Using UN/CEFACT S Modelling Methodology (UMM) in e-health Projects

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1 Using UN/CEFACT S Modelling Methodology (UMM) in e-health Projects P. García-Sánchez, J. González, P.A. Castillo, and A. Prieto Department of Computer Architecture and Computer Technology, CITIC-UGR, University of Granada, Spain {pgarcia,jesus,pedro,aprieto}@atc.ugr.es Abstract. UN/CEFACT s Modelling Methodology (UMM) is a methodology created to capture the business requirements of inter-organizational business processes, regardless of the underlying technology. An example of how to apply UMM to an inter-enterprise e-health project is presented in this paper. 1 Introduction Nowadays, Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) and e-health are in a continuous growing, so several international initiatives applying IT technologies to welfare and health are emerging [1]. One example is the I+D+i project AmIVital, which instead of focusing on home-systems and network sensors for e-health, focuses on the research and development of services that will be the basis of an interoperable platform able to communicate with different systems of e-health, e-government or others. In this sense, the B2B (Business To Business) paradigm facilitates the information exchange among organizations (social services, hospitals, government, etc.) using the Internet. In this paper we show how to use UMM to model a complete Ambient Assisted Living scenario, describing all views and sub-views of this methodology. The paper is arranged as follows. First, the state of art, concerning all the relevant technologies and design methodologies related to B2B applications, is described in Section 2. Then, Section 3 introduces all the design views UMM uses to model a B2B system, and Section 4 describes how to apply it to model an example of an e-health use case within AmIVital, describing all its views and sub-views in relation with the proposed example. Finally, some concluding remarks and future work are pointed out in Section 5. 2 State of the Art In the previous years, several B2B technologies have emerged, being ebxml and Web Services the most extended. Web Services have been quickly adopted by This work has been supported by the Spanish Ministry of Commerce, under project AmIVital (CENIT ). J. Cabestany et al. (Eds.): IWANN 2009, Part I, LNCS 5517, pp , c Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2009

2 926 P. García-Sánchez et al. the IT industry, while ebxml has gained acceptance in different B2B communities because of its specification of standard business communication scenarios. ebxml defines a set of standards that allows the enterprises negotiate their products through the Internet. It is based on a well-defined documents interchange using a contract-based approach [2], providing a specification for messaging, registry/repositories and business processes description, and unlike other approaches, it is an horizontal standard (it is not oriented towards a specific industry sector). On the contrary, Web Services expose any kind of applications to the Web, so anyone can call them (service approach). Another main difference between Web Services and ebxml is that the former is based on BPEL, which can only describe the scenario inside a company, due to it has not all the information of the services being orchestrated, while the latter can be used to model a global choreography among several companies. Regardless of the chosen B2B framework, the business processes of the platform must be analyzed and modelled. So it is necessary to use a consistent and well-defined methodology to design a model based on a machine-readable description. Business-Centric Methodology (BCM) for Enterprise Agility and Interoperability [3] is a roadmap for the development and implementation of procedures to create effective, efficient, and sustainable interoperability mechanisms. It has been developed by OASIS, the same consortium that created BPEL or UDDI, among others, and it is complementary to other existent architectures and technologies designed to build business oriented services, like ebxml or Web Services. BCM is formed by a set of model layers with a step-guide process, and an information pyramid to align the semantic information of partners. This allows the participation of business experts and the creation of a very large documentation repository. Nevertheless, this methodology has some disadvantages: it has a very large learning curve and it is not very extended yet. SOMA [4] is an architecture proposed by IBM to model service oriented processes. It lets the identification, specification and implementation of services inside the SOA paradigm. To achieve this tasks, it proposes a top-down modelling oriented to intra-enterprise services (service-oriented instead of businessoriented). UN/CEFACTs Modelling Methodology (UMM) [5]isanapproachtomodel the business services that each partner must provide in order to perform a B2B collaboration. It has a complete meta-model about business processes and business information, including a process analysis methodology. It is interesting to show that UMM provides and supports components to capture the knowledge about the business processes, and that it is independent of the underlying implementation technology (ebxml, Web Services, CORBA or EDI). Furthermore, because UMM extends UML, we could say that this methodology is more easily adaptable, due to the high development, acceptance and maturity of UML. In fact, a survey of B2B modelling languages show that UMM is the most complete approach [6], thus, this is the methodology the authors have chosen to model the AAL scenario presented in this paper.

3 Using UMM in e-health Projects Usage of UMM To build a complete B2B information system it is necessary to obtain all the business knowledge, as well as all the technical information about the business domain to be modelled, being this information the basis of the system ambit, its requirements and its specifications. UMM proposes the usage of worksheets to do this work, being them the bridge between business experts and business analysts. Thus, every view and sub-view of the model requires a set of these worksheets in order to obtain the relevant information. The main views of this methodology are: Business Domain View: It is used to discover, but not to build, collaborative business processes. Using interviews with the business experts, together with the worksheets, the process analyst is guided in order to capture business knowledge. Business Requirements View: It is used to identify the business processes and business entities candidates to perform a business collaboration. First the workflow processes are modelled, then the relevant Business Entities and their lifecycles are identified, and finally the requirements of every transaction are described. Business Transaction View: This view describes the whole choreography, the interactions and the exchanged information between business partners. Business Service View: This last view details the composed services, the agents, and the necessary data interchange in order to execute and validate a business collaboration. This view is expressed in the language and technical concepts chosen by the software developers (i.e. BPEL or BPSS), and thus, it is not included in the UMM guidelines. At the moment, the most viable option to apply UMM is using the Enterprise Architect tool together with the UMM Add-In [7]. This plug-in is widely tested, includes a whole user guide, and is completely free. It also includes tools to manage the worksheets, which are not standardized by the UN/CEFACT. But its most important features are that it is able to validate the model, and that it can generate BPEL or BPSS descriptions from a valid model. 4 Using UMM in AmIVital The general objective of project AmIVital is to develop a new generation of technology and information tools to model, design and implement an Ambient Intelligence (AmI) platform to support the independent life, welfare and health of its users. As this objective is completely integrated in the European concept of Ambient Assisted Living (AAL), the Spanish Ministry of Commerce, inside the CENIT program, has awarded a grant of more than 20 million euro to this project. In a large e-health project like AmIVital, where several institutions must create functional services to be choreographed, and many different technologies

4 928 P. García-Sánchez et al. must be integrated, it is a good idea to use an independent-technology based modelling methodology like UMM. As an example of its application we could think in the following scenario: A virtual calendar launches an event and notifies the monitorization system to create a reminder for the user, sending him a notice. If the user is not localizable, or he does not accept the notice, the monitorization ends. Otherwise, the monitorization is accepted and a monitorization context, containing information about the devices and instructions about how to use them, is created. Then the user activates the monitorization, which sends the data to the monitorization context, where they are checked. Finally a report is sent to the user and the doctor (or an alarm if there have been any problem). In the next subsections all the UMM views of this example are described. 4.1 Business Domain View This view allows to split the business in two ways: Business Areas (divisions of an enterprise: sales, personnel,...) that encompass Business Process Areas (common operations) or Business Categories, that may encompass other Business Categories. As the last one is a more general modelling strategy, it is the proposed in this work to model the AmIVital platform. Inside every leaf of the created structure a use case diagram is created to identify the relevant business partners and business processes. As each process may be composed by other processes, we may have to use the include association. Business partners must also be added and linked with their participating processes with participates relations. Finally, stakeholders can also be added with an isinterestedof relation to describe that, although they are interested in a business process, they do not take active part in its execution. 4.2 Business Requirements View The requirements of the collaborative business processes, business entities and transactions,arecollected in this view. It is composed by the following sub-views: Business Process View: Every business process can be divided into subprocesses, and each of these, into activities. For example, the previous whole scenario has been divided into three sub-processes: Create reminder, Create monitorization context and Perform monitorization. Every sub-process is modelled from each participant s point of view, and finally, a collaborative point of view is generated (an example of this view can be seen in Figure 1). Business Entity View: This sub-view describes the relevant Business Entities affected by a business process and models their lifecycle. A Business Entity is a real-world thing with significance to the partners. In our example we define entities like Reminder, Monitorization or Localization. Each one of them can change its state during their lifecycle (an example is shown in Figure 2a). This information is also detailed in the worksheets. Transaction Requirements View: This step focuses on the atomic interactions between the partners of a collaboration flow, describing the exchange of

5 Using UMM in e-health Projects 929 Fig. 1. Business Process View of the sub-process Manage Reminder of our example (collaborative view). Each column is a partition to describe the behaviour of each partner. (a) (b) Fig. 2. (a) Business Information Entity Lifecycle. (b) Business Transaction Use Case.

6 930 P. García-Sánchez et al. information between exactly two roles. The worksheets describe who starts the transaction, the activities performed, the pre and post-conditions, and the possible exceptions. An example can be seen in Figure 2b. Business Collaboration Requirements View: All the participants and requirements of each collaboration are detailed in this sub-view, so every collaboration is divided into Business Transactions Uses Cases (created on the previous view) and business partners are mapped to the roles in everytransaction (for example, the Business Partners User and Monitorization System are respectively mapped to the Receptor and the Notifier roles in the transaction use case shown in Figure 2b). Worksheets are used to specify which Business Entities and Business Partners participate in the collaboration, along with all the pre and post-conditions, exceptions and performed actions. Business Collaboration Realization View: This last sub-view is used to map the business partners defined in the Business Domain View into the business collaborations defined in the Business Collaboration Requirements View. This view allows that different partners perform the same collaboration, increasing the re-usability and scalability of the design. 4.3 Business Transaction View This last view in the UMM workflow is used to model the business collaborations, from the analysts s point of view, in order to reach the requirements defined in the previous steps. It describes the whole choreography of interactions and defines the information that is exchanged among these interactions. It is composed by the following sub-views: Business Choreography View: For each one of the Business Collaborations defined in the Business Collaboration Requirements View, a Business Choreography is created. This choreography is composed by Business Activities, being each one of them linked to the business transactions defined in the Business Interaction View (next sub-view). Constraints are used in order to guide this execution flow, as can be seen in Figure 3a). Business Interaction View: This view details the sequence of steps that each business transaction performs, identifying the information exchanged between exactly two roles. These exchanges are modelled as requests and optional responses. It is interesting to show that these Business Transactions are also described in worksheets that specify the transaction pattern (Request/Response, Query/Response, Notification...) and several legal and security requisites. For example, Figure 3b shows a request/response transaction to locate the user. Business Information View: This view models the information entities that are exchanged in each transaction. These information entities are encapsulated in information envelopes, which have a header and a body. The information entities are modelled using UML artefacts. In fact, there are not restrictions to model this documents, although UN/CEFACT recommends using the Core Components Technical Specification (CCTS) [8].

7 Using UMM in e-health Projects 931 (a) (b) Fig. 3. (a) Business Choreography for the sub-process Manage Reminder. Everytransaction is refined within a Business Interaction View. One of these transactions can be seen in (b). Nevertheless, as CCTS is mainly focused on commercial transactions, it is not appropiated to model the information entities of AmIVital. 4.4 Business Service View Functional services for e-health are modelled more efficiently using SOA, mainly because this kind of services (location, vital signs monitoring, video-conference, etc.) are more centred on the user rather than on the business process. Thus, as UMM does not include a modelling guide to create or reuse functional services, we propose the use of SOMA to model different low-coupling services for each organization involved in AmIVital. Like UMM, SOMA is also based on a top-down modelling, being more oriented towards intra-enterprise services. SOMA can also be used to model a micro-soa, for instance, to describe the set of domotic devices inside a house, providing a level of abstraction and a service interface more adequate to integrate them in the whole platform using UMM. 5 Conclusions and Future Work Within a wide inter-organizational research project like AmIVital, where several enterprises and universities work together to develop services for e-health, a

8 932 P. García-Sánchez et al. common modelling methodology is mandatory. As a proof of concept, UMM has been used to model a simple e-health business process, where several systems collaborate in an intelligent way with the user 1. We have chosen UMM due to its growing usage in the development of B2B applications, the fact that its learning curve is not very large, and because there exist completely functional tools to create and validate the models. During the development of this work, the UMM authors have published the 2.0 specification of this methodology [9], with some changes in the artefacts and packet structure to make UMM more simple, extensible and scalable. At the moment it is only a public draft version. Their authors are also working in a new UMM Add-In for Enterprise Architect, being this add-in in beta phase. The next step in our project will be to migrate the use case described in this paper to UMM 2.0, and to continue working with this new version of the methodology, extending its usage to other e-health services, as telecare, medication management and domotic services among others. References 1. Kleinberger, T., Becker, M., Ras, E., Holzinger, A., Müller, P.: Ambient intelligence in assisted living: Enable elderly people to handle future interfaces. In: Stephanidis, C. (ed.) UAHCI 2007 (Part II). LNCS, vol. 4555, pp Springer, Heidelberg (2007) 2. Patil, S., Newcomer, E.: ebxml and Web Services. IEEE Internet Computing 7(3), (2003) 3. OASIS BCM TC: Business-Centric Methodology for Enterprise Agility and Interoperability. Executive White Paper (2003), 4. Arsanjani, A., Ghosh, S., Allam, A., Abdollah, T., Ganapathy, S., Holley, K.: SOMA: A method for developing service-oriented solutions. IBM Systems Journal 47(3), (2008) 5. Hofreiter, B., Huemer, C., Liegl, P., Schuster, R., Zapletal, M.: UN/CEFACT S modeling methodology (UMM): A UML profile for B2B e-commerce. In: Roddick, J.F., Benjamins, V.R., Si-said Cherfi, S., Chiang, R., Claramunt, C., Elmasri, R.A., Grandi, F., Han, H., Hepp, M., Lytras, M.D., Mišić, V.B., Poels, G., Song, I.-Y., Trujillo, J., Vangenot, C. (eds.) ER Workshops LNCS, vol. 4231, pp Springer, Heidelberg (2006) 6. Folmer, E., Bastiaans, J.: Methods for Design of Semantic Message-Based B2B Interaction Standards. Volume Enterprise Interoperability III (2008) 7. Hofreiter, B., Huemer, C., Liegl, P., Schuster, R., Zapletal, M.: UMM add-in: A UML extension for UN/CEFACT s modeling methodology. In: Krämer, B.J., Lin, K.-J., Narasimhan, P. (eds.) ICSOC LNCS, vol. 4749, pp Springer, Heidelberg (2007) 8. United Nations Centre for Trade Facilitation and Electronic Business: Core Components Technical Specification (2003), 9. Huemer, C., Liegl, P., Motal, T., Schuster, R., Zapletal, M.: The development process of the UN/CEFACT modeling methodology. In: ICEC 2008: Proceedings of the 10th international conference on Electronic commerce, pp ACM, New York (2008) 1 Available at