Computer model of the interactions among members of an inter-professional/interdisciplinary team

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An interdisciplinary team (IDT) represents a modus operandi for a number of industries. While existing workflow execution systems are capable of providing basic support for the operations of an IDT, they are not sufficient to capture rich team dynamics (i.e. team creation, allocation of tasks, maintenance of team continuity). Specifically, every IDT has to have a leader who oversees the execution of a workflow and makes key decisions while team members execute tasks that are compatible with their capabilities rather than being determined by their professional roles. The composition of an IDT changes over time – members leave as they finish their shifts and new members are recruited to execute tasks requiring new capabilities.***The proposed research program formalizes and operationalizes IDT dynamics in order to support team operations. Its long-term objective is to create a new architectural framework that will allow modeling IDT dynamics and will support team-based execution of the workflow. ***Achieving this long-term objective will require accomplishing four goals: ***Goal 1: Modeling the structure of an IDT and a workflow. Practical considerations imply modelling team leadership, capability-based task assignment, time-dependent team membership, need for team's continuity, and evolution of team's structure. Accomplishing this goal will result in modelling structured characteristics of an IDT in terms of a foundational ontology.***Goal 2: Designing modeling components of the architectural framework responsible for representing IDT dynamics. Attention will be paid to managing dynamics in an environment where multiple teams operate simultaneously and compete for limited human resources. Accomplishing this goal requires modelling the general IDT environment in the form of status rules and modeling temporal team dynamics as a planning problem using planning rules.***Goal 3: Designing remaining components of the architectural framework. This is to integrate the modeling components with the planner, workflow execution tools, and external IT infrastructure. This work will create a proof of concept prototype.***Goal 4: Demonstrating generalizability of the architectural framework by assessing the prototype using case studies. One case study will come from the Lung Cancer Transfor-mation Initiative at the Ottawa Hospital while the other from the Flights Applications Strategy Group at Nav Canada. For each of these case studies a proof of concept prototype will be customized to team-related and context-related characteristics of the domain.***This research will have academic and practical impacts. On the academic side, it will open up opportunities for representing team dynamics, thus advancing research on providing IDTs with computer-based tools. On the practical side, it will open up avenues for extending workflow management systems to support workflow execution by the IDTs.