Traceability Management of Systems of Systems: A Systematic Review in the Assisted Reproduction Domain

Abstract

Over last decade, Assisted Reproductive Treatment (ART) has becomea very used health service by more and more people around the worldbecause of problems such as the delay in the maternity age, single-parent couples, etc. In this context, health agencies have performedinnovations to improve healthcare processes of ARTs, to optimize theperformance of health professionals who work in fertilization laborato-ries and to improve Biological Sample Management (BSM) and sampletraceability in ART. However, there are important handicaps in ARTprocesses from the point of view of quality, safety and management.On the one hand, these processes are mainly based on manual executiontasks and manual control tasks. This excess of manual tasks could lead to fatal traceability and safety errors during BSM. On the other hand, ARTprocesses require real, interoperable and traceable communicationsbetween different software systems that have to collaborate together(health information systems, biological sample management systems,patient management systems, etc.), but, at present, it is possible toidentify some limitations in this domain, that is, the domain of systemsof systems (SoS). This paper aims to conduct an exhaustive study wascarried out both in the research community and in the commercial fieldto identify and analyze SoS solutions and theoretical proposals for BSMin ART processes. We have applied the Systematic Literature Review(SLR) methodology to carry out our study and we conclude it is a veryyoung research line that shows a growing trend and that in the actualitythere are very few technologies that deal with the problem of the BSMin ART.After analyzing the results, this paper presents as future workan initial Model-Driven conceptual solution to improve BSM in ART.