A framework for the specification and execution of declarative processes for adaptive case management

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Trisotech is a Montréal-based IT company that provides software consulting services and business process modeling and automation solutions. Founded in 1996, it now boasts 70+ employees and customers in Europe and North America. Trisotech's business process modeling and automation solutions are centered around its Digital Enterprise Suite (DES). DES is a suite of tools that enable non-technical business people to model, analyze, simulate, and execute various aspects of their business. With DES, Trisotech operates in a crowded and highly competitive BPMS market, and product innovation is key to its thriving. To this end, Trisotech wants to augment its BPM capabilities with full-fledged support for case management, which refers to flexible, knowledge-intensive business processes that characterize the work of many of today's knowledge workers. In particular, the Object Management Group has recently (2014) released the first version of the Case Management Model and Notation (CMMN) standard, and Trisotech wants to be the first or one of the first BPMS vendor(s) to offer a tool for CMMN-compliant modeling, simulation, and execution of processes. This project aims at prototyping such a capability within the context of Trisotech's CMMN Modeler tool. In previous work, the applicant's research team has developed theoretical formalisms, algorithms, and tools for the specification and execution of "declarative processes". In such processes, the sequence of activities is not predetermined at process design time. Instead, it is determined during run-time based on a combination of domain knowledge-- specified declaratively as a set of constraints and dependencies between activities-- and the case at hand. Our execution engine guides "case managers", including by preemptively inhibiting those activities that lead to dead ends. In this project, we propose to adapt our work to the context of a CMMN-compliant case management tool, in general, and Trisotech's CMMN Modeler, in particular. We propose to do this through a realistic health care case study.