Modeling clinical guidelines through Petri Nets

Clinical guidelines (GLs) play an important role to standardize and organize clinical processes according to evidence-based medicine. Several computer-based GL representation languages have been defined, usually focusing on expressiveness and/or on user-friendliness. In many cases, the interpretation of some constructs in such languages is quite unclear. Only recently researchers have started to provide a formal semantics for some of such languages, thus providing an unambiguous specification for implementers, and a formal ground in which different approaches can be compared, and verification techniques can be applied. Petri Nets are a natural candidate formalism to cope with GL semantics, since they are explicitly geared towards the representation of processes, and are paired with powerful verification mechanisms. We show how Petri Nets can cope with the semantics of GLs in a clear way, taking the system GLARE formalism as a case study.