1. Specifying Flexible Human Behavior in Interaction-intensive Process Environments
Christoph Dorn, Schahram Dustdar
Distributed Systems Group,
Vienna University of Technology
Leon J. Osterweil
Department of Computer Science, University of Massachusetts Amherst

2. Motivation
Setting:
Process-driven environments, that exhibit intensive dynamic interaction among users
Health care, negotiation, software engineering, collective intelligence
Modeling challenge:
Interaction remains implicit / not modeled, thus not supported
Modeled with process primitives  might be too rigidly defined
Problem:
Broken processes: unaware of implicit interaction’s side-effects
Inefficient processes: when participants lack flexibility
Approach:
Combine process-centric model (Little-JIL) with collaboration structure-centric model (human Architecture Description Language hADL)
11/28/2018
BPM 2014

3. Emergency Department Scenario
Efficient and effective utilization of resources:
physicians, nurses, triage nurses, clerks, beds …
Constraints:
Only nurses put patients in beds
Same doctor conducts initial and final assessment
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4. Emergency Department Scenario
Highly dynamic ED environment requires bending constraints temporarily
Maintain non-functional properties (patient comfort, length of stay)
Use resources more efficiently
Ad-hoc collaboration and coordination required for:
triage nurse substitutes for regular nurse, swapping of allocated already beds, different doctor conducts final assessment
Dr. B …
Dr. A
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5. Little-JIL
11/28/2018
BPM 2014

6. hADL
11/28/2018
BPM 2014

7. Complementarity Little JIL hADL Communication Primitives
Explicit data passing between steps
Message, Artifact, Stream, etc with user roles
Coordination Primitives
Step sequencing types, step tree structure
Distinction between (multiple) coordinating and work executing roles
Execution Primitives
Steps, Input/Output, Resources, Exceptions
(CRUD) actions on Collaboration objects
Concurrency
Parallel step, multiple step instances
All actions interleaving, concurrent by default, implicit sequence via object creation and consumption
Constraints
Step cardinality, duration, resource groups + filters
Action cardinality
11/28/2018
BPM 2014

8. Joint Modeling Top Down (motivating scenario): Bottom-up:
Specify the process first, as rigorous as needed
Then specify step scopes with significant collaboration needs
Bottom-up:
Specify the various needed collaboration mechanisms, and their integration
Where rigidity needed introduce process artifact and further detail process
11/28/2018
BPM 2014

9. Discussion Limitations: Future work:
Comprehension of two languages (but UML similar)
No default execution framework for hADL
Future work:
Joint Analysis (across models)
Monitoring/Analysis support for detecting deviations
Tool support for deployment
11/28/2018
BPM 2014

10. Conclusions You can model any system with a process language
But it might get awkward to model
Difficult to understand, too rigid, etc
But once you hit the (pragmatic) limits of process primitives:
Switch and combine with a collaboration structure-centric language such as hADL
11/28/2018
BPM 2014

11. Thanks for your attention! Questions?
Christoph Dorn
Distributed Systems Group,
Vienna University of Technology, Austria
WWW:
Twitter: @christophdorn
Supported by: EU FP7 Smart Society (600854),
NSF IIS , CNS , NIST 60NANB13D165
11/28/2018
BPM 2014