Knowledge and knowledge work are key factors of today’s successful companies. This study devises an approach for increasing the performance of knowledge work by shifting it towards a process orientation. Business process management and workflow management are methods for structured and predefined work but are not flexible enough to support knowledge work in a comprehensive way. Case-based reasoning (CBR) uses the knowledge of previously experienced cases in order to propose a solution to a problem. CBR can be used to retrieve, reuse, revise, retain and store functional and process knowledge. The aim of the research was to develop an approach that combines CBR and process execution to improve knowledge work. The research goals are: a casedescription for knowledge work that can be integrated into a process execution system and that contains both functional and process knowledge; a similarity algorithm for the retrieval of functional and procedural knowledge; and an adaptation mechanism that deals with the different granularities of solution parts. This thesis contains a profound literature framework and follows a design science research (DSR) strategy. During the awareness phase of the design science research process, an application scenario was acquired using the case study research method, which is the admission process for a study programme at a university. This application scenario is used to introduce and showcase the combined CBR and process execution approach called ICEBERG-PE, which consists of a case model and CBR services. The approach is implemented as a prototype and can be instantiated using the ICEBERG-PE procedure model, a specific procedure model for ontology-based, CBR projects. The ICEBERG-PE prototype has been evaluated using triangulated evaluation data and different evaluation settings to confirm that the approach is transferable to other contexts. Finally, this thesis concludes with potential recommendations for future research. / Computing / D. Phil. (Information Systems)

This study explores complexity metrics for business artifact process models described by Case Management Model and Notation (CMMN). Process models are usually described using Business Process Management (BPM), which is a relatively mature discipline with a large number of practitioners. Over the last few decades a new way of describing data intensive business processes has emerged in BPM literature, for which traditional BPM is no longer adequate. This emerging method, used to describe more flexible processes, is called business artifacts with Guard-Stage-Milestone (GSM). The work on GSM influenced CMMN, which was created to fill a market need for more flexible case management processes for knowledge workers. Complexity metrics have been developed for traditional BPM models, such as the Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN). However, traditional BPM is not suitable for describing GSM or CMMN process models. Therefore, complexity metrics developed for traditional process models may not be applicable to business artifact process models such as CMMN. This study addresses this gap by exploring complexity metrics for business artifact process models using CMMN. The findings of this study have practical implications for the CMMN standard and for the commercial products implementing CMMN. This research makes the following contributions: • The development of a formal description of CMMN using first-order logic. • An exploration of the relationship between CMMN and GSM and the development of transformation procedures between them. • A comparison between the method complexity of CMMN and other popular process methods, including BPMN, Unified Modeling Language (UML) Activity diagrams, and Event-driven Process Charts (EPC). • The creation of a systematic literature review of complexity metrics for process models, which was conducted in order to inform the creation of CMMN metrics. • The identification of a set of complexity metrics for the CMMN standard, which underwent theoretical and empirical validation. This research advances literature in the areas of method complexity, complexity metrics for process models, declarative processes, and research on CMMN by characterizing CMMN method complexity, identifying complexity metrics for CMMN, and exploring the relationship between CMMN and GSM. / Ph.D. (Computer Science)

Made available in DSpace on 2016-03-04T13:55:09Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 2 8.pdf: 9480685 bytes, checksum: 65cbb930cc2b75597dfdd60ac4a1838c (MD5) license.txt: 1748 bytes, checksum: 8a4605be74aa9ea9d79846c1fba20a33 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2015 / Fundação Oswaldo Cruz. Instituto de Tecnologia em Fármacos/Farmanguinhos. Rio de Janeiro, RJ, Brasil. / O setor farmacêutico sofre rígida regulamentação e fiscalização para atender às exigências domercado consumidor de forma a garantir a segurança, qualidade e eficácia dos medicamentos.Por fazer parte de um negócio altamente dinâmico como o setor farmacêutico, Farmanguinhostem que lidar com a velocidade das transformações e seus impactos nos processos decomercialização. Desta forma, é crucial que a administração tenha capacidade de resposta àmudança do ambiente, percebendo os desafios impostos, diagnosticando os impactos,decidindo o que fazer e pondo em prática suas decisões. A implantação de um sistemaintegrado de gestão alinhando o planejamento à estratégia e aos processos da organização temsido tratado e exposto em vários estudos. O gerenciamento de processos de negócios (BPM)permite as organizações uma melhor visibilidade de suas atividades o que favorece ações demelhoria na qualidade de seus produtos e serviços além de proporcionar o alinhamento comas estratégias organizacionais. Esse estudo contribui para o aperfeiçoamento da gestão públicacom a adoção de práticas de BPM, buscando a integração dos processos institucionais àestratégia. A partir desta proposta, Farmanguinhos passa a adotar uma ferramenta que poderáestabelecer a sistematização do planejamento com o alinhamento da estratégia aos processos,devendo estar claramente definidos e difundidos em toda a organização. / The pharmaceutical industry undergoes strict regulations and supervision to meet the requirements of the consumer market in order to ensure the safety, quality and efficacy of medicines. To be part of a highly dynamic business like the pharmaceutical industry, Farmanguinhos have to deal with the speed of change and its impact on marketing processes. Thus, it is crucial that the administration be responsive to environmental change, realizing the challenges, diagnosing the impacts, deciding what to do and putting into practice their decisions. The implementation of an integrated management system aligning planning the strategy and the organization's processes have been treated and exposed in several studies. The business process management (BPM) enables organizations better visibility of its activities which favors actions to improve the quality of its products and services in addition to providing alignment with the organizational strategies. This study contribute to the improvement of public management with the adoption of BPM practices, seeking from integration of institutional processes to strategy. Based on this proposal, Farmanguinhos will adopt a tool that can establish systematic planning with the alignment of strategy to proceedings and should be clearly defined and disseminated throughout the organization.

Submitted by Izabel Franco (izabel-franco@ufscar.br) on 2016-10-03T18:14:47Z No. of bitstreams: 1 DissLAPR.pdf: 4492395 bytes, checksum: 3cbeb71e7d3159ff9f8b260e4486c81d (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Marina Freitas (marinapf@ufscar.br) on 2016-10-20T19:18:44Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 DissLAPR.pdf: 4492395 bytes, checksum: 3cbeb71e7d3159ff9f8b260e4486c81d (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Marina Freitas (marinapf@ufscar.br) on 2016-10-20T19:18:51Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 DissLAPR.pdf: 4492395 bytes, checksum: 3cbeb71e7d3159ff9f8b260e4486c81d (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2016-10-20T19:18:57Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 DissLAPR.pdf: 4492395 bytes, checksum: 3cbeb71e7d3159ff9f8b260e4486c81d (MD5) Previous issue date: 2015-09-02 / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES) / Over time, Business Processes have become a key asset for organizations since it allows managing what happens within their environments. It is possible to automate some activities of business processes resorting to the use of Information Systems and accordingly decrease the execution time and increase the production. However, Information systems often suffer maintenance over time and become obsolete in their technologies and a reengineering process becomes necessary. In this case, the Business Knowledge, located more accurately the reality in information system source code, should be mantained. Thereof, in this work, we propose an Approach to support the Business Process Recovery from Source Code. The approach, entitled RPN, uses a static analysis technique of source code because it allows to analyze the source code without the need to modify and run the information system source code. Furthermore, the approach uses the Knowledge Discovery Metamodel (KDM) standard with a set of Heuristic rules to identify relevant code elements to the business layer. As result, Business Process Models are generated according to Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) standard specification. This models, together with other software artifacts, provide more subsidies to the Software Reengineering process. To evaluate the proposed approach, a case study was performed in Academic Domain to measure the effectiveness of the approach compared to the other approaches and the manual process. The results exceeded expectations and prove that the approach is effective. / Ao longo do tempo, processos de negócio se tornaram um artefato chave para organizações, visto que esses processos permitem gerenciar o que acontece dentro de seus ambientes. É possível automatizar algumas atividades de processos de negócio recorrendo ao uso de sistemas de informação e, dessa forma, diminuir o tempo de execução dessas atividades e aumentar a produção. Entretanto, ao longo do tempo, sistemas de informação sofrem diversas manutenções e tornam-se obsoletos em suas tecnologias e um processo de reengenharia torna-se necessário. Nesse caso, o conhecimento do negócio, localizado mais precisamente à realidade no código fonte do sistema de informação, deve ser mantido. Por este motivo, este trabalho propõe uma abordagem para apoiar a recuperação de processos de negócio a partir do código fonte. A abordagem, nomeada RPN, recorre à técnica de análise estática do código fonte, uma vez que essa técnica permite analisar o código fonte de um sistema sem a necessidade de modificá-lo e executá-lo. Além disso, a abordagem utiliza o padrão Knowledge Discovery Metamodel (KDM) com um conjunto de regras de heurísticas para recuperar elementos de código relevantes à camada de negócio. Como resultado, são gerados modelos de processos de negócio de acordo com a especificação padrão Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN). Esses modelos, em conjunto com outros artefatos de software, fornecem maiores subsídios para o processo de reengenharia de software. Para avaliar a abordagem proposta, foi realizado um estudo de caso no domínio acadêmico para mensurar a eficácia da abordagem comparado às outras abordagens e ao processo manual. Os resultados obtidos foram satisfatórios e a abordagem RPN mostrou-se muito eficaz e eficiente para executar seu propósito.

Submitted by Nayara Passos (nayara.passos@ufpe.br) on 2015-03-10T14:26:26Z No. of bitstreams: 2 DISSERTAÇÃO Natália Cabral Silva.pdf: 2867606 bytes, checksum: 4e1c75788ce8db0420f34c1ca5195e63 (MD5) license_rdf: 1232 bytes, checksum: 66e71c371cc565284e70f40736c94386 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2015-03-11T17:30:06Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 2 DISSERTAÇÃO Natália Cabral Silva.pdf: 2867606 bytes, checksum: 4e1c75788ce8db0420f34c1ca5195e63 (MD5) license_rdf: 1232 bytes, checksum: 66e71c371cc565284e70f40736c94386 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2014 / Diante do ambiente complexo e dinâmico encontrado nas empresas atualmente, o sistema tradicional de Workflow não está sendo flexível suficiente para modelar Processos de Negócio. Nesse contexto, surgiram os Processos Flexíveis que tem por principal objetivo suprir a necessidade de modelar processos menos estáticos. Processo declarativo é um tipo de processo flexível que permite os participantes decidirem a ordem em que as atividades são executadas através de regras de negócio. As regras de negócio determinam as restrições e obrigações que devem ser satisfeitas durante a execução. Tais regras descrevem o que deve ou não deve ser feito durante a execução do processo, mas não definem como. Os métodos e ferramentas atualmente disponíveis para modelar e executar processos declarativos apresentam várias limitações que prejudicam a sua utilização para este fim. Em particular, a abordagem que emprega lógica temporal linear (LTL) sofre do problema de explosão de estados a medida que o tamanho do modelo do processo cresce. Embora mecanismos eficientes em relação a memória terem surgido, eles não são capazes de adequadamente garantir a conclusão correta do processo, uma vez que permitem o usuário alcançar estados proibidos ou que causem deadlock. Além disso, as implementações atuais de ferramentas para execução de processos declarativos se concentram apenas em atividades manuais. Comunicação automática com aplicações externas para troca de dados e reutilização de funcionalidade não é suportado. Essas oportunidades de automação poderiam ser melhor exploradas por uma engine declarativa que se integra com tecnologias SOC existentes. Este trabalho propõe uma nova engine de regras baseada em grafo, chamado de REFlex. Tal engine não compartilha os problemas apresentados pelas abordagens disponíveis, sendo mais adequada para modelar processos de negócio declarativos. Além disso, REFlex preenche a lacuna entre os processos declarativos e SOC. O orquestrador REFlex é um orquestrador de serviços declarativo, eficiente e dependente de dados. Ele permite que os participantes chamem serviços externos para executar tarefas automatizadas. Diferente dos trabalhos relacionados, o algoritmo de REFlex não depende da geração de todos os estados alcançáveis, o que o torna adequado para modelar processos de negócios grandes e complexos. Além disso, REFlex suporta regras de negócio dependentes de dados, o que proporciona sensibilidade ao contexto. / Declarative business process modeling is a flexible approach to business process management in which participants can decide the order in which activities are performed. Business rules are employed to determine restrictions and obligations that must be satisfied during execution time. Such business rules describe what must or must not be done during the process execution, but do not prescribe how. In this way, complex control-flows are simplified and participants have more flexibility to handle unpredicted situations. The methods and tools currently available to model and execute declarative processes present several limitations that impair their use to this application. In particular, the well-known approach that employs Linear Temporal Logic (LTL) has the drawback of the state space explosion as the size of the process model grows. Although approaches proposing memory efficient methods have been proposed in the literature, they are not able to properly guarantee the correct termination of the process, since they allow the user to reach deadlock states. Moreover, current implementations of declarative business process engines focus only on manual activities. Automatic communication with external applications to exchange data and reuse functionality is barely supported. Such automation opportunities could be better exploited by a declarative engine that integrates with existing SOC technologies. This work proposes a novel graph-based rule engine called REFlex that does not share the problems presented by other engines, being better suited to model declarative business processes than the techniques currently in use. Additionally, such engine fills this gap between declarative processes and SOC. The REFlex orchestrator is an efficient, data-aware declarative web services orchestrator. It enables participants to call external web services to perform automated tasks. Different from related work, the REFlex algorithm does not depend on the generation of all reachable states, which makes it well suited to model large and complex business processes. Moreover, REFlex is capable of modeling data-dependent business rules, which provides unprecedented context awareness and modeling power to the declarative paradigm.

The first steps in the software development life cycle are crucial for a successful software product. In this scenario, modeling activities play an important role in the requirements specification and other activities throughout the Project. Although the modeling activities of business processes and activities related to Requirements Engineering are recognized as important individually, some approaches have considered the integration of these activities. In this context, this master thesis proposes an approach and corresponding guidelines for integration of modeling software requirements with SysML and modeling of business processes and workflows with the support of BPMN. This relationship is represented with both graphical models and tabular format. Therefore, software developers can track business processes and software requirements already during the initial activities of the software development process. The proposed approach has been presented to a group of systems analysts, university professors and master students. These participants answered to a questionnaire based on TAM theory mostly agreeing that integrating BPMN and SysML will contribute positively for documentation , validation and tracking requirements. Despite their interest in learning more about the two languages, they declared di culty in performing integration and the cost to use this proposal in projects in industry. This work has also presented a report of the experience in HU / UFS and a guide to integration of BPMN and SysML to assist the development of a patient’s Electronic Health Record in a public hospital. / Os primeiros passos no ciclo de vida de desenvolvimento de software são cruciais para um produto de software bem sucedido. Neste cenário, as atividades de modelagem desempenham um papel importante na especificação de requisitos e demais atividades em todo o projeto. Embora as atividades de modelagem de processos de negócio e as atividades relacionadas com a Engenharia de Requisitos sejam reconhecidas como importantes individualmente, algumas abordagens têm considerado a integração destas atividades. Neste contexto, este trabalho propõe uma abordagem e orientações correspondentes à integração dos modelos de processos de negócio elaborados com BPMN e modelos de requisitos de software com SysML. Essa relação é representada tanto com modelos gráficos como em formato tabular. Portanto, os desenvolvedores de software podem rastrear os processos de negócio e requisitos de software já durante as atividades iniciais do processo de desenvolvimento de software. A abordagem proposta foi apresentada a um grupo de analistas de sistemas, professores universitários que lecionam a disciplina Engenharia de Software e estudantes de mestrado do curso de Ciência da Computação da Universidade Federal de Sergipe, e respondendo a um questionário baseado na teoria TAM afirmaram que a integração BPMN e SysML irá contribuir positivamente nas atividades de documentação, validação e rastreamento de requisitos. Apesar do interesse em aprender mais sobre as duas linguagens, os participantes na pesquisa declararam a dificuldade em realizar a integração e o custo em utilizar esta proposta em projetos reais. Neste trabalho foi ainda apresentado um relato da experiência no Hospital Universitário da Universidade Federal de Sergipe (HU/UFS) e um guia para integração de modelos elaborados com BPMN e SysML, para auxiliar o desenvolvimento de um prontuário eletrônico do paciente em um hospital público.

Made available in DSpace on 2014-07-29T14:57:48Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Dissertacao Mestrado Luiz Loja.pdf: 2304806 bytes, checksum: 345f8fb0018e00778e9d22ef4a49b0e2 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2011-02-10 / To offer products and services, organizations need to execute business processes. The effectiveness of these processes is critical to the success of any organization. For this reason, there have been major efforts to develop techniques and tools aimed at the improvement of business processes. One of the results of these efforts are the BPMS ( textit Business Process Management Systems), software that help to define, analyze, and manage business processes. Although there are many BPMS available, current systems only provide support for running a limited set of processes. Notably, BPMS do not allow the execution of flexible processes, restricting its operations to defined processes. In addition, they do not provide a collaborative environment for process modeling. This paper presents a software architecture for management of business processes that overcomes these limitations of current BPMS. The architecture was used to implement a software tool called Sinfonia which includes a metamodel for business processes, a process execution engine and a graphical process modeler. The innovative aspects of the proposals of this work include features such as support for defining and implementing flexible processes, such as empirical and textit adhoc processes, and support for modeling collaborative processes. Sinfonia has enough expressive power to define and implement key business process standards described in the literature. The ability of this tool to express flexible processes and to promote collaboration in the modeling of business processes were evaluated in an experiment involving fourteen participants. The results of this experiment provide evidence that Sinfonia contributes to the evolution of BPMS. / Para realizar serviços e produtos, as organizações precisam executar processos de negócio. A efetividade destes processos é um fator crítico para o sucesso de qualquer organização. Por essa razão, tem havido grandes esforços para o desenvolvimento de técnicas e ferramentas dirigidas para a melhoria de processos de negócio. Um dos resultados produzidos por esses esforços são os BPMS (Business Process Management Systems), softwares que auxiliam a definição, análise, e gerenciamento de processos de negócio. Embora existam diversos BPMS disponíveis, os sistemas atuais apenas provêem suporte à execução de um conjunto limitado de processos. Notadamente os BPMS não permitem a execução de processos flexíveis, restringindo sua atuação aos processos definidos. Além disso, eles não proporcionam um ambiente colaborativo de modelagem de processos. Este trabalho apresenta uma arquitetura de software para gerência de processos de negócio que supera essas limitações dos BPMS atuais. A arquitetura foi empregada para a implementação de uma ferramenta de software denominada Sinfonia, que contempla um metamodelo de processos de negócio, uma máquina de execução de processos e um modelador gráfico de processos. Os aspectos inovadores das propostas do presente trabalho abrangem características como o suporte à definição e execução de processos flexíveis, tais como processos empíricos e ad hoc, e o apoio à modelagem colaborativa de processos. A ferramenta Sinfonia tem poder de expressão suficiente para definir e executar os principais padrões de processos de negócio descritos na literatura. A capacidade dessa ferramenta de expressar processos flexíveis e de promover a colaboração na modelagem de processos de negócio foram avaliadas em um experimento envolvendo quatorze participantes. Os resultados desse experimento provêem evidências de que Sinfonia contribui para a evolução dos BPMS.

Atualmente as empresas precisam de sistemas ágeis a mudanças constantes do ambiente do negócio e para garantir que os sistemas cumpram com sua finalidade, os desenvolvedores devem possuir uma compreensão mais aprofundada sobre a organização, seus objetivos, metas e estratégias de mercado. O principal problema para o desenvolvimento de sistemas de software tem sido a dificuldade em se obter informações sobre o domínio da aplicação. Essa dificuldade levou ao surgimento de técnicas de modelagem organizacional, sendo uma atividade valiosa para a compreensão do ambiente empresarial. O EKD - Enterprise Knowledge Development - é uma metodologia que fornece uma forma sistemática e controlada de analisar, entender, desenvolver e documentar uma organização. Infelizmente não possui uma sintaxe e semântica bem definidas, dificultando análises mais complexas dos modelos. Como resultado, o modelo de processos de negócio do EKD pode ser ambíguo e de difícil análise, principalmente em sistemas mais complexos, não sendo possível verificar a consistência e completude do modelo. Neste trabalho, esses problemas serão estudados sob uma abordagem baseada em redes de Petri. O formalismo de redes de Petri a torna uma importante técnica de modelagem para a representação de processos. Além disso, redes de Petri permitem rastrear cada etapa da operação sem ambigüidade e possuem métodos eficientes de análise que garantem que o modelo está livre de erros. Assim, este trabalho tem como objetivo desenvolver um método de avaliação do modelo de processo de negócio do EKD (MPN-EKD). Por meio desse método é possível verificar se o modelo tem erros de construção e travamentos. Este método pode ser aplicado em modelos direcionados para o desenvolvimento de sistema de informação ou de controle do fluxo de trabalho, e pode ser utilizado também para o estudo de estratégias de trabalho e simulação do fluxo de trabalho. / Nowadays all companies need fast systems and frequent changes on the business environment and to guarantee that the systems are reaching their goals, the developers must have a deeper comprehension of the enterprise, its goals and market strategies. The main problem to the development of software systems has been the difficulty to obtain information about the application domain. This difficulty leaded to the creation of enterprise modeling techniques, which is a valuable activity for the comprehension of business environment. The EKD - Enterprise Knowledge Development - is a methodology that gives a systematic and controlled way to analyze, understand, develop, and document an enterprise. Unfortunately it doesn\'t have syntax neither a semantic well defined, which doesn\'t help on more complex analyses of the models. As a result, the enterprise process model of EKD can be ambiguous and hard to analyze, especially on more complex systems, and also it is not possible to verify the consistency and entireness of the model. On this paper, these problems will be studied under an approach based on Petri nets. Because of the Petri nets formalism this is an important modeling technique to process representation. Furthermore, Petri nets allow the tracking of each step of the operation without ambiguity and also they have efficient methodology for analyses, which guarantee the accuracy of the model. Therefore, this work has the objective to develop an evaluation methodology of the business process model of EKD (MPN-EKD). Such methodology will make possible the verification of possible building and locking model errors. This methodology can be applied to information systems or workflow, and also can be used to study the strategies of work and workflow simulations.

A regulação assistencial é um importante instrumento de gestão pública que tem como objetivo viabilizar o acesso dos usuários aos serviços de saúde. No entanto, há estudos que apontam que não há um equilíbrio entre a oferta e a demanda por serviços da atenção secundária no SUS. Na presente pesquisa questiona-se como está efetivamente estruturado o acesso a esse nível de atenção e quais os principais entraves para a efetividade do acesso. O objetivo consistiu em analisar o processo de acesso à atenção secundária da saúde buscando identificar oportunidades de melhoria. O foco desse estudo foi o acesso à especialidade médica de gastrocirurgia dos dois hospitais secundários integrantes do complexo do Hospital das Clínicas de Ribeirão Preto. Foram realizadas entrevistas com gestores, médicos e demais profissionais envolvidos no processo. A partir das informações coletadas foi construído um mapa dos processos utilizando o software Bizagi e a notação de modelagem de processos de negócios (BPMN). A partir da descrição e análise, foi verificado como os processos descritos poderiam ser otimizados. Foi possível identificar que os dois processos estudados, apesar de terem o mesmo objetivo: prover acesso a atenção secundária de saúde, possuem diferenças marcantes. As vagas são distribuídas aos municípios na forma de cotas no processo de acesso ao HEAB enquanto que no acesso ao HERP há uma regulação compartilhada entre o DRSXIII e o próprio hospital. Os principais problemas identificados foram: absenteísmo dos usuários nas consultas; guias de referência incompletas ou ilegíveis; dificuldades de relacionamento entre os profissionais e organizações de saúde; demora para agendar consulta, entre outros. Concluiu-se que existem pontos no processo que não estão coerentes com as normas que o regulam e que há dados que podem ser utilizados para medir o desempenho do processo, como a proporção de casos novos e de pedidos de interconsulta; distribuição de vagas por município e situação após primeira consulta. Concluiu-se ainda que os problemas identificados podem ser solucionados a partir da implantação de melhorias sugeridas como: melhorar a comunicação e a triagem nos municípios, realizar treinamento dos funcionários e divulgar protocolos aos envolvidos. / The assistance regulation is an important public management tool that aims to facilitate users\' access to health services. However, studies show that there is not a balance between supply and demand for services in secondary care in the Unified Health System (SUS). In the present study it casts doubt on how the access is effectively structured to this level of care and what the main obstacles to the effectiveness of access are. The aim was analyze the process of access to secondary health care seeking to identify opportunities for improvement. The focus of this study was the access to medical specialty Gastrosurgery of the two hospitals that are members of the complex of the General Hospital of Ribeirão Preto Medical School (University of São Paulo). Interviews were conducted with managers, doctors and other stakeholders. From the information collected, a map of the processes using the Bizagi software and the notation for business process modeling (BPMN) was constructed. From the description and analysis, it was verified how the described processes could be optimized. It was possible to identify that the two processes studied have the same goal: provide access to secondary health care, have marked differences, such as how the distribution of vacancies. The vacancies are distributed to municipalities for quotas in the process of access to HEAB while access to HERP there is a shared regulation between the DRSXIII and the hospital. The main problems identified were outpatient non-attendance (absenteeism), incomplete or illegible reference guides, relationship difficulties between professionals and health organizations, long wait for schedule consultation, among others. It was concluded that there are points in the process that are not consistent with the rules that regulate, there is data that can be used to measure the performance process, as the proportion of new cases and requests for referral; distribution of vacancies for municipality and situation after first appointment. It was possible concluded also that the problems found can be solved through the implementation of suggested improvements; such as how improve communication and sorting in the municipalities, conduct employee training and disseminate the protocols involved.

Dynamic changes in the business environment requires their business process to be up-to-date. The Workflow Management Systems supporting these business processes need to adapt to these changes rapidly. The Work Flow Management Systems however lacks the ability to dynamically propagate the process changes to their process model schemas (Workflow templates). The literature on workflow schema evolution emphasizes the impact of changes in control flow with very ittle attention to other aspects of a workflow schema. This thesis studies the data aspect (data flow and data model) of workflow schema during its evolution. Workflow schema changes can lead to inconsistencies between the underlying database model and the workflow. A rather straight forward approach to the problem would be to abandon the existing database model and start afresh. However this introduces data persistence issues. Also there could be significant system downtimes involved in the process of migrating data from the old database model to the current one. In this research we develop an approach to address this problem. The business changes demand various types of control flow changes to its business process model (workflow schema). The control flow changes include task insertion, deletion, swapping, movement, replacement, extraction, in-lining, Parallelizing etc. Many of the control flow changes to the workflow can be made by using the combination of a simple task insertion and deletion, while some like embedding task in loop/ conditional branch and Parallelizing tasks also requires the addition/removal of control dependency between the tasks. Since many of the control flow change patterns involves task insertion and deletion at its core, in this thesis we study its impact on the underlying data model. We propose algorithms to dynamically handle the changes in the underlying relational database schema. First we identify the basic change patterns that can be implemented using atomic task insertion and deletions. Then we characterize these basic pattern in terms of their data flow anomalies (Missing, Redundant, Conflicting data) that they can generate. The Data schema compliance criteria are developed to identify the data changes: (i) that makes the underlying database schema inconsistent with the modified workflow and (ii) generating the aforementioned data anomalies. The Data schema compliance criteria characterizes the change patterns in terms of its ability to work with the current relational data model. The Data schema compliance criteria show various properties required of the modified workflow to be consistent with the underlying database model. The data of any workflow instance conforming to Data schema compliance criteria can be directly accommodated in the database model. The data anomalies (of task insertion and deletion) identified using DSC are handled dynamically using respective Data adaptation algorithms. The algorithm uses the functional dependency constraints in the relational database model to adapt/handle these data anomalies. Such handled data (changes) that conform to DSC can be directly accommodated in the underlying database schema. Hence with this approach the workflow can be modified (using task insertion and deletion) and their data changes can be implemented on-the-fly using the Data adaptation algorithms. In this research the same old data model is evolved without abandoning it even after the modification of the workflow schema. This maintains the old data persistence in the existing database schema. Detailed implementation procedures to deploy the Data adaptation algorithms are presented with illustrative examples.