Activity Crediting in Distributed Workflow Environments

Workflow Management Systems (WfMSs) are increasingly being introduced to deal with cooperative inter-organisational business processes. There are many situations in these distributed workflow environments, where, for a given business process, activities might be undertaken in one enterprise that overlap with, or repeat activities undertaken elsewhere. This paper examines such situations in the context of healthcare, where duplicated tests and procedures are costly and can have negative health impacts on patients undergoing unnecessary interventions. We introduce the notions of partial crediting, goal-based crediting, data crediting and examine the role that termporal constraints play in determining candidate activities for crediting. Keywords: workflow, adaptive, goal, activity, crediting, health, healthcare, care plans.