Applying ARM to a Healthcare System - A Case Study

Adaptivity is one of the most challenging issues of today information systems. This paper presents ARM, an Adaptive Resource Management system representing our solution to address adaptivity. The main objective of ARM is to identify the most appropriate system component able to execute the current service request and to ensure that the required qualities of services are guaranteed during its execution. To achieve this goal, ARM captures and models explicitly additional information about the components of a system and the services it provides in terms of qualities and properties and introduces strategies to implement the decision support. In this paper we present a case study related to the application of ARM in the context of a healthcare system. The issues raised by this actual example are related to the integration of the domain and system knowledge in the adaptation process, as well as to the introduction of new elements which have lead to the evolution of ARM. Evolution is related to the explicit consideration of the time dimension and regards both the execution of services and their bookings. Bookings are managed through contracts, which establish agreements between the requesters of services and the components of the system providing the services.