptation of dynamic processes at run-time

The research activity outlined in this thesis is devoted to define a general approach, a concrete architecture and a prototype Process Management System (PMS) for the automated adaptation of dynamic processes at run-time, on the basis of a declarative specification of process tasks and relying on well-established reasoning about actions and planning techniques. The purpose is to demonstrate that the combination of procedural and imperative models with declarative elements, along with the exploitation of techniques from the field of artificial intelligence (AI), such as Situation Calculus, IndiGolog and automated planning, can increase the ability of existing PMSs of supporting dynamic processes. To this end, a prototype PMS named SmartPM, which is specifically tailored for supporting collaborative work of process participants during pervasive scenarios, has been developed. The adaptation mechanism deployed on SmartPM is based on execution monitoring for detecting failures at run-time, which does not require the definition of the adaptation strategy in the process itself (as most of the current approaches do), and on automatic planning techniques for the synthesis of the recovery procedure

Eighth Workshop and Tutorial on Practical Use of Coloured Petri Nets and the CPN Tools, Aarhus, Denmark, October 22-24, 2007

This booklet contains the proceedings of the Eighth Workshop on Practical Use of Coloured Petri Nets and the CPN Tools, October 22-24, 2007. The workshop is organised by the CPN group at the Department of Computer Science, University of Aarhus, Denmark. The papers are also available in electronic form via the web pages: http://www.daimi.au.dk/CPnets/workshop0