Adaptação de workflows dirigida por contexto aplicada ao planejamento de saúde

Author(s)

Bruno Siqueira Campos Mendonça Vilar

• Document type: Doctoral Thesis
• Press: Campinas, SP.
• Institution: Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Instituto de Computação
• Defense date: 2014-04-14

Examining board members

Claudia Maria Bauzer Medeiros; Cecília Mary Fischer Rubira; Ana Estela Antunes da Silva; Fátima de Lourdes dos Santos Nunes Marques; Lucinéia Heloisa Thom

• Advisor: André Santanchè; Claudia Maria Bauzer Medeiros

Abstract

Workflow Management Systems (WfMS) are used to manage the execution of processes, improving efficiency and efficacy of the procedure in use. The driving forces behind the adoption and development of WfMSs are business and scientific applications. Associated research efforts resulted in consolidated mechanisms, consensual protocols and standards. In particular, a scientific WfMS helps scientists to specify and run distributed experiments. It provides several features that support activities within an experimental environment, such as providing flexibility to change workflow design and keeping provenance (and thus reproducibility) of experiments. On the other hand, barring a few research initiatives, WfMSs do not provide appropriate support to dynamic, context-based customization during run-time; on-the-fly adaptations usually require user intervention. This thesis is concerned with mending this gap, providing WfMSs with a context-aware mechanism to dynamically customize workflow execution. As a result, we designed and developed DynFlow ¿ a software architecture that allows such a customization, applied to a specific domain: healthcare planning. This application domain was chosen because it is a very good example of context-sensitive customization. Indeed, healthcare procedures constantly undergo unexpected changes that may occur during a treatment, such as a patient¿s reaction to a medicine. To meet dynamic customization demands, healthcare planning research has developed semi-automated techniques to support fast changes of the careflow steps according to a patient¿s state and evolution. One such technique is Computer-Interpretable Guidelines (CIG), whose most prominent member is the Task-Network Model (TNM) -- a rule based approach able to build on the fly a plan according to the context. Our research led us to conclude that CIGs do not support features required by health professionals, such as distributed execution, provenance and extensibility, which are available from WfMSs. In other words, CIGs and WfMSs have complementary characteristics, and both are directed towards execution of activities. Given the above facts, the main contributions of the thesis are the following: (a) the design and development of DynFlow, whose underlying model blends TNM characteristics with WfMS; (b) the characterization of the main advantages and disadvantages of CIG models and workflow models; and (c) the implementation of a prototype, based on ontologies, applied to nursing care. Ontologies are used as a solution to enable interoperability across distinct SWfMS internal representations, as well as to support distinct healthcare vocabularies and procedures (AU)

• FAPESP's process: 11/17196-0 - Context-Sensitive workflow adaptation
• Grantee: Bruno Siqueira Campos Mendonça Vilar
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Doctorate