Teleo-Reactive workflows for pervasive healthcare

There is growing interest in using workflows to describe, monitor and direct a wide-range of medical procedures in hospitals. Unlike their well-established business counterparts, medical workflows require a high degree of execution flexibility since it is impossible to anticipate all the possible circumstances that might influence their execution and it is important that staff are permitted to respond to situations flexibly. Medical workflows also need to be unobtrusive, since requiring staff to continually acknowledge task execution or enter workflow data will get in the way of delivering medical healthcare. In this paper we present a new approach to workflow specification based on Teleo-Reactive programs, where a workflow is not defined as a set of discrete steps, but rather as a goal-driven process. Workflow tasks are modelled as continuous context conditions or durative actions. TR workflows offer a high degree of flexibility and an easier way to model human-centric tasks than the traditional graph-based workflow models. We illustrate the approach with a small pervasive healthcare example and show how we also apply the approach to managing workflow resources and security.