Modeling for Rapid Systems Prototyping: Hospital Situational Awareness System Design

Avi Shaked

doi:10.3390/systems9010012

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic caught hospitals unprepared. The need to treat patients remotely and with limited resources led hospitals to identify a gap in their operational situational awareness. During the pandemic, Israeli Aerospace Industries helped hospitals to address the gap by designing a system to support their effective operation, management and decision making. In this paper, we report on the development of a functional, working prototype of the system using model-based engineering approach and tools. Our approach relies on domain-specific modeling, incorporating metamodeling and domain-specific representations based on the problem domain’s ontology. The tools practiced are those embedded into the Eclipse Modeling Framework—specifically, Ecore Tools and Sirius. While these technological tools are typically used to create dedicated, engineering-related modeling tools, in this work, we use them to create a functional system prototype. We discuss the advantages of our approach as well as the challenges with respect to the existing tools and their underlying technology. Based on the reported experience, we encourage practitioners to adopt model-based engineering as an effective way to develop systems. Furthermore, we call researchers and tool developers to improve the state-of-the-art as well as the existing implementations of pertinent tools to support model-based rapid prototyping.

Highlights

We demonstrated that a model-based approach can be used to
We demonstrated that a model-based approach can be used to prototype prototype systems by using model-based development with a twist: (a) detailing the systems by using model-based development with a twist: (a) detailing the structure structure for the system’s information model using a formal metamodel, (b) designing for the system’s information model using a formal metamodel, (b) designing system representations that capture and introduce behavioral aspects implicitly by implementing model-based tools that dynamically act on the formally structured information model, and (c) demonstrating the prototyped system by using the representations to communicate and manipulate a sample information model
Conceptual entities were clearly identified, relations between entities were concretized from somewhat implicit definitions, and their cardinality was explicitly stated, forming an ontology for hospital operations

Summary

Introduction

Hospitals sought effective means to manage their operations and resources and provide better service to their customers (i.e., their patients). Hospital operation can be viewed as a product–service system of the result-oriented type [1], as hospitals need to service patients with the goal of treating them as the functional result and by using appropriate means (resources and products) to do so [2]. Hospitals in Israel are faced with the need to manage their operations and resources more efficiently [3]. This has increased due to the COVID-19 pandemic, with the need to treat isolated patients with limited means

Methods

Results

Conclusion