by Seung Yeob Shin, Yuriy Brun, Leon J. Osterweil, Hari Balasubramanian, Philip L. Henneman
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 respect, and make effective use of, the capabilities 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 different approaches to human-intensive system designs. We evaluate our specification language and simulation framework in the healthcare domain, modeling and evaluating, together with a domain expert, different approaches to developing a software system that manages a hospital emergency department's patient care.
Citation:
Seung Yeob Shin, Yuriy Brun, Leon J. Osterweil, Hari Balasubramanian, and Philip L. Henneman, Resource Specification for Prototyping Human-Intensive Systems, in Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Fundamental Approaches to Software Engineering (FASE), 2015, pp. 332–346.
Bibtex:
@inproceedings{Shin15fase,
author = {{Seung Yeob} Shin and Yuriy Brun and Leon J. Osterweil and
Hari Balasubramanian and Philip L. Henneman},
title = {\href{http://people.cs.umass.edu/brun/pubs/pubs/Shin15fase.pdf}{Resource
Specification for Prototyping Human-Intensive Systems}},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on
Fundamental Approaches to Software Engineering (FASE)},
venue = {FASE},
month = {April},
year = {2015},
date = {11--18},
address = {London, England},
accept = {$\frac{23}{82} \approx 28\%$},
doi = {10.1007/978-3-662-46675-9_22},
note = {\href{https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-46675-9_22}{DOI: 10.1007/978-3-662-46675-9\_22}},
pages = {332--346},
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 respect,
and make effective use of, the capabilities 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
different approaches to human-intensive system designs. We evaluate our
specification language and simulation framework in the healthcare domain,
modeling and evaluating, together with a domain expert, different approaches
to developing a software system that manages a hospital emergency
department's patient care.},
fundedBy = {NSF IIS-1239334, NSF CNS-1258588, NSF IIS-0705772},
}