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| Titel |
Flexible Early Warning Systems with Workflows and Decision Tables |
| VerfasserIn |
F. Riedel, F. Chaves, H. Zeiner |
| Konferenz |
EGU General Assembly 2012
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| Medientyp |
Artikel
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| Sprache |
Englisch
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| Digitales Dokument |
PDF |
| Erschienen |
In: GRA - Volume 14 (2012) |
| Datensatznummer |
250065533
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| Zusammenfassung |
| An essential part of early warning systems and systems for crisis management are decision
support systems that facilitate communication and collaboration. Often official policies
specify how different organizations collaborate and what information is communicated to
whom. For early warning systems it is crucial that information is exchanged dynamically
in a timely manner and all participants get exactly the information they need to
fulfil their role in the crisis management process. Information technology obviously
lends itself to automate parts of the process. We have experienced however that in
current operational systems the information logistics processes are hard-coded,
even though they are subject to change. In addition, systems are tailored to the
policies and requirements of a certain organization and changes can require major
software refactoring. We seek to develop a system that can be deployed and adapted to
multiple organizations with different dynamic runtime policies. A major requirement
for such a system is that changes can be applied locally without affecting larger
parts of the system. In addition to the flexibility regarding changes in policies and
processes, the system needs to be able to evolve; when new information sources
become available, it should be possible to integrate and use these in the decision
process.
In general, this kind of flexibility comes with a significant increase in complexity. This
implies that only IT professionals can maintain a system that can be reconfigured and
adapted; end-users are unable to utilise the provided flexibility. In the business world similar
problems arise and previous work suggested using business process management systems
(BPMS) or workflow management systems (WfMS) to guide and automate early warning
processes or crisis management plans.
However, the usability and flexibility of current WfMS are limited, because current
notations and user interfaces are still not suitable for end-users, and workflows
are usually only suited for rigid processes. We show how improvements can be
achieved by using decision tables and rule-based adaptive workflows. Decision
tables have been shown to be an intuitive tool that can be used by domain experts to
express rule sets that can be interpreted automatically at runtime. Adaptive workflows
use a rule-based approach to increase the flexibility of workflows by providing
mechanisms to adapt workflows based on context changes, human intervention
and availability of services. The combination of workflows, decision tables and
rule-based adaption creates a framework that opens up new possibilities for flexible and
adaptable workflows, especially, for use in early warning and crisis management
systems. |
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