Tackling Dierent Business Process Perspectives

Business Process Management (BPM) has emerged as a discipline to design, control, analyze, and optimize business operations. Conceptual models lie at the core of BPM. In particular, business process models have been taken up by organizations as a means to describe the main activities that are performed to achieve a specific business goal. Process models generally cover different perspectives that underlie separate yet interrelated representations for analyzing and presenting process information. Being primarily driven by process improvement objectives, traditional business process modeling languages focus on capturing the control flow perspective of business processes, that is, the temporal and logical coordination of activities. Such approaches are usually characterized as \u201cactivity-centric\u201d. Nowadays, activity-centric process modeling languages, such as the Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) standard, are still the most used in practice and benefit from industrial tool support. Nevertheless, evidence shows that such process modeling languages still lack of support for modeling non-control-flow perspectives, such as the temporal, informational, and decision perspectives, among others. This thesis centres on the BPMN standard and addresses the modeling the temporal, informational, and decision perspectives of process models, with particular attention to processes enacted in healthcare domains. Despite being partially interrelated, the main contributions of this thesis may be partitioned according to the modeling perspective they concern. The temporal perspective deals with the specification, management, and formal verification of temporal constraints. In this thesis, we address the specification and run-time management of temporal constraints in BPMN, by taking advantage of process modularity and of event handling mechanisms included in the standard. Then, we propose three different mappings from BPMN to formal models, to validate the behavior of the proposed process models and to check whether they are dynamically controllable. The informational perspective represents the information entities consumed, produced or manipulated by a process. This thesis focuses on the conceptual connection between processes and data, borrowing concepts from the database domain to enable the representation of which part of a database schema is accessed by a certain process activity. This novel conceptual view is then employed to detect potential data inconsistencies arising when the same data are accessed erroneously by different process activities. The decision perspective encompasses the modeling of the decision-making related to a process, considering where decisions are made in the process and how decision outcomes affect process execution. In this thesis, we investigate the use of the Decision Model and Notation (DMN) standard in conjunction with BPMN starting from a pattern-based approach to ease the derivation of DMN decision models from the data represented in BPMN processes. Besides, we propose a methodology that focuses on the integrated use of BPMN and DMN for modeling decision-intensive care pathways in a real-world application domain

Nowhere to nap : how service providers and homeless adult males view the influence criminalizing survival activities has on support service use, an exploratory study

This qualitative study explores how service providers and homeless adult males view the influence criminalizing survival activities has on support service use. Six homeless adult males and five service providers were interviewed for the study. Participant narratives revealed the complexity and uniqueness of homeless experiences. The major findings revealed that homeless individuals do not directly acknowledge the impact criminalizing homeless survival activities has on support service use. On the other hand, service providers were not in agreement about the impact of criminalizing survival activities. While some providers felt the impact was severe, others felt it had no affect on homeless use of support services. Additionally several homeless participants said criminalizing survival activities had no impact on their use of services, but it was clear that these laws had affected other aspects of their life; particularly their mental state. A few service providers acknowledged the subtle and indirect ways criminalization has impacted their clients\u27 use of support services. The findings implied that homeless use of support services may be indirectly, via decreased self-esteem, decreased quality of support services, and decreased ability to access familiar services, impacted by the criminalization of survival activities

Living at the cutting edge: Women's experiences of protection orders. Volume 2: What's to be done? A critical analysis of statutory and practice approaches to domestic violence

This report examines the experiences of 43 Māori, Pakeha, Pasifika and other ethnic minority women who were victims of male partner violence, the impact of the violence on them and their children, and their experiences of the justice system when they reached out for protection. The objectives of the project were to: a.identify and describe the experiences of a sample of women in obtaining protection orders, the impact of protection orders and the response to breaches of protection orders; b.identify those aspects that are working well (that is, positive experiences of protection orders); and c.identify areas for improvement including barriers that prevent women from applying for and obtaining protection orders

An Investigation into the Design, Development and Testing of a Tool to Improve the Accessibility of Access Information for People with Disabilities

Independent access for all to the built environment is one of the most basic of human rights. It provides social inclusion, integration and acceptance in communities. People with disabilities often encounter barriers to such access, barriers that can discriminate and marginalise to the extent that it prohibits independent living. Visiting the built environment becomes a lottery whereby inaccessible features may be present around every corner. People with disabilities deserve more than operating on a system of chance; they require a tool to make an informed decision prior to embarking on a journey. However in order to provide such information three distinct aspects must be considered, the individual, the disability and the built environment. Understanding and building upon each of these aspects holds the solution to the current gap in service provision for people with disabilities.Considerate investigation into the meaning of disability and the requirement of the individual will help strengthen the credibility of any research undertaken to improve the status of people with disabilities. From this the built environment can then be suitably examined as to where accessibility does and does not exist. Once accessibility or indeed inaccessibility information has been collected a means whereby the information may be communicated to people with disabilities must be developed. This research aims to develop a concept entitled “LADDER” to meet this current gap in services. The use of a regulatory requirement as the access audit standard to collect data and a GIS as a communication tool broadens the application of concept not only to people with disabilities but also to key stakeholders who can advance their status within society. It is only through gaining a broad insight into legislative, structural and emotional requirements for access for people with disabilities can worthwhile research on this area be carried out. A multi-dimensional approach to the design of the research was employed. Preliminary research involved an examination of associated literature and surveys of key stakeholders to gain an insight into the determinants of access. Part one of the “LADDER” concept designed an access audit using the regulatory standard that was then tested on a defined research area to assess both the suitability of the legislation as an auditing tool, and to evaluate the effectiveness of the legislation in providing access. Part two then investigated how to best communicate such information to key stakeholders in a meaningful and useful manner using GIS. The result generated an exciting new tool that may not only reform how stakeholders use data and promote and improve disability access, but also change how a person with a disability plans and lives their life. This research was conducted in close collaboration with people of varying abilities as it is only through consulting with and understanding the needs of people with disabilities can society begin to create an environment that is truly accessible and inclusive to all

Combining MAS and P2P systems : the Agent Trees Multi-Agent System (ATMAS)

The seamless retrieval of information distributed across networks has been one of the key goals of many systems. Early solutions involved the use of single static agents which would retrieve the unfiltered data and then process it. However, this was deemed costly and inefficient in terms of the bandwidth since complete files need to be downloaded when only a single value is often all that is required. As a result, mobile agents were developed to filter the data in situ before returning it to the user. However, mobile agents have their own associated problems, namely security and control. The Agent Trees Multi-Agent System (AT-MAS) has been developed to provide the remote processing and filtering capabilities but without the need for mobile code. It is implemented as a Peer to Peer (P2P) network of static intelligent cooperating agents, each of which control one or more data sources. This dissertation describes the two key technologies have directly influenced the design of ATMAS, Peer-to-Peer (P2P) systems and Multi-Agent Systems (MAS). P2P systems are conceptually simple, but limited in power, whereas MAS are significantly more complex but correspondingly more powerful. The resulting system exhibits the power of traditional MAS systems while retaining the simplicity of P2P systems. The dissertation describes the system in detail and analyses its performance.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Best practices in drug demand reduction: beyond promotion, how to measure the impact?

Drug related problems remain an important burden for public health. Prevention is considered key even under very different political orientation. Effective preventive interventions need to rely on supportive policies, sound evidence and effective implementation. The present project touches on all these three dimensions providing an analysis of the world regional, the European and the European National drug strategies on prevention of drug related problems and the way in which these shape the quality assurance systems in the European Member States. Prevention is often associated with provision of information about the risks through, for example media campaigns. We assessed the evidence-base for media campaign interventions to prevent the use of illicit drugs and the emerging role of web and text based interventions to discourage tobacco smoking. We critically commented on the process at the base of evidence dissemination, e.g. the development of guidelines, and we proposed that various study designs should be used to summarize the evidence in support of interventions aimed at changing behaviours. We concluded with a review of the classical epidemiological study designs to discuss strength and weaknesses of evaluating prevention and we investigated how often a method to include evidence from various study designs is used in the systematic reviews of evidence to promote behavioural changes with the aim of providing acceptable and feasible recommendations. This work represents a comprehensive and pragmatic analysis aimed at contributing to a common understanding of the terminology and processes of evidence-based prevention interventions with the objective of facilitating the adoption of effective preventive intervention for drug related problems, and to promote an informed debate about the methods to evaluate interventions