Alert-driven e-service management

Process management technology has recently been employed not only within businesses but also in provision of e-services over the Internet. Urgent requests and critical messages in these systems (referred to as alerts) should be delivered and handled timely. In particular, humans are often involved in critical conditions. Presently, most e-service systems cannot address these requirements, and alerts are often handled in an ad-hoc manner. In this paper, we propose a sophisticated alert management system for effective e-service integration under urgent constraints. We develop a model for specifying alerts, in which alerts are associated with service requests and a set of parameters are captured for their routing. The alert monitor matches the service provider to receive an alert, based on the alert specification. We then propose a routing mechanism that is initiated when the alert message is not acknowledged or serviced within the deadline, so that the alert can be forwarded to other suitable services if necessary. Monitoring is especially essential to ensure timeliness and availability of services, otherwise suitable exceptions should be raised and handled. We outline our implementation framework of an alert management system (AMS) which includes Web services for B2B interactions, together with multiple-platform support for human users. We demonstrate our approach with an example medical house-call AMS.