Negotiating Deadline Constraints in Inter-organizational Logistic Systems: A Healthcare Case Study

Abstract

Abstract. Current logistics methods are more focused on strategic goals and do not deal with short term objectives, such as, reactivity and real-time constraints. Automated logistics management systems tend to facilitate information sharing between companies, in order to support cooperative strategies, improve productivity, control service quality and reduce administrative costs. In this paper, we discuss the application of Inter-Organizational Workflows (IOW) for automating logistic procedures in a collaborative context. A case study of healthcare process is presented, and focuses on the negotiations aspects of temporal constraints in critical situations. We show how our proposed temporal extension of the CoopFlow approach, brings advantages to automating logistics operational procedures, by providing real-time data knowledge and decision routing for the case of emergency healthcare.

A metamodel to integrate business processes time perspective in BPMN 2.0

“…(i) Some of the former, use Time Petri Nets, for example: Huai et al [19] and Makni et al [23,24] . Some others prefer Timed Automata, such as Watahiki et al [35] or Cheikhrouhou et al [6,7] .…”

“…Researchers have defined business process time dimension with different approaches, such as Timed Automata [6,7,35] , Time Petri Nets [19,23,24] , Time workflow nets [10] , Timed activity graphs [12,13] , BPMN [8,[15][16][17][18]35] and other different techniques [20,21,37] .…”

“…OMG Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) [24] is becoming the de-facto standard and selected technology among other approaches for most business experts to model processes, because it offers the advantages of a graphical language [58] , as well as simplicity, standardization ( ISO/IEC 19510:2013 [26] ) and support for execution processes. It is defined by Bonnet et al [4] as the leading standard for modeling business processes.…”

A Survey on Time-aware Business Process Modeling

“…The authors in (Makni et al, 2011) discuss the application of Inter-Organizational Workflows (IOW) for automating processes in the collaborative context. A case study of emergency healthcare is presented in order to show the feasibility of the proposed temporal extension of the CoopFlow approach detailed in (Makni et al, 2010).…”

“…Indedeed, the visual appeal of the graph-based modeling approaches makes them useful for all kinds of workflow designers since no technical background is required. Similarly, other research efforts (Makni et al, 2010;Makni et al, 2011;Kallel et al, 2009;Guermouche, 2010;Du et al, 2011;Huai et al, 2010) opted for formal specification languages with modeling capabilities such as Petri nets and Timed Automata. Whereas, other approaches like (Wong and Gibbons, 2009) opted for CSP as a process algebra language, which lacks for graphical support.…”