Service Workflow Research Articles

Evaluation of integrated care services in Catalonia: population-based and service-based real-life deployment protocols

BackgroundComprehensive assessment of integrated care deployment constitutes a major challenge to ensure quality, sustainability and transferability of both healthcare policies and services in the transition toward a coordinated service delivery scenario. To this end, the manuscript articulates four different protocols aiming at assessing large-scale implementation of integrated care, which are being developed within the umbrella of the regional project Nextcare (2016–2019), undertaken to foster innovation in technologically-supported services for chronic multimorbid patients in Catalonia (ES) (7.5 M inhabitants).Whereas one of the assessment protocols is designed to evaluate population-based deployment of care coordination at regional level during the period 2011–2017, the other three are service-based protocols addressing: i) Home hospitalization; ii) Prehabilitation for major surgery; and, iii) Community-based interventions for frail elderly chronic patients. All three services have demonstrated efficacy and potential for health value generation. They reflect different implementation maturity levels. While full coverage of the entire urban health district of Barcelona-Esquerra (520 k inhabitants) is the main aim of home hospitalization, demonstration of sustainability at Hospital Clinic of Barcelona constitutes the core goal of the prehabilitation service. Likewise, full coverage of integrated care services addressed to frail chronic patients is aimed at the city of Badalona (216 k inhabitants).MethodsThe population-based analysis, as well as the three service-based protocols, follow observational and experimental study designs using a non-randomized intervention group (integrated care) compared with a control group (usual care) with a propensity score matching method. Evaluation of cost-effectiveness of the interventions using a Quadruple aim approach is a central outcome in all protocols. Moreover, multi-criteria decision analysis is explored as an innovative method for health delivery assessment. The following additional dimensions will also be addressed: i) Determinants of sustainability and scalability of the services; ii) Assessment of the technological support; iii) Enhanced health risk assessment; and, iv) Factors modulating service transferability.DiscussionThe current study offers a unique opportunity to undertake a comprehensive assessment of integrated care fostering deployment of services at regional level. The study outcomes will contribute refining service workflows, improving health risk assessment and generating recommendations for service selection.Trials registrationNCT03130283 (date released 04/06/2018), NCT03768050 (date released 12/05/2018), NCT03767387 (date released 12/05/2018).

Student Support Services with Remedial Management System

An innovative approach to support student services for an educational institution is proposed in this paper. This approach is applied to integrate the student centralized services to help problem student who probably dropping out the university. The student support service workflow information system (SSS WIS) is developed to support the approach. The system consists of: (1) student information system to analyze the problems that will occur in the following area: financial, health, social and psychological aspects, (2) the notification and appointment system to solve problems, and (3) troubleshooting system. The SSS WIS can be used to systematically support the students. It can solve the student problems on demand. This affects the higher retention rate. In addition, students can graduate from the university on time.

Report of the ALCTS Technical Services Workflow Efficiency Interest Group Meeting. American Library Association Annual Conference, New Orleans, June 2018

The ALCTS Technical Services Workflow Efficiency Interest Group (TSWEIG) held its meeting at the American Library Association Annual Conference in New Orleans. The session began with a short busine...

Security modeling and efficient computation offloading for service workflow in mobile edge computing

It is a big challenge for resource-limited mobile devices (MDs) to execute various complex and energy-consumed mobile applications. Fortunately, as a novel computing paradigm, edge computing (MEC) can provide abundant computing resources to execute all or parts of the tasks of MDs and thereby can greatly reduce the energy of MD and improve the QoS of applications. However, offloading workflow tasks to the MEC servers are liable to external security threats (e.g., snooping, alteration). In this paper, we propose a security and energy efficient computation offloading (SEECO) strategy for service workflows in MEC environment, the goal of which is to optimize the energy consumption under the risk probability and deadline constraints. First, we build a security overhead model to measure the execution time of security services. Then, we formulate the computation offloading problem by incorporating the security, energy consumption and execution time of workflow application. Finally, based on the genetic algorithm (GA), the corresponding coding strategies of SEECO are devised by considering tasks execution order and location and security services selection. Extensive experiments with the variety of workflow parameters demonstrate that SEECO strategy can achieve the security and energy efficiency for the mobile applications. ’

Interoperable and network‐aware service workflows for big data executions at internet scale

SummarySharing of computing resources and workload across different big data frameworks is challenging due to their lack of interoperable interfaces. In contrast, web services natively support an interoperable execution. Therefore, an increasing number of big data workflows are composed of data services and web service implementations that access and process big data. On the other hand, big data execution in the wide area networks needs to minimize latency and communication overheads to be able to scale seamlessly. Lack of network‐awareness of classic web service execution beyond data centers significantly challenges the scope of data services.Software‐Defined Networking (SDN) offers better control and management to the network, by unifying the control plane centrally, away from the distributed data plane devices. In this paper, we propose Software‐Defined Data Services (SDDS), an SDN‐based distributed service composition and workflow placement approach for data services in wide area networks. We first present the design of an SDDS framework that models the big data executions as composable data service workflows in multi‐domain network environments. We then evaluate the performance of a prototype SDDS framework through microbenchmarks. The benchmarks highlight the efficiency of SDDS in data service execution inside and beyond data centers.

Development and validation of a simple screening tool for caregiver grief in dementia caregiving

BackgroundLoss and grief are experienced by caregivers of persons with dementia (PWD), relating to the ambiguous loss of PWD even when they are still alive and the anticipation of future loss related to their physical death. Such experience of caregiver grief is not easily recognized in clinical practice, despite its association with adverse effects such as caregiver burden, caregiver depression and caregivers’ desire to place the PWD in nursing homes. We constructed a simple screening tool – based on factors associated with caregiver grief – to identify caregivers with high grief.MethodsSpouses or children of community-dwelling PWD (n = 403) completed self-administered questionnaires containing a well-established grief scale and information related to the caregiver and PWD. We split the study sample into two – the derivation sample (n = 300) was used to identify factors associated with grief (using logistic regression) and derive a simple tool based on the number of identified factors; the validation sample (n = 103) evaluated the performance of the tool using the receiver-operating-characteristic-curve-analysis (ROC).ResultsFour key factors were identified by the multivariable regression – more severe dementia (odds ratio, OR 6.9), behavioral problems in PWD (OR 5.0), spousal caregivers (OR 6.0) and daily caregiving (OR 3.0). The screening tool (based on the number of key factors) had an area under ROC of 0.77. At the optimal cut-off of ≥2 key factors, the tool had a sensitivity of 0.91 and a specificity of 0.42.ConclusionsThe identified factors are consistent with current understanding on caregiver grief. They can be easily integrated into the workflow of routine services to screen for caregivers who are more likely to benefit from further grief-related assessment.

Multi-objective resource allocation for Edge Cloud based robotic workflow in smart factory

Multi-robotic services are widely used to enhance the efficiency of Industry 4.0 applications including emergency management in smart factory. The workflow of these robotic services consists of data hungry, delay sensitive and compute intensive tasks. Generally, robots are not enriched in computational power and storage capabilities. It is thus beneficial to leverage the available Cloud resources to complement robots for executing robotic workflows. When multiple robots and Cloud instances work in a collaborative manner, optimal resource allocation for the tasks of a robotic workflow becomes a challenging problem. The diverse energy consumption rate of both robot and Cloud instances, and the cost of executing robotic workflow in such a distributed manner further intensify the resource allocation problem. Since the tasks are inter-dependent, inconvenience in data exchange between local robots and remote Cloud also degrade the service quality. Therefore, in this paper, we address simultaneous optimization of makespan, energy consumption and cost while allocating resources for the tasks of a robotic workflow. As a use case, we consider resource allocation for the robotic workflow of emergency management service in smart factory. We design an Edge Cloud based multi-robot system to overcome the limitations of remote Cloud based system in exchanging delay sensitive data. The resource allocation for robotic workflow is modelled as a constrained multi-objective optimization problem and it is solved through a multi-objective evolutionary approach, namely, NSGA-II algorithm. We have redesigned the NSGA-II algorithm by defining a new chromosome structure, pre-sorted initial population and mutation operator. It is further augmented by selecting the minimum distant solution from the non-dominated front to the origin while crossing over the chromosomes. The experimental results based on synthetic workload demonstrate that our augmented NSGA-II algorithm outperforms the state-of-the-art works by at least 18% in optimizing makespan, energy and cost attributes on various scenarios.

An integrated, collaborative healthcare model for the early diagnosis and management of dementia: Preliminary audit results from the first transdisciplinary service integrating family medicine and geriatric psychiatry services to the heart of patients\u2019 homes

BackgroundThe number of dementia cases is expected to rise exponentially over the years in many parts of the world. Collaborative healthcare partnerships are envisaged as a solution to this problem. Primary care physicians form the vanguard of early detection of dementia and influence clinical care that these patients receive. However, evidence suggests that they will benefit from closer support from specialist services in dementia care. An interdisciplinary, collaborative memory clinic was established in 2012 as a collaborative effort between a large family medicine based service and a specialist geriatric psychiatry service in Singapore. It is the first service in the world that integrates a family medicine based service with geriatric psychiatry expertise in conjunction with community-based partnerships in an effort to provide holistic, integrated care right into the heart of patients’ homes as well as training in dementia care for family medicine physicians. We describe our model of care and the preliminary findings of our audit on the results of this new model of care.MethodsThis was a retrospective audit done on the electronic medical records of all patients seen at the Memory Clinic in Choa Chu Kang Polyclinic from August 2013 to March 2016. The information collected included gender, referral source, patient trajectories, presence of behavioural and psychological symptoms of dementia and percentage of caregivers found to be in need of support. A detailed outline of the service workflow and processes were described.ResultsA majority (93.5%) of the patients had their memory problems managed at the memory clinic without escalation to other specialist services. 22.7% of patients presented with behavioural and psychological symptoms of dementia. When initially assessed, a majority (82.2%) of patients’ caregivers were found to be in need of support with 99.5% of such caregivers’ needs addressed with memory clinic services.ConclusionOur model of care has the potential to shape future dementia care in Singapore and other countries with a similar healthcare setting. Redesigning and evolving healthcare services to promote close collaboration between primary care practitioners and specialist services for dementia care can facilitate seamless delivery of care for the benefit of patients.

The Extension of Semantic Formalization of Service Workflow Specification Language

Service-Oriented Computing (SOC) is changing the way modern information systems that are designed, operated, and evolved. SOC makes possible to aggregate distributed resources at the phases of decision-making support and system operations. When myriads of resources with similar functionalities are available, effective methodologies are demanded to select services and compose them as service workflows for the specified goals. The computation for workflow composition is very complex since it depends on the numbers of services and their dynamic characteristics. Therefore, composing optimized workflows in a timely manner poses a great challenge. We are highly motivated to reduce the complexity of service selection and composition. The formalized semantics in SWSpec is extended so that unqualified or inferior services can be eliminated directly from the scope of the design solution space. In this paper, a brief review of the proposed SWSpec language is given and the focus is on the sematic formalization. A new compositional proof-system is developed with a set of inference rules and the proven system properties. The proposed semantic formalization has its great significance in reducing the complexity of composing workflows and developing efficient algorithms for compliance checking.

Relational Model for Parameter Description in Automatic Semantic Web Service Composition

Automatic Service Composition is a research direction aimed at facilitating the usage of atomic web services. Particularly, the goal is to build workflows of services that solve specific queries, which cannot be resolved by any single service from a known repository. Each of these services is described independently by their providers that can have no interaction with each other, therefore some common standards have been developed, such as WSDL, BPEL, OWL-S. Our proposal is to use such standards together with JSON-LD to model a next level of semantics, mainly based on binary relations between parameters of services. Services relate to a public ontology to describe their functionality. Binary relations can be specified between input and/or output parameters in service definition. The ontology includes some relations and inference rules that help to deduce new relations between parameters of services. To our knowledge, it is for the first time that parameters are matched not only based on their type, but on a more meaningful semantic context considering such type of relations. This enables the automation of a large part of the reasoning that a human person would do when manually building a composition. Moreover, the proposed model and the composition algorithm can work with multiple objects of the same type, a fundamental feature that was not possible before. We believe that the poor model expressiveness is what is keeping service composition from reaching large-scale application in practice.

Incorporating Software Curation into Research Data Management Services: Lessons Learned

Many large research universities provide research data management (RDM) support services for researchers. These may include support for data management planning, best practices (e.g., organization, support, and storage), archiving, sharing, and publication. However, these data-focused services may under-emphasize the importance of the software that is created to analyse said data. This is problematic for several reasons. First, because software is an integral part of research across all disciplines, it undermines the ability of said research to be understood, verified, and reused by others (and perhaps even the researcher themselves). Second, it may result in less visibility and credit for those involved in creating the software. A third reason is related to stewardship: if there is no clear process for how, when, and where the software associated with research can be accessed and who will be responsible for maintaining such access, important details of the research may be lost over time.
 This article presents the process by which the RDM services unit of a large research university addressed the lack of emphasis on software and source code in their existing service offerings. The greatest challenges were related to the need to incorporate software into existing data-oriented service workflows while minimizing additional resources required, and the nascent state of software curation and archiving in a data management context. The problem was addressed from four directions: building an understanding of software curation and preservation from various viewpoints (e.g., video games, software engineering), building a conceptual model of software preservation to guide service decisions, implementing software-related services, and documenting and evaluating the work to build expertise and establish a standard service level.

Study on quality and safety management standard of lifesaving access to emergency care

A review of management problems found in lifesaving access to emergency care in healthcare organizations at all levels in China, and a reference international critical and emergency care systems and their quality and safety management standards were made by the authors. Based on such and special needs of such access, the paper studied the domestic lifesaving access to emergency care service workflow, and abstracted common management issues on the lifesaving access to emergency care. The study identified key elements of lifesaving access to emergency care management through case analysis, and formulated standard terms for such key elements. Hence a set of standards is developed for quality management fitting healthcare organizations at all levels in China′s lifesaving access to emergency care, serving as the guidance for their standardized management and evaluation. Key words: Emergency medical services; Lifesaving access to emergency care; Patient safety; Management standard

SD-CPS: software-defined cyber-physical systems. Taming the challenges of CPS with workflows at the edge

A cyber-physical system (CPS) is a smart mechanical environment, developed by an amalgamation of computation, networking, and physical dimensions. Each CPS consists of a network of devices, often limited in computing, storage, or bandwidth resources. Moreover, the frequent small-scale communications between the various counterparts of CPS require data and computation of CPS to be deployed close to each other, with the ability to support micro-executions. Due to these operational requirements, CPS faces several inherent challenges, uncommon to a traditional computational environment. In this paper, we describe software-defined cyber-physical systems (SD-CPS), a CPS framework built by extending and adapting the design principles of software-defined networking (SDN) into CPS. We realize the support for CPS operation as a workflow of microservices, possibly in continuous or cyclic execution. SD-CPS coordinates each CPS execution step, performed by a microservice, through an extended SDN controller architecture. By creating, placing, deploying, migrating, and managing the computation processes of CPS as service workflows at the edge, SD-CPS orchestrates the entire lifecycle of the CPS effectively and efficiently. SD-CPS thus addresses the general challenges of CPS, concerning modeling, development, performance, management, communication and coordination, scalability, and fault-tolerance, through its software-defined approach. Our evaluations highlight the efficiency of the SD-CPS framework and the scalability of its SDN controller to manage the complex CPS environments.

Use of On-Demand Cloud Services to Model the Optimization of an Austenitization Furnace

Abstract This article describes a smart manufacturing framework, comprising an on-demand, cloud-based deployment of a modeling application in a manufacturing operation. A specific use case, the optimization of the austenitization of steel parts, is presented. The framework uses a Kepler workflow as a cloud service to orchestrate and manage the data and computations required to implement a run-time model-based control and optimization approach on Amazon Web Services (AWS) resources. Austenitization is an energy intensive heat treating process commonly employed to harden and strengthen ferrous metals, such as steel. Pre-finished steel parts are heated to a specific temperature in a continuously operating industrial austenitization furnace without oxidizing the surface. The steel parts are then rapidly cooled or quenched in an oil bath. There is significant potential to optimize energy productivity by managing the energy usage needed to achieve the properties of the metal part instead of managing to operational process settings. Models of this process, which predict the furnace energy consumption and temperatures of parts as a function of time and position in the furnace and map temperatures to properties, have been previously developed; however, for operational use, the data and models need to be orchestrated for run-time operation, access to infrastructure, scalability, security, and support. A cloud-based approach is an alternative to the on-premise approach, in which an infrastructure for data, computational, and security needs to be built and maintained to support the application. A workflow service makes it possible to combine and sequence simulation and optimization software applications developed in several distinct MATLAB (The Mathworks Inc., Natick, MA) model configurations that are needed for various data-based calculations. The final output of the computation is the optimal operating condition of the furnace that minimizes the fuel consumption without violating the part target specifications. The workflow can be triggered on demand by an operator of the furnace or run at periodic intervals. All the computational resources required are instantiated and run at the start of the workflow and shutdown at the end of the workflow.

Reports of Conferences, Institutes and Seminars

This quarter’s column offers several reports from the Electronic Resources & Libraries Conference held in Austin, Texas, on March 4–7, as well as coverage of sessions from the American Library Association Annual Conference, which took place in New Orleans, Louisiana, June 21–26. A handful of reports were also collected from the Library Publishing Forum in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on May 21–23; Ex Libris Users in North America (ELUNA) in Spokane, Washington, on May 1–4; Acquisitions Institute at Timberline Lodge in Oregon on May 19–21, and finally the NASIG conference in Atlanta, Georgia, on June 8–11. Topics covered include electronic resource tracking, trials, and troubleshooting; equity and diversity in acquisitions; technical services workflows; systems migrations; and library publishing pedagogy and open access.

Report of the ALCTS Technical Services Workflow Efficiency Interest Group Meeting. American Library Association Midwinter Meeting, Denver, February 12, 2018

Report of the ALCTS Technical Services Workflow Efficiency Interest Group Meeting. American Library Association Midwinter Meeting, Denver, February 12, 2018

Deadlock prevention for service orchestration via controlled Petri nets

In multi-party Web service composition, the non-local choice mismatch is one of the most important problems. To solve it, the reachability graph-based method is widely adopted to check deadlock-freeness by generating adaptors. However, this method is inefficient due to the neglect of future deadlock states and requirements of many possible interactions. This work proposes an abnormity prevention strategy and an optimal controller for service collaboration. To overcome drawbacks of previous studies, this work describes service choreography by using service workflow nets. Moreover, this work formulates a novel reachability graph by combining structures and reachability analysis. To present abnormity, a maximally permissive state feedback control policy is then proposed. Furthermore, to avoid deadlocks in service orchestration, this work constructs an optimal controller for administrators of service composition. Finally, experiments demonstrate the advantage of the proposed method via a realistic example.

Utilitarian Placement of Composite Services

The emergence of distributed clouds opens up new research challenges for service deployment. Composite services consist of multiple components, potentially located in different geographical locations, which need to be interconnected and invoked in the correct order according to the overall service work-flow. The placement of composite services over distributed cloud node locations raises new challenges for efficient deployment and management. In this paper, we design exact models of the composite service placement problems using mixed integer linear program, and compare these to solutions based on genetic algorithms. We use a utility function, based initially on latency metrics, to evaluate the quality of service (QoS) of the deployed composite service. By maximizing the utility with respect to deployment cost, our approach can provide good QoS for users while satisfying budget constraints for service providers. Based on simulations using real data-center locations and traffic demand patterns, we show that our algorithms are scalable under a range of scenarios.

Report of the ALCTS Technical Services Workflow Efficiency Interest Group meeting. American Library Association Annual Conference, Chicago, June 2017

The ALCTS Technical Services Workflow Efficiency Interest Group (TSWEIG) held its meeting at the American Library Association Annual Conference in Chicago. The session began with a short business m...

Toward service selection for workflow reconfiguration:An interface-based computing solution

Due to the open and diverse features of the Internet, applications need an effective method of performing a workflow reconfiguration to achieve both the functional behaviors and non-functional requirements of workflow changes when a service failure occurs. This paper proposes a service selection method for workflow reconfiguration based on interface operation matching. First, formal models of service workflow and interface operations of Web services are defined, and functional behavior comparisons of service selections are performed to determine the operation coverage set that will fulfill all activities that predefine the form of an abstract process. Second, reconfiguration patterns are introduced to describe different solution types for service patterns, including one-to-one, one-to-many, many-to-many, and many-to-one modes. Third, to consider the quality of service (QoS), the quality of service workflow (QoW) is proposed according to control structures and service interface computing, and the unified QoW formula is then provided to effectively rank each reconfiguration plan to provide a top-k solution recommendation. Fourth, related algorithms and a case study are discussed to show the service selection process during the workflow reconfiguration. To support the engineering implementation, a novel service workflow reconfiguration architecture is designed to provide guidance, which ranges from monitoring to recommendations for project implementation. Finally, experiments are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed method.