Behavior ontology to model collective behavior of emergency medical systems

Abstract

It is very important to understand system behaviors in collective pattern for each knowledge domain. However, there are structural limitations to represent collective behaviors due to the size of system components and the complexity of their interactions, causing the state explosion problem. Further composition with other systems is mostly impractical due to exponential growth of their size and complexity. This paper presents a practical method to model the collective behaviors, based on a new concept of domain engineering: behavior ontology. Two domains are selected to demonstrate the method: Emergency Medical Service (EMS) and Health Care Service (HCS) systems. The examples show that the method is very effective and efficient to construct a hierarchy of collective behaviors in a lattice and that the composition of two collective behaviors is systematically performed by the composition operation of two lattices. The method can be one of the most innovative approaches in representing system behaviors in collective pattern, as well as in minimization of system states to reduce system complexity. For implementation, a prototype tool, called PRISM, has been developed on ADOxx Meta-Modelling Platform.