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| About The Customer |
Customer is a world leader in high technology, is
a diversified manufacturer and marketer of advanced electronic and
electrical products, spanning information & communications equipment
and systems, Internet-based solutions and services, electronic components
and materials, power systems, industrial and social infrastructure
systems, and household appliances.
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| The Challenge |
The customer manufactures high-end ultrasound medical
scanner. The scanning process can be predefined as a workflow consisting
of a sequence of these activities. The customer wanted a system by
which such a workflow can be defined graphically through drag-drop,
which shall be stored in a file and later read and executed by the
scanner.
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The Solution
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The solution consists of several interacting modules,
of which our team developed the Visual Workflow Editor component.
The basic objective of the Visual Workflow Editor project is to develop
a graphical editor through which the user may be able to create and
edit workflows in an easy and intuitive manner. A workflow was a linear
sequence of activities to be performed by the scanner during a clinical
test. Each of these activities was modeled as a COM object with appropriate
properties, which were developed by the client. The Visual Editor
displayed the list of activities present in the system under appropriate
folders and the user created or modified workflows by adding or deleting
activities as well setting their property values. The user could also
connect different activities by the editor where output of an activity
is treated as the input of another activity. Finally, Visual Editor
saved these workflows as XML files in appropriate folders in the user's
PC, from which they can be transferred to the ultrasound scanner by
a form of media transfer like optical disks.
Before conducting the actual tests in the scanner, the operator
chose the corresponding workflow from the scanner GUI, which listed
the all the available workflow XML files. The Workflow Engine, present
in the scanner then read and interpreted these workflows. Finally,
the workflow engine carried out the actual clinical test by instantiating
the same activity COM objects, setting their properties by values
present in the XML file and calling appropriate methods on these
objects, which in turn interacted with the scanner hardware to perform
the operation.
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| Benefits |
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Enhanced and automated scanning process,
which eliminated the chances of human mistakes |
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The project was executed in the offshore
development centers in India providing significant cost advantages
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