Co-ordination of multiple metamodels, with application to healthcare systems

Abstract

Due to their complexity and the plethora of requirements placed upon them, healthcare systems so far have not been adequately modeled for the purpose of software development. As a result, the healthcare software suffers from high development costs and lack of flexibility. Model driven software engineering (MDSE) is an emerging methodology for software development, targeting productivity, flexibility and reliability of systems; metamodelling is at the core of most MDSE approaches. In previous work, we proposed a multi metamodelling approach that captures the complexity of these systems by using a metamodelling hierarchy, built from individually defined metamodels, each capturing different aspects of a healthcare domain, namely, user access modelling, health process modelling, process monitoring, user interface modelling and modelling of the data sources. Here, we formalize the co-ordination among metamodels, using a linguistic extension of the metamodelling hierarchy. This linguistic extension is an added metalevel which models the integration of two or more different aspects of the system. We focus on two features essential to the co-ordination of healthcare metamodels, namely the integration of process and data, modelling data-aware processes, and the integration of process and user, modelling both user access as well as inheritance of user access to tasks.