Rule-Based Dynamic Modification of Workflows in a Medical Domain

A major limitation of current workflow systems is their lack of supporting dynamic workflow modifications. However, this functionality is a major requirement for next-generation systems in order to provide sufficient flexibility to cope with unexpected situations and failures. For example, our experience with data intensive medical domains such as cancer therapy shows that the large number of medical exceptions is hard to manage for domain experts. We therefore have developed a rule- based approach for partially automated management of semantic exceptions during workflow instance execution. When an exception occurs, we automatically determine which running workflow instances w.r.t. which workflow regions are affected, and adjust the control flow. Rules are being used to detect semantic exceptions and to decide which activities have to be dropped or added. For dynamic modification of an affected workflow instance, we provide two algorithms (drcd-and p-algorithm) which locate appropriate deletion or insertion points and carry out the dynamic change of control flow

Towards a New Dimension in Clinical Information Processing (Keynote)

Process-oriented information systems can be very valuable for the clinical personnel since they may actively support the processes in a hospital. By offering tasks right in time and when all information is available to perform them, and by obeying deadlines and other time constraints, it reduces the administrative overhead. Today’s WF technology is still too limited in order to be broadly applicable in this scenario. However, research in WF technology is making quick progress. In the foreseeable future one can expect very powerful WfMS to appear at the market place, offering a powerful platform for implementing process-oriented information systems, also in the clinical domain. This paper sketches the ADEPT WfMS prototype, which is among the functionally most powerful WfMS and proves that one can really build systems of this kind which offer all this functionality within one system

Beyond Discrete E-Services: Composing Session-oriented Services in Telecommunications

We distinguish between two broad categories of e-services: discrete services (e.g., add item to shopping cart, charge a credit card), and session-oriented ones (teleconference, collaborative text chat, streaming video, c-commerce interactions). Discrete services typically have short duration, and cannot respond to external asynchronous events. Session-oriented services have longer duration (perhaps hours), and typically can respond to asynchronous events (e.g., the ability to add a new participant to a teleconference). When composing discrete e-services it usually suffices to use a process model and engine that composes the e-services as relatively independent tasks. But when composing session-oriented e-services, the engine must be able to receive asynchronous events and determine how and whether to impact the active sessions. For example, if a teleconference participant loses his wireless connection then it might be appropriate to trigger an announcement to some or all of the other participants. In this paper we propose a process model and architecture for flexible composition and execution of discrete and session-oriented services. Unlike previous approaches, our model permits the specification of scripted active flowcharts that can be triggered by asynchronous events, and can appropriately impact active sessions. We introduce here a model and language for specifying process schemas (essentially a collection of active flowcharts) that combine multiple e-services, and describe a prototype engine for executing these process schemas

Änderungsrechte in adaptiven Workflow-Management-Systemen

Adaptive Workflow-Management-Systeme (WfMS) sind eine neuartige Technologie für die Realisierung flexibler, prozessorientierter Anwendungen. Sie gestatten es prozessbeteiligten Anwendern zur Laufzeit, in flexibler Art und Weise vom modellierten Ablauf abzuweichen, etwa durch Einfügen, Löschen oder Verschieben von Prozess-Schritten. Allerdings bieten adaptive WfMS derzeit noch keine ausreichenden Sicherheitskonzepte zur Kontrolle solcher Ad-hoc-Änderungen. Entsprechende Handlungsmöglichkeiten stehen entweder nur einzelnen Akteuren (z. B. Prozessverantwortlichen) offen, was vielfach zu restriktiv ist, oder aber sie können unkontrolliert durch beliebige Benutzer erfolgen. In diesem Beitrag diskutieren wir erstmals Anforderungen an Berechtigungskonzepte für Adhoc- Änderungen. Am Beispiel des Ad-hoc-Einfügens von Prozess-Schritten stellen wir systematisch dar, welche Berechtigungskonzepte konkret erforderlich sind und wie sich entsprechende Änderungsrechte möglichst einfach und kompakt definieren lassen. Dabei verfolgen wir einen rollenbasierten Ansatz, der in dem von uns entwickelten WfMS auch die Grundlage für die Definition und Verwaltung anderer Zugriffs- und Ausführungsrechte bildet. Unser Hauptaugenmerk gilt der komfortablen Festlegung und Pflege der Änderungsrechte. Entsprechende Berechtigungskonzepte bildet einen unverzichtbaren Bestandteil eines jeden adaptiven WfMS

Modellierung planbarer Abweichungen in Workflow-Management-Systemen

Workflow-Management-Systeme (WfMS) sind eine vielversprechende Technologie für die Realisierung prozessorientierter Anwendungen. Allerdings bieten heutige WfMS keine ausreichende Unterstützung zur Behandlung von Ausnahmen. Im ADEPT-Projekt haben wir deshalb fortschrittliche Modellierungs- und Ausführungskonzepte entwickelt, die auf eine Erhöhung der Flexibilität von WfMS zielen. Sie ermöglichen es zum einen, planbare Abweichungen vom Standardablauf eines Arbeitsprozesses bereits zur Modellierzeit festzulegen, zum anderen können nicht vorhersehbare Abweichungen auch dynamisch zur Laufzeit erfolgen. Dieser Beitrag konzentriert sich auf den erstgenannten Aspekt. Er zeigt auf, wie sich planbare Abweichungen sinnvoll modellieren lassen, welche Anforderungen dabei bestehen und welche Möglichkeiten bzw. Grenzen mit einem solchen Ansatz verbunden sind. Unsere Erfahrung mit konkreten Anwendungen aus dem Krankenhausbereich hat gezeigt, dass entsprechende Modellierungsmöglichkeiten einen wichtigen Beitrag zur Erhöhung der Flexibilität von WfMS leisten

Clinical Workflows - The Killer Application for Process-oriented Information Systems?

There is an increasing interest in changing information systems to support business processes in a more direct way. Workflow technology is a very interesting candidate to achieve this goal. Hence the important question arises, how far do we get using this technology. Is its functionality powerful enough to support a wide range of applications or is it only suitable for rather simple ones? And, if the latter is the case, are the missing functions of the “just to do” type or are more fundamental issues addressed? The paper uses the clinical domain to motivate and to elaborate the functionality needed to adequately support an advanced application environment. It shows that workflow technology is still lacking important features to serve this domain. The paper surveys the state of the art and it presents solutions for some issues based on the concepts elaborated in the ADEPT project

Enterprise-wide and Cross-enterprise Workflow Management: Concepts, Systems, Applications

These proceedings comprise a number of papers on issues related to cross-organizational workflow management

Aide à la conception de workflows personnalisés : application à la prise en charge à domicile

Aujourd'hui, les TIC sont reconnues comme un élément inéluctable pour améliorer les pratiques et les usages du secteur de la santé et particulièrement celui de la PAD. Cependant, malgré tout l'engouement et les avancés accomplies dans ce domaine, un problème de coordination et de continuité des soins personnalisés aux patients subsiste toujours. Un système de gestion de workflow semble approprié pour assurer cette coordination de la PAD. Toutefois, les caractéristiques des processus de la PAD, que nous avons identifié, compliquent la conception de ce workflow. En effet, le processus de la PAD a la particularité d'être un processus, personnalisé pour chaque patient, collaboratif évoluant dans un environnement très dynamique et incertain avec une forte contrainte temporelle. Dans le but d'améliorer la coordination en tenant compte des caractéristiques des processus de la PAD, nous avons proposé une approche de conception d'un workflow personnalisé basé sur les modèles de connaissances et guidée par une approche dirigée par les modèles. Cette approche préconise l'utilisation d'ontologies du domaine de la PAD et du BPMN dans un processus de transformations qui aboutit à la conception d'un workflow personnalisé pour un patient donnée selon son profil. Les travaux développés dans ce mémoire présentent une partie de cette approche qui consiste à construire un processus BPMN personnalisé. Les contributions, que nous y exposons sont : premièrement, la conception d'une ontologie du domaine de la PAD. Cette ontologie inclut : le profil patient (pathologie, entourage, environnement,...), l'aspect organisationnel de la PAD (le rôle de chaque intervenant) et le traitement ou les interventions nécessaires pour chaque pathologie. Deuxièmement une proposition de règles de correspondances entre les termes du domaine de la PAD et du BPMN. Finalement des requêtes permettant la conception d'un processus BPMN personnalisé. Cette approche a été testée sur un cas d'étude de la PAD qui montre son bon fonctionnement.Today, ICT is recognized as a requirement to improve the practices of the health sector and particularly the home care area. However, despite all the advances accomplished in this field, a problem of coordination and continuity of personalized care remains. A workflow management system seems appropriate to ensure the coordination of home care. However, the characteristics of the home care processes complicate the design of the workflow. Indeed, the processes of home care need to be customized for each patient, collaborative, evolving in a very dynamic and uncertain environment with a strong time constraint. In order to improve the coordination taking into account the characteristics of the home care process, we propose an approach to design a custom workflow models based on knowledge and guided by a model driven approach. This approach advocates the use of ontologies in the field of home care and BPMN into a process of transformation that leads to the design of a custom workflow for a given patient according to his profile. The work developed in this thesis are part of this approach is to build a customized BPMN process. Contributions are: first, the design of an ontology for home care. This ontology includes: patient profile (pathology, environment, ...), the organizational aspect of the home care (the role of each actor) and the treatment or interventions necessary for each pathology. Secondly, a proposal of correspondence rules between the terms in the field of home care and BPMN. Finally queries are performed to design a customized BPMN process. This approach has been tested on a significative case study

Event-Oriented Dynamic Adaptation of Workflows: Model, Architecture and Implementation

Workflow management is widely accepted as a core technology to support long-term business processes in heterogeneous and distributed environments. However, conventional workflow management systems do not provide sufficient flexibility support to cope with the broad range of failure situations that may occur during workflow execution. In particular, most systems do not allow to dynamically adapt a workflow due to a failure situation, e.g., to dynamically drop or insert execution steps. As a contribution to overcome these limitations, this dissertation introduces the agent-based workflow management system AgentWork. AgentWork supports the definition, the execution and, as its main contribution, the event-oriented and semi-automated dynamic adaptation of workflows. Two strategies for automatic workflow adaptation are provided. Predictive adaptation adapts workflow parts affected by a failure in advance (predictively), typically as soon as the failure is detected. This is advantageous in many situations and gives enough time to meet organizational constraints for adapted workflow parts. Reactive adaptation is typically performed when predictive adaptation is not possible. In this case, adaptation is performed when the affected workflow part is to be executed, e.g., before an activity is executed it is checked whether it is subject to a workflow adaptation such as dropping, postponement or replacement. In particular, the following contributions are provided by AgentWork: A Formal Model for Workflow Definition, Execution, and Estimation: In this context, AgentWork first provides an object-oriented workflow definition language. This language allows for the definition of a workflow\u92s control and data flow. Furthermore, a workflow\u92s cooperation with other workflows or workflow systems can be specified. Second, AgentWork provides a precise workflow execution model. This is necessary, as a running workflow usually is a complex collection of concurrent activities and data flow processes, and as failure situations and dynamic adaptations affect running workflows. Furthermore, mechanisms for the estimation of a workflow\u92s future execution behavior are provided. These mechanisms are of particular importance for predictive adaptation. Mechanisms for Determining and Processing Failure Events and Failure Actions: AgentWork provides mechanisms to decide whether an event constitutes a failure situation and what has to be done to cope with this failure. This is formally achieved by evaluating event-condition-action rules where the event-condition part describes under which condition an event has to be viewed as a failure event. The action part represents the necessary actions needed to cope with the failure. To support the temporal dimension of events and actions, this dissertation provides a novel event-condition-action model based on a temporal object-oriented logic. Mechanisms for the Adaptation of Affected Workflows: In case of failure situations it has to be decided how an affected workflow has to be dynamically adapted on the node and edge level. AgentWork provides a novel approach that combines the two principal strategies reactive adaptation and predictive adaptation. Depending on the context of the failure, the appropriate strategy is selected. Furthermore, control flow adaptation operators are provided which translate failure actions into structural control flow adaptations. Data flow operators adapt the data flow after a control flow adaptation, if necessary. Mechanisms for the Handling of Inter-Workflow Implications of Failure Situations: AgentWork provides novel mechanisms to decide whether a failure situation occurring to a workflow affects other workflows that communicate and cooperate with this workflow. In particular, AgentWork derives the temporal implications of a dynamic adaptation by estimating the duration that will be needed to process the changed workflow definition (in comparison with the original definition). Furthermore, qualitative implications of the dynamic change are determined. For this purpose, so-called quality measuring objects are introduced. All mechanisms provided by AgentWork include that users may interact during the failure handling process. In particular, the user has the possibility to reject or modify suggested workflow adaptations. A Prototypical Implementation: Finally, a prototypical Corba-based implementation of AgentWork is described. This implementation supports the integration of AgentWork into the distributed and heterogeneous environments of real-world organizations such as hospitals or insurance business enterprises