Treating Temporal Information in Plan and Process Modeling

Computer-supported treatment planning is an important task to support the medical staff in their daily routine. Several (semi-)formal languages to represent the medical treatment processes are available to support the treatment planning. Due to the complexity of most of these languages, assistance for developing the often very sophisticated processes is necessary. This paper defines a basis for a body of rules that can facilitate the subsequent modeling of treatment plans in the formal language Asbru. It goes into detail with temporal issues, in particular with flows whose temporal information are available in different ways. That is, the expressions can be both metric and qualitative nature or dependencies among individual flows can be represented by point or interval relations. Based on these several formats we develop different forms of representations to display the flows in Asbru. Special attention has to be paid incomplete and uncertain temporal information of the processes, which can exacerbate a definite representation. Nevertheless, by means of these definitions the modeling process will be simplified and therefore can help saving time and costs.