A Two Tier, Goal-Driven Workflow Model for the Healthcare Domain

Workflow models define a set of tasks to be undertaken to achieve a set of goals. Very often, the set of goals is not articulated explicitly, let alone modelled in such a way as to link the workflow schema(s) to the goal schema(s). In this paper, we introduce a two tier model that clearly delineates the higher level goals (business model) from the lower level tasks (process model) whilst elucidating the relationships between the two tiers. We utilise a goal-ontology to represent the upper level (business model) and decompose this to an extended Petri-Net model for the lower level workflow schema. The modelling of business processes, and the management of subsequent changes, both become an integral part of the workflow itself. Healthcare is a domain where it is quite common for goals not to be realized, or not to be realized fully, and where alterations to the goals have to be undertaken on a case by case (instance-level) basis. Consequently any workflow schema will need to include tasks that both assess the degree to which a goal has been achieved, and also allow for new goals to be established, or for the workflow to be altered. We term such workflow schemas self-managing.