Resource Specification for Prototyping Human-Intensive Systems

Abstract

Abstract. Today's software systems rely heavily on complex resources, such as humans. Human-intensive systems are particularly important in our society, especially in the healthcare, financial, and software development domains. One challenge in developing such systems is that the system design must account for the constraints, capabilities, and allocation policies of their complex resources, particularly the humans. The resources, their capabilities, and their allocation policies and constraints need to be carefully specified, and modeled. Toward the goal of supporting the design of systems that make effective use of such resources, we introduce a resource specification language and a process-aware, discrete-event simulation engine that simulates system executions while adhering to these resource specifications. The simulation supports (1) modeling the resources that are used by the system, and the ways in which they are used, (2) experimenting with different resource capability mixes and allocation policies, and (3) identifying such undesirable situations as bottlenecks, and inefficiencies that result from these mixes and policies. The joint use of detailed resource specifications and simulation supports rapid evaluation of human-intensive system designs. We evaluate our specification language and simulation framework in the healthcare domain, on a software system for managing a hospital emergency department.

Application Resource Management for Highly Computational Applications in the Operational Environment: A Critical Review

“…These applications constantly interact with and rely heavily on complex resources and are all stretching the limits of the organization's existing resources [13]. Such Journal of Software Engineering and Applications applications are characterized by complex processes [14] that sometimes need to run for extended periods of time [15].…”

“…Insufficient attention to workloads and the interactions of the applications with the available (limited) resources at the application design time can reduce the quality and effectiveness of the software [13], yet there is an increasing demand, from the users, for software products with increasing quality [24]. We infer that Journal of Software Engineering and Applications for any application design, it is important to understand the management of the application transactional processes and its implication within its operational environment.…”

Specification and analysis of human-intensive system resource-utilization policies

“…Our resource specification language has been described in earlier work, and so in this paper we only suggest its specification capabilities through a small pictorial example. Full details of this language can be found in [11]. Thus, note that Figure 1(a) contains a representation of our definition of the MD resource type (a doctor working in the ED).…”

“…As noted above, our interest in the specification of complex constraints on diverse resources has arisen from our earlier interest in the discrete-event simulation of hospital EDs [3,10,11]. This paper only summarizes our previous work briefly to provide motivation for our static analysis research.…”

“…We propose three types of policy specifications: permission constraint policies that restrict the activities that a given resource can support, scheduling policies to define precedence among both requests and resources, and conflict resolution policies to resolve conflicts between multiple resource utilization policies. In previous work [10,11], we described a process-and resource-aware discrete-event simulator that adheres to resource utilization policy specifications to support dynamic analysis of the effects of diverse resource utilization policies. That work incorporated rudimentary facilities for specifying policy conflicts and their resolution.…”