Achieving flexible process interoperability in the homecare domain through aspect-oriented service composition

Abstract

In elderly care the shortage of available financial and human resources for coping with an increasing number of elderly people becomes critical. Current solutions to this problem focus on efficiency gains through the usage of information systems and include homecare services provided by IT systems. However, the current IT systems that integrate homecare services have difficulties in handling the user-context dynamicity and the diversity of needs and preferences of care-receivers. This makes the available homecare services hardly interoperable at the process level, particularly due to the lack of support for process flexibility. In this paper, we present an approach capable of dealing with such interoperability issues based on aspect-oriented service composition. We demonstrate the feasibility of our approach and of the proposed architecture by implementing a prototype for a reminder service scenario. © 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.