3,357 research outputs found

    What Automated Planning Can Do for Business Process Management

    Get PDF
    Business Process Management (BPM) is a central element of today organizations. Despite over the years its main focus has been the support of processes in highly controlled domains, nowadays many domains of interest to the BPM community are characterized by ever-changing requirements, unpredictable environments and increasing amounts of data that influence the execution of process instances. Under such dynamic conditions, BPM systems must increase their level of automation to provide the reactivity and flexibility necessary for process management. On the other hand, the Artificial Intelligence (AI) community has concentrated its efforts on investigating dynamic domains that involve active control of computational entities and physical devices (e.g., robots, software agents, etc.). In this context, Automated Planning, which is one of the oldest areas in AI, is conceived as a model-based approach to synthesize autonomous behaviours in automated way from a model. In this paper, we discuss how automated planning techniques can be leveraged to enable new levels of automation and support for business processing, and we show some concrete examples of their successful application to the different stages of the BPM life cycle

    A standards-based ICT framework to enable a service-oriented approach to clinical decision support

    Get PDF
    This research provides evidence that standards based Clinical Decision Support (CDS) at the point of care is an essential ingredient of electronic healthcare service delivery. A Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) based solution is explored, that serves as a task management system to coordinate complex distributed and disparate IT systems, processes and resources (human and computer) to provide standards based CDS. This research offers a solution to the challenges in implementing computerised CDS such as integration with heterogeneous legacy systems. Reuse of components and services to reduce costs and save time. The benefits of a sharable CDS service that can be reused by different healthcare practitioners to provide collaborative patient care is demonstrated. This solution provides orchestration among different services by extracting data from sources like patient databases, clinical knowledge bases and evidence-based clinical guidelines (CGs) in order to facilitate multiple CDS requests coming from different healthcare settings. This architecture aims to aid users at different levels of Healthcare Delivery Organizations (HCOs) to maintain a CDS repository, along with monitoring and managing services, thus enabling transparency. The research employs the Design Science research methodology (DSRM) combined with The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF), an open source group initiative for Enterprise Architecture Framework (EAF). DSRM’s iterative capability addresses the rapidly evolving nature of workflows in healthcare. This SOA based solution uses standards-based open source technologies and platforms, the latest healthcare standards by HL7 and OMG, Decision Support Service (DSS) and Retrieve, Update Locate Service (RLUS) standard. Combining business process management (BPM) technologies, business rules with SOA ensures the HCO’s capability to manage its processes. This architectural solution is evaluated by successfully implementing evidence based CGs at the point of care in areas such as; a) Diagnostics (Chronic Obstructive Disease), b) Urgent Referral (Lung Cancer), c) Genome testing and integration with CDS in screening (Lynch’s syndrome). In addition to medical care, the CDS solution can benefit organizational processes for collaborative care delivery by connecting patients, physicians and other associated members. This framework facilitates integration of different types of CDS ideal for the different healthcare processes, enabling sharable CDS capabilities within and across organizations

    SIMDAT

    No full text

    Non-functional Property based service selection: A survey and classification of approaches

    Get PDF
    In recent years there has been much eïŹ€ort dedicated to developing approaches for service selection based on non-functional properties. It is clear that much progress has been made, and by considering the individual approaches there is some overlap in functionality, but obviously also some divergence. In this paper we contribute a classiïŹcation of approaches, that is, we deïŹne a number of criteria which allow to differentiate approaches. We use this classiïŹcation to provide a comparison of existing approaches and in that sense provide a survey of the state of the art of the ïŹeld. Finally we make some suggestions as to where the research in this area might be heading and which new challenges need to be addressed

    Authorization schema for electronic health-care records: for Uganda

    Get PDF
    This thesis discusses how to design an authorization schema focused on ensuring each patient's data privacy within a hospital information system

    From planning to resilience: The role (and value) of the emergency plan

    Full text link
    This is the author’s version of a work that was accepted for publication in Technological Forecasting & Social Change. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. A definitive version was subsequently published in Technological Forecasting & Social Change 121 (2017) 17–30. DOI 10.1016/j.techfore.2016.12.004.The study of resilience in the emergency management field is nowadays in effervescence. Traditionally, the robustness of organizations against disasters is based on several pillars: equipment, staff training, organization and, especially, planning. All of these dimensions are aimed at increasing the preparedness and recovery of organizations against disasters. While the approaches to resilience in emergency management focus on the processes that implement these dimensions, we approach resilience-building processes from a different perspective: instead of focusing on planning-related activities, we pay attention to the principal outcome of such activities, namely emergency plan. We show how the management of the emergency plan can contribute to reinforcing an organization's resilience. First, we identify the major resilience-related emergency plan components and suggest improved emergency plans that consider the characteristics that contribute to resilience. Secondly, we show how to reinforce the resilience of the organizations that have emergency plans. Our study is based on QuEP, a quality-based framework for the assessment and improvement of emergency plan management within organizations. We have extended and integrated the resilience characteristics as practices of the QuEP's maturity level hierarchy to make up QuEP + R. We describe its resilience model and give details of a supporting tool, currently under development. © 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.The work of M. C. Penades and J. H. Canos& was partially funded by MINECO under grant CALPE (TIN2015-68608-R) and A.G. NCifiez received support from SENESCYT scholarship program of the Republic of Ecuador.PenadĂ©s Gramage, MC.; NĂșñez Ávila, AG.; Canos Cerda, JH. (2016). From planning to resilience: The role (and value) of the emergency plan. Technological Forecasting and Social Change. 121(3):17-30. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.techfore.2016.12.004S1730121

    A service oriented architecture to implement clinical guidelines for evidence-based medical practice

    Get PDF
    Health information technology (HIT) has been identified as the fundamental driver to streamline the healthcare delivery processes to improve care quality and reduce operational costs. Of the many facets of HIT is Clinical Decision Support (CDS) which provides the physician with patient-specific inferences, intelligently filtered and organized, at appropriate times. This research has been conducted to develop an agile solution to Clinical Decision Support at the point of care in a healthcare setting as a potential solution to the challenges of interoperability and the complexity of possible solutions. The capabilities of Business Process Management (BPM) and Workflow Management systems are leveraged to support a Service Oriented Architecture development approach for ensuring evidence based medical practice. The aim of this study is to present an architecture solution that is based on SOA principles and embeds clinical guidelines within a healthcare setting. Since the solution is designed to implement real life healthcare scenarios, it essentially supports evidence-based clinical guidelines that are liable to change over a period of time. The thesis is divided into four parts. The first part consists of an Introduction to the study and a background to existing approaches for development and integration of Clinical Decision Support Systems. The second part focuses on the development of a Clinical Decision Support Framework based on Service Oriented Architecture. The CDS Framework is composed of standards based open source technologies including JBoss SwitchYard (enterprise service bus), rule-based CDS enabled by JBoss Drools, process modelling using Business Process Modelling and Notation. To ensure interoperability among various components, healthcare standards by HL7 and OMG are implemented. The third part provides implementation of this CDS Framework in healthcare scenarios. Two scenarios are concerned with the medical practice for diagnosis and early intervention (Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease and Lung Cancer), one case study for Genetic data enablement of CDS systems (New born screening for Cystic Fibrosis) and the last case study is about using BPM techniques for managing healthcare organizational perspectives including human interaction with automated clinical workflows. The last part concludes the research with contributions in design and architecture of CDS systems. This thesis has primarily adopted the Design Science Research Methodology for Information Systems. Additionally, Business Process Management Life Cycle, Agile Business Rules Development methodology and Pattern-Based Cycle for E-Workflow Design for individual case studies are used. Using evidence-based clinical guidelines published by UK’s National Institute of Health and Care Excellence, the integration of latest research in clinical practice has been employed in the automated workflows. The case studies implemented using the CDS Framework are evaluated against implementation requirements, conformance to SOA principles and response time using load testing strategy. For a healthcare organization to achieve its strategic goals in administrative and clinical practice, this research has provided a standards based integration solution in the field of clinical decision support. A SOA based CDS can serve as a potential solution to complexities in IT interventions as the core data and business logic functions are loosely coupled from the presentation. Additionally, the results of this this research can serve as an exemplar for other industrial domains requiring rapid response to evolving business processes

    DRIVER Technology Watch Report

    Get PDF
    This report is part of the Discovery Workpackage (WP4) and is the third report out of four deliverables. The objective of this report is to give an overview of the latest technical developments in the world of digital repositories, digital libraries and beyond, in order to serve as theoretical and practical input for the technical DRIVER developments, especially those focused on enhanced publications. This report consists of two main parts, one part focuses on interoperability standards for enhanced publications, the other part consists of three subchapters, which give a landscape picture of current and surfacing technologies and communities crucial to DRIVER. These three subchapters contain the GRID, CRIS and LTP communities and technologies. Every chapter contains a theoretical explanation, followed by case studies and the outcomes and opportunities for DRIVER in this field
    • 

    corecore