CMMN-compliant tool for the specification and execution of declarative processes for adaptive case management

Source of subsidy

XEROX PARC (USA), CRSNG (EGP), Trisotech Inc.

Professors involved

• Hafedh Mili (UQAM)
• Javier González-Huerta

Students

• Anis Boubaker
• Renata Carvalho

Summary

It is 3:00 pm. You pop-up your 65th shipment order of the current shift. You look for books in the shelves, pick a box of the right size, put the books in the box. Print a shipping slip and an address label, put the slip in the box, close the box, paste the shipping label, and put the box on the conveyor belt. It is labor day week-end. Jogger A comes in complaining of chest pain. You measure their blood oxygen level. It is normal. No history of heart problems. You order an EKG to be done when the EKG machine is free. Ambulances brings too baseball players B and C who knocked heads at third base. Both have a royal headache, and B keeps fainting. You order an EKG for B, to be done ASAP, and CAT-scans for both. As you start connecting the just-freed EKG machine to B, ambulances bring in D and E who crossed paths on a biking trail. There is some bruising, bleeding, and perhaps fractured bones. While you try to figure out what to do with D and E, patient A faints in the waiting room. Skeptics argue that BPM and BPM systems (BPMS) have only solved the ‘easy problems’, such as our Amazon warehouse work: 1) business processes where a handful of contingencies handle all situations, and 2) processes where most of the activities can be automated. However, complex and knowledge intensive processes do not lend themselves to such rigid formalizations. In the ER example, the way a patient is handled depends on, 1) what brings them to ER (type of ailment and severity), 2) their medical history, and 3) what else is happening in ER at that time. ER staff have more or less well-defined protocols to follow, but are otherwise left to contend with, 1) tasks that are mostly manual (e.g. taking a blood sample) and knowledge intensive (diagnosis), 2) different instances of the same process that compete for scarce resources, and 3) the urgency to act. This project aims at developing languages and tools for the specification and execution of such processes so that, 1) the protocols and constraints inherent in such processes can be specified and enforced, without imposing a predetermined task flow, and 2) information and resource sharing can occur across competing instances of the same process.