Business process modeling in Web service-based healthcare systems

Abstract

Web services composition is an emerging paradigm for enabling inter and intra organizational integration, and a landscape of languages and techniques for modeling business processes in web service based environments has emerged and is continuously being enriched. With the advent of modeling standards, different business sectors are investigating the options for modeling their workflows. In terms of business process modeling, healthcare is a rather complex sector of activity. Indeed, modeling healthcare processes presents special requirements dictated by the complicated and dynamic nature of these processes as well as by the specificity and diversity of the actors involved in these processes. Little effort has been dedicated to evaluating the capabilities and limitations of modeling languages based on healthcare requirements. This thesis presents a set of healthcare requirements and proposes an evaluation framework for process modeling languages based on these requirements. The suitability of three major process-based service composition languages, namely BPEL, BPMN and WS-CDL, is evaluated.