bpmNEXT 2015 Day 3 Demos: Camunda, Fujitsu and Best In Show

Last demo block of the conference, and we’re focused on case management and unstructured processes.

Camunda, CMMN and BPMN Combined

Jakob Freund presented on OMG’s (relatively) new standard for case management modeling, CMMN, and how they combine it with BPMN to create processes that have a combination of pre-defined flows and case structures. They use the Trisotech CMMN modeler embedded in their environment, running both the CMMN and BPMN on the same engine; they are looking at adding DMN for decision modeling as well. He demonstrated an insurance application example there BPMN is used to model the overall process, with the underwriting subprocess actually being a CMMN model within a BPMN model. The user task list can show a consolidated view of both BPMN tasks and CMMN tasks, or a dedicated UI can be used for a case since it can also show enabled activities that are not yet instantiated (hence would not appear in a task list) as available user actions. BPMN processes can also be triggered from the CMMN model, providing pre-defined process fragments that can be triggered by the case worker to perform standard operations. He also showed their developer workbench, including a full-featured debugger that includes stepwise execution and the ability to execute code at any step. Since their paradigm is to provide process management services to a developer writing in Java, their tooling is more technical than what is found in a no-code or low-code environment. Also, a BPMN font.

Fujitsu: Using Agents to Coordinate Patient Care across Independent Specialists

Keith Swenson finished the demos presenting healthcare research from the University of Granada, which helps to create patient treatment plans based on rules and iterative goal-seeking rather than pre-defined processes. This allows for different medical specialists to have their own sets of rules and best practices for dealing with their own specialization; automated agents can combine and negotiate the rules from multiple specialists to create a consolidated treatment plan for patients with multiple conditions, allowing each of the participants to monitor progress. He demonstrated a prototype/sample application that allows each specialist to set out a schedule of actions that make up a treatment plan; the multiple treatments plans are conciliated against each other — basically, modifying a plan by adding steps from another plan — and presented back to the referring physician, who can then select one of the plan processes for execution. He used the IActive Knowledge Studio to show how the plans and rules are designed, and discussed how the processes for the interacting agents would be emergent as they communicate and negotiate.

That’s it for bpmNEXT for me. Great conference, as always. As a matter of disclosure, I was not charged the conference fee to attend, although I paid my own travel and living expenses. A number of the vendors that I have written about here over the past three days are my clients or have been so in the past, but that did not allow them to escape the snarky Twitter comments.

Update: waiting to take off at Santa Barbara airport, and I see from the Twitter stream that SAP won the Best In Show award for their Internet of Everything demo – congratulations! Top five presentations: W4, Camunda, Trisotech, Bonitasoft and BP-3. Kudos all around.