Petri Net Based Reliable Work Flow Framework for Nephrology Unit in Hospital Environment

The 21st century has witnessed a revolution in Biology and Medicine that has radically changed the way health, diagnosis, prognosis, etc., of a disease is monitored nowadays. Accordingly, hospital redesign, workforce planning and scheduling, patient flow, performance management, disease monitoring, and health care technology assessment need to be modeled efficiently. Mathematical modeling and computer simulation techniques have been shown to be increasingly valuable in providing useful information to aid planning and management. Petri Net (PN) is considered as a powerful model since it combines well-defined mathematical theory with a graphical representation which reflects the dynamic behavior of systems of interest. Due to dynamic characteristics, it is found to be more suitable for modeling Hospital Management System (HMS). In this paper, a Petri net model-based reliable workflow framework for Nephrology unit in hospital environment is proposed to track the movement of patients in the unit. The key objective of the proposed reliable workflow framework is to provide a well-organized health care unit to reduce the waiting time of the resource/ patient. The performance of the proposed Petri net model-based reliable workflow framework is simulated and validated through reachability graph using HPSim tool. The proposed Petri net workflow framework for the Nephrology unit can be used to deliver highly efficient and reliable healthcare services

Analysis of Petri Nets with Context-Free Structure Changes

Structure-changing Petri nets are Petri nets with transition replacement rules. In this paper, we investigate the restricted class of structure-changing workflow nets and show that two different reachability properties (concrete and abstract reachability) and word membership in the language of labelled firing sequences are decidable, while a language-based notion of correctness (containment of the language of labelled firing sequences in a regular language) is undecidable

Model interoperability via model driven development

It is widely recognised that software development is a complex process. Among the factors that contribute to its inherent complexity is the gap between the design and the formal analysis domains. Software design is often considered a human oriented task while the analysis phase draws on formal representation and mathematical foundations. An example of this dichotomy is the use of UML for the software design phase and Petri Nets for the analysis; a separation of concerns that leads to the creation of heterogeneous models. Although UML is widely accepted as a language that can be used to model the structural and behavioural aspects of a system, its lack of mathematical foundations is seen as a serious impediment to rigorous analysis. Petri Nets on the other hand have a strong mathematical basis that is well suited for formal analysis; they lack however the appeal and the easeof-use of UML. A pressing concern for software developers is how to bridge the gap between these domains and allow for model interoperability and the integration of different toolsets across them, and thus reduce the complexity of the software development process. The aim of this paper is to present a Model Driven Development (MDD) model transformation which supports a seamless transition between UML and Petri Nets. This is achieved by model interoperability between UML Sequenc