Resource Specification for Prototyping Human-Intensive Systems
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},
}