This may be slightly premature as I'm still waiting on the final grades from the University, but Wednesday 3 July, I delivered my thesis/dissertation defense and final presentation. I believe it went well and hope to publish my final paper on ResearchGate as soon as the final grades are out. In the meantime, here's the abstract:
Computers and information technology are commonly used to perform complex tasks more efficiently. Within information technology, two disciplines that are often used to assist businesses and other domains complete processes in a more efficient manner are workflow management and advanced case management. Workflow management is a discipline that is used to document, enforce, and streamline repetitive processes. Advanced Case Management is an emerging field that is an alternative to traditional workflow management and that offers more flexibility in completing processes. Both disciplines can provide additional efficiency gains through enabling business to distribute tasks to multiple users simultaneously.
Another discipline in computer science is parallel and high-performance computing. It offers users a similar ability to increase performance and throughput of complex processes through parallel task execution and work distribution across multiple systems.
To explore the commonality between the three disciplines, this paper will review both the disciplines of workflow management and advanced case management from a parallel programming perspective. In addition, this paper will present a prototype of a new framework based on the guard-stage- milestone methodology of advanced case management, that has been built on the Akka actor model framework, uses a common big data NoSQL database for data storage, and can be used to demonstrate how an advanced case management system can be used to as a parallel task execution environment.