Simulation to Analyze the Impact of a Schedule-aware Workflow Management System

Abstract

Today’s workflow management systems (WfMSs) offer workitems to users through specific work-lists. Users select the workitems they will perform without having a schedule in mind. However, in many environments work needs to be scheduled and performed at particular times. For example, in hospitals many workitems are linked to appointments, e.g., a doctor cannot perform surgery without reserving an operating theater and making sure that the patient is present and ready. One of the problems when applying workflow technology in such domains is the lack of calendar-based scheduling support. In collaboration with the Academic Medical Center (AMC), a large hospital in the Netherlands, we developed a schedule-aware WfMS that supports the seamless integration of unscheduled (flow) and scheduled (schedule) tasks. However, before deployment of the resultant system in the hospital, a seamless integration with AMC’s running healthcare processes needs to be guaranteed. Therefore, for a large and complex healthcare process, we apply computer simulation to validate and to investigate, for different configurations of the system, the operational performance for a selected healthcare process when supported by the schedule-aware workflow management system. One of the important characteristics of our approach is the tight coupling between the simulation model and the actual implemented system. While performing simulation experiments, parts of the system may be simulated using CPN Tools while connected to the actual system components. Our simulation experiments demonstrate that the developed schedule-aware WfMS can be safely applied in the AMC hospital.