α-Flow

Also known by the romanized form of "alpha-Flow". The "α" is intended to implicate "active" as in "active document".

Purpose of the enclosing project Process support of adaptive-evolutionary information systems in healthcare (ProMed) is the formulation of architectural and process description requirements to adaptive and evolutionary information systems in order to support cross-organizational workflows within the medical supply chain. Besides α-Flow there has been other research subprojects; especially in the context of semantic integration (e.g. subprojects “DEUS”, “XdsRig”, “DMPS”, and “OXDBS”). Focus of the ongoing research is process support, which means developing a formal notation for cooperative and inter-institutional workflows on the basis of “active documents”.

α-Flow is based on a document-oriented process paradigm and enables process support in heterogeneous and inter-institutional scenarios. The governmental project “Elektronische Gesundheitskarte” (eGK) will hopefully provide a platform of secure information exchange and therefore solve the issue of technical integration in German healthcare. In healthcare, processes are characterized by cooperative ad-hoc flows, wherein distributed information systems are required to coordinate work with initially unknown sets of actors and activities. alpha-Flow provides a new approach to schema-less workflows and decouples content from decision support and both of these from coordination work. The primary artefact in α-Flow is the α-Doc which is a distributed case file in form of an active document that manages, for example, process participants as well as process plan and history, provding distributed synchronization and versioning facilities as well as import and export of process templates.

To read up on α-Flow:

An α-Flow Position Paper [PDF] (and the according presentation).
Published at the Int'l WS ProHealth 2009 in conjunction with the Int'l Conf BPM 2009 in Ulm, DE.
A description of the α-Flow Use-Case of Breast Cancer [PDF] .
Published at the Int'l WS ACEC 2010 at the 19th Int'l Workshops WETICE 2010 in Larissa, GR.
The α-Adaptive approach for run-time adaptive process status attributes [PDF]
Published at the Int'l WS ProHealth 2011 in conjunction with the Int'l Conf BPM 2011 in Clermont-Ferrand, FR.
Please ask me for a personal copy of a journal paper "The alpha-Flow Approach to Inter-Institutional Process Support in Healthcare".
The paper is accepted for publication in International Journal of Knowledge-Based Organizations. IGI Global, 2012.

A complete list of publications is provided on my personal web site, but not all of them are related to α-Flow.

Contact:

Christoph P. Neumann

Publications:

Neumann, Christoph P. ; Wahl, Andreas ; Lenz, Richard:
Adaptive Version Clocks and the OffSync Protocol .
In: IEEE (Org.):
Proc of the 10th IEEE Int'l Symposium on Parallel and Distributed Processing with Applications (ISPA-12
(10th IEEE Int'l Symposium on Parallel and Distributed Processing with Applications, Madrid, Spain, July 2012).
2012.
Keywords: ProMed; alpha-Flow; (BibTeX)

Schwab, Peter:
alpha-Adaptive: Ein adaptives Attributmodell als Baustein einer Prozessunterstützung auf Basis von aktiven Dokumenten .
Erlangen, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Dipl. thesis, 2011.
- - pages.
Keywords: ProMed; alpha-Flow (BibTeX)

Neumann, Christoph P. ; Lenz, Richard:
alpha-Flow: A Document-based Approach to Inter-Institutional Process Support in Healthcare .
In: ProHealth ´09 (Org.):
Proceedings of the 3rd Int'l Workshop on Process-oriented Information Systems in Healthcare in conjunction with the 7th Int'l Conf on Business Process Management
(BPM '09, Ulm, Germany, 2009, September).
2009.
Keywords: ProMed; alpha-Flow;
[doi>10.1007/978-3-642-12186-9_55] (BibTeX)

Neumann, Christoph P. ; Wahl, Andreas M.:
alpha-OffSync: An Offline-Capable Synchronization Approach for Distributed Document-Oriented Process Management in Healthcare .
In: Porada, Ludger (Ed.) : Gesellschaft für Informatik (Org.):
Lecture Notes in Informatics (LNI) Seminars 11 / Informatiktage 2012
(GI Informatiktage 2012, Bonn, Germany, 23./24.3.2012).
2012. - ISBN 978-3-88579-444-8
Keywords: ProMed; alpha-Flow; (BibTeX)

Wahl, Andreas M.:
alpha-OffSync: Verteilten Datensynchronisation in Form von IMAP-basiertem Mail-Transfer als Baustein einer Prozessunterstützung auf Basis von aktiven Dokumenten .
Erlangen, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, BS thesis, 2011.
- - pages.
Keywords: ProMed; alpha-Flow (BibTeX)

Todorova, Aneliya ; Neumann, Christoph P.:
alpha-Props: A Rule-Based Approach to 'Active Properties' for Document-Oriented Process Support in Inter-Institutional Environments .
In: Porada, Ludger (Ed.) : Gesellschaft für Informatik e.V. (GI) (Org.):
Lecture Notes in Informatics (LNI) Seminars 10 / Informatiktage 2011.
xx : xx, 2011. - ISBN 978-3-88579-444-8
Keywords: ProMed; alpha-Flow (BibTeX)

Reischl, Patrick:
alpha-Templates: Import und Export von Process Templates als Baustein einer Prozessunterstützung auf Basis von aktiven Dokumenten .
Erlangen, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, BS thesis, 2011.
- - pages.
Keywords: ProMed; alpha-Flow (BibTeX)

Hady, Scott:
alpha-VVS: Ein integriertes Versionsverwaltungssystem als Baustein einer Prozessunterstützung auf Basis von aktiven Dokumenten .
Erlangen, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Dipl. thesis, 2011.
- - pages.
Keywords: ProMed; alpha-Flow (BibTeX)

Lempetzeder, Benedikt:
Gegenüberstellung verschiedener Paradigmen zur Darstellung von Prozesseigenschaften unter Berücksichtigung von Zeit und Daten .
Erlangen, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, BS thesis, 2011.
- - pages.
Keywords: ProMed; alpha-Flow (BibTeX)

Neumann, Christoph P. ; Hady, Scott A. ; Lenz, Richard:
Hydra Version Control System .
In: IEEE (Org.):
Proc of the 10th IEEE Int'l Symposium on Parallel and Distributed Processing with Applications (ISPA-12
(10th IEEE Int'l Symposium on Parallel and Distributed Processing with Applications, Madrid, Spain, July 2012).
2012.
Keywords: ProMed; alpha-Flow; (BibTeX)

Hanisch, Stefan:
Konzeption und Implementierung einer Infrastruktur für aktive Dokumente .
Erlangen, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Dipl. thesis, 2010.
- - pages.
Keywords: ProMed; alpha-Flow (BibTeX)

Pehlivanov, Hristiyan:
Konzeption und Implementierung einer Teilnehmerverfolgung für verteilte aktive Dokumente auf Basis Peer-to-Peer-basierter File Sharing Protokolle .
Erlangen, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, BS thesis, 2010.
- - pages.
Keywords: ProMed; alpha-Flow (BibTeX)

Engel, Igor:
Konzeption und Implementierung einer verteilten Institutionsverwaltung als anwendungsspezifische Form eines verteilten Metadaten-Repository .
Erlangen, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Stud. thesis, 2011.
- - pages.
Keywords: ProMed; alpha-Flow (BibTeX)

Todorova, Anelyia:
Konzeption und Implementierung eines leichtgewichtigen und autonomen Regel-basierten Systems als eine Realisierung von `Active Properties' im Kontext von aktiven Dokumenten .
Erlangen, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Dipl. thesis, 2010.
- - pages.
Keywords: ProMed; alpha-Flow (BibTeX)

Hady, Scott:
Konzeption und Realisierung einer Datenbankanbindung für den .getmore Testfallgenerator .
Erlangen, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Stud. thesis, 2011.
- - pages.
Keywords: ProMed; alpha-Flow (BibTeX)

Idler, Steffen:
Recherche und vergleichende Evaluation von verfügbaren Ansätzen für 'Aktive Dokumente' .
Erlangen, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, BS thesis, 2010.
- - pages.
Keywords: ProMed; alpha-Flow (BibTeX)

Kreuter, André:
Recherche und vergleichende Evaluation von verfügbaren Ansätzen für `Content-oriented Workflows' .
Erlangen, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Dipl. thesis, 2011.
- - pages.
Keywords: ProMed; alpha-Flow (BibTeX)

Neumann, Christoph P. ; Lenz, Richard:
The alpha-Flow Use-Case of Breast Cancer Treatment -- Modeling Inter-Institutional Healthcare Workflows by Active Documents .
In: 19th Int'l Workshops on Enabling Technologies: Infrastructures for Collaborative Enterprises (Org.):
Proc of the 8th Int'l Workshop on Agent-based Computing for Enterprise Collaboration
(19th Int'l Workshops on Enabling Technologies: Infrastructures for Collaborative Enterprises (WETICE 2010), Larissa, Greece, 28.-30.06.2010).
2010.
Keywords: ProMed; alpha-Flow
[doi>10.1109/WETICE.2010.8] (BibTeX)

Theses:

Lectures:

2010SS: Seminar "Modeling of Workflows with BPMN 2.0" (Wedekind/Neumann/Lenz)

2008SS: Seminar "Prozessunterstützung in der Medizin" (Lenz/Neumann)

Subprojects/-systems:

α-Props (internal wiki)