Adaptive Inter-Organizational Workflow Management for E-Business Integration

As the collaboration between companies is facilitated in e-business environment, inter-organizational workflow management becomes an important issue. Because the inter-organizational workflow consists of autonomous organizational workflow, the coordination of these autonomous processes is required. In this paper, a local viewed inter-organizational workflow model is proposed, in which an inter-organizational workflow is defined as a set of block activities. Exception handling rules for internal process are defined with pertinent block activities. Based on the suggested model, a multi-agent system and a coordination algorithm are proposed. For the illustration of the suggested model, an example interorganizational workflow about book order process is presented

A Task-based Support Architecture for Developing Point-of-care Clinical Decision Support Systems for the Emergency Department

Objectives: The purpose of this study was to create a task-based support architecture for developing clinical decision support systems (CDSSs) that assist physicians in making decisions at the point-of-care in the emergency department (ED). The backbone of the proposed architecture was established by a task-based emergency workflow model for a patient-physician encounter. Methods: The architecture was designed according to an agent-oriented paradigm. Specifically, we used the O-MaSE (Organization-based Multi-agent System Engineering) method that allows for iterative translation of functional requirements into architectural components (e.g., agents). The agent-oriented paradigm was extended with ontology-driven design to implement ontological models representing knowledge required by specific agents to operate. Results: The task-based architecture allows for the creation of a CDSS that is aligned with the task-based emergency workflow model. It facilitates decoupling of executable components (agents) from embedded domain knowledge (ontological models), thus supporting their interoperability, sharing, and reuse. The generic architecture was implemented as a pilot system, MET3-AE – a CDSS to help with the management of pediatric asthma exacerbation in the ED. The system was evaluated in a hospital ED. Conclusions: The architecture allows for the creation of a CDSS that integrates support for all tasks from the task-based emergency workflow model, and interacts with hospital information systems. Proposed architecture also allows for reusing and sharing system components and knowledge across disease-specific CDSSs

Architectural design of experience based factory model for software development process in cloud computing: integration with workflow and multi-agent system

A model which is based on experience factory approach has been proposed earlier, calledEBF-SD, to overcome the limitations of experience management in software developmentdomain. An application prototype, which is then called SDeX, is developed based on theproposed model. The study on correlation analysis indicates that automation do have positiverelationship with other components: knowledge management, cloud, collaboration and portal.This paper further discusses the high level prototype development with the emphasis on thearchitectural design. Automation features are incorporated in the design in which workflowsystem and intelligent agents are integrated, and the facilitation of cloud environment isempowered to further support the automation.Keywords: architectural design; knowledge management; experience factory; workflow;multi-agent system; cloud automation

Coordination approaches and systems - part I : a strategic perspective

This is the first part of a two-part paper presenting a fundamental review and summary of research of design coordination and cooperation technologies. The theme of this review is aimed at the research conducted within the decision management aspect of design coordination. The focus is therefore on the strategies involved in making decisions and how these strategies are used to satisfy design requirements. The paper reviews research within collaborative and coordinated design, project and workflow management, and, task and organization models. The research reviewed has attempted to identify fundamental coordination mechanisms from different domains, however it is concluded that domain independent mechanisms need to be augmented with domain specific mechanisms to facilitate coordination. Part II is a review of design coordination from an operational perspective

mPower: A component-based development framework for multi-agent systems to support business processes

One of the obstacles preventing the widespread adoption of multi-agent systems in industry is the difficulty of implementing heterogeneous interactions among participating agents via asynchronous messages. This difficulty arises from the need to understand how to combine elements of various content languages, ontologies, and interaction protocols in order to construct meaningful and appropriate messages. In this paper mPower, a component-based layered framework for easing the development of multi-agent systems, is described, and the facility for customising the components for reuse in similar domains is explained. The framework builds on the JADE-LEAP platform, which provides a homogeneous layer over diverse operating systems and hardware devices, and allows ubiquitous deployment of applications built on multi-agent systems both in wired and wireless environments. The use of the framework to develop mPowermobile , a multi-agent system to support mobile workforces, is reported

Enhancing Workflow with a Semantic Description of Scientific Intent

Peer reviewedPreprin

Modeling and Execution of Multienterprise Business Processes

We discuss a fully featured multienterprise business process plattform (ME-BPP) based on the concepts of agent-based business processes. Using the concepts of the subject-oriented business process (S-BPM) methodology we developed an architecture to realize a platform for the execution of distributed business processes. The platform is implemented based on cloud technology using commercial services. For our discussion we used the well known Service Interaction Patterns, as they are empirically developed from typical business-to-business interactions. We can demonstrate that all patterns can be easily modeled and executed based on our architecture. We propose therefore a change from a control flow based to an agent based view to model and enact business processes.Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1404.273

Trust and Risk Relationship Analysis on a Workflow Basis: A Use Case

Trust and risk are often seen in proportion to each other; as such, high trust may induce low risk and vice versa. However, recent research argues that trust and risk relationship is implicit rather than proportional. Considering that trust and risk are implicit, this paper proposes for the first time a novel approach to view trust and risk on a basis of a W3C PROV provenance data model applied in a healthcare domain. We argue that high trust in healthcare domain can be placed in data despite of its high risk, and low trust data can have low risk depending on data quality attributes and its provenance. This is demonstrated by our trust and risk models applied to the BII case study data. The proposed theoretical approach first calculates risk values at each workflow step considering PROV concepts and second, aggregates the final risk score for the whole provenance chain. Different from risk model, trust of a workflow is derived by applying DS/AHP method. The results prove our assumption that trust and risk relationship is implicit

Adaptive use of task assignment models in team-based mobile business processes

Most mobile business processes are executed under uncertain and dynamic working environments. This makes the traditional centralized approach for the management of mobile tasks inappropriate to respond to the changes in working environment quickly as collecting the changing information from geographically distributed workforces in real time is expensive if not impossible. This raises the need of a distributed approach in the management of mobile tasks. This paper proposes a distributed architecture for team-based coordination support for mobile task management. In this architecture, tasks are managed via peer-to-peer style coordination between team members who have better understanding on the changing working environment than a centralised system. The novelty of the design of the architecture is explained by applying it to a real business process in the UK