Enhancing the Supply Chain Performance by Integrating Simulated and Physical Agents into Organizational Information Systems

As the business environment gets more complicated, organizations must be able to respond to the business changes and adjust themselves quickly to gain their competitive advantages. This study proposes an integrated agent system, called SPA, which coordinates simulated and physical agents to provide an efficient way for organizations to meet the challenges in managing supply chains. In the integrated framework, physical agents coordinate with inter-organizations\' physical agents to form workable business processes and detect the variations occurring in the outside world, whereas simulated agents model and analyze the what-if scenarios to support physical agents in making decisions. This study uses a supply chain that produces digital still cameras as an example to demonstrate how the SPA works. In this example, individual information systems of the involved companies equip with the SPA and the entire supply chain is modeled as a hierarchical object oriented Petri nets. The SPA here applies the modified AGNES data clustering technique and the moving average approach to help each firm generalize customers\' past demand patterns and forecast their future demands. The amplitude of forecasting errors caused by bullwhip effects is used as a metric to evaluate the degree that the SPA affects the supply chain performance. The experimental results show that the SPA benefits the entire supply chain by reducing the bullwhip effects and forecasting errors in a dynamic environment.Supply Chain Performance Enhancement; Bullwhip Effects; Simulated Agents; Physical Agents; Dynamic Customer Demand Pattern Discovery

Performance Benchmarks for Custom Applications: Considerations and Strategies

The motivation for this research came from the need to solve a problem affecting not only the company used in this study, but also the many other companies in the information technology industry having similar problem: how to conduct performance benchmarks for custom applications in an effective, unbiased, and accurate manner. This paper presents the pros and cons of existing benchmark methodologies. It proposes a combination of the best characteristics of these benchmarks into a methodology that addresses the problem from an application perspective considering the overall synergy between operating system and software. The author also discusses a software design to implement the proposed methodology. The methodology proposed is generic enough to be adapted to any particular application performance-benchmarking situation

A Tissue Engineering product development pathway

Tissue engineering is a field of inquiry and research that uses engineering techniques and principles of biological sciences to develop functional substitutes for reconstruction of damaged organs. Commercial translation of tissue engineering products is currently in progress all over the world. Many companies are moving their interest towards this market segment that grows by 6% per year. Aim of this thesis is to probe the possibility of developing tissue engineering products in the most cost-effective way, minimizing the industrial risk and developing a specific fund raising model. Tissue engineering is based on three main features: cells, scaffolds and bioreactors. Cells are seeded on a scaffold and cultured in a bioreactor in order to obtain a tissue engineering product. Nevertheless, developing cell carrying products is hampered by certification claims ("advanced therapies" certification rules) that unbearably increase R&D and certification costs and can be faced by either big companies or start-ups of big companies and spin-offs of complex aggregates of research centers involved in advanced cell research. On the other hand, scaffolds (certification class IIb) and bioreactors for tissue engineering (certification class I) can be developed with a lower economic effort, being the competition based on innovation, since their market is in the "growth phase" for scaffolds and in the "introduction phase" for bioreactors in the Levitt's product life cycle theory. Purpose of this thesis is to basically study scaffold and bioreactor features, then to preliminarily design some models of bioreactors and, eventually, to set a business model, based on private and public fund raising, aimed to the development of scaffolds for dental implantology and of bioreactors for cardiovascular and bone tissue engineering. Finally, a business plan of a company being spin-off of Politecnico di Torino and industrial start-up has been elaborate

Business Process Simulation Using Coloured Petri Nets

Äriprotsesside juhtimine on tänapäeva maailmas muutunud järjest olulisemaks tänu suurenevatele nõudmistele protsesside tõhusamaks muutmisel. Protsesside juhtimisega üritatakse leida võimalikke kitsaskohti, tõsta tootlikust ja vähendada vajadust ressursside järjele. Paljud protsesside modelleerimise vahendid toetavad lisaks protsesside modelleerimisele mudelite juurutamist ning simulatsioone. Simulatsioonid on üks parimaid tehnikaid protsesside efektiivsemaks muutmisel. Enamus äriprotsesside modelleerimise standardeid ei toeta simulatsioone (k.a. de facto standard BPMN). Mitmed protsesside modelleerimise vahendid võimaldavad simulatsioone, kuid simulatsioonimootor on peidetud nende vahendite sisse. See piirab simulatsioonimootorite laiendatavust ning protsesside simulatsioonides tuleb läbi ajada tarkvara vahenditega. Kuid modelleerimistarkvara võimalused on võrreldes reaalse maailma situatsioonidega väga piiratud. Antud töö eesmärgiks on välja pakkuda eelpool mainitud probleemile üks võimalik lahendus – BPMN meta-mudeli laiendus simulatsiooni atribuutidega. Töös kasutatakse simulatsioonimootorit CPN Tools, mis baseerub Coloured Petri Nets (CPN) modelleerimis-keelel. CPN on loodud spetsiaalselt diskreetsete süsteemide simulatsiooni keeleks. Esmalt tehakse ülevaade BPMN standardist ning kahest levinumast BPMN modelleerimise vahendist – IBM WebSphere Modeller ja IPT Commerce. Järgnevalt antakse lühiülevaade Petri Nets ja CPN mudelitest ning CPN Tools modelleerimisvahendist. Kasutades olemasolevate vahendite analüüsist saadud kogemusi, laiendatakse BPMN standardi meta-mudelit simulatsioonide meta-mudeliga. Seejärel kirjeldatakse kuidas saada simulatsiooni andmetega täiendatud BPMN mudelist CPN mudel ning demonstreeritakse erinevaid võimalusi CPN mudelite simuleerimiseks kasutades CPN Tools vahendeid. Töös kirjeldatud simulatsiooni meta-mudel ja BPMN mudeli elementide teisendamine CPN mudeli konstruktsioonideks on esitatud üldiselt, sest eesmärgiks oli testida välja pakutava lahenduse võimalikkust. CPN Tools sai valitud simulatsioonimootoriks sellepärast, et tema mudelid on kirjeldatud kasutades XML-i. Töö edasiarendusena pakub autor välja BPMN mudelitest CPN mudelite automaatse konverteri loomist.Business process management plays an increasingly important role in the business world as it promotes effectiveness and efficiency in business operations. The simulation of business processes is one of the most versatile techniques for analyzing business processes quantitatively in order to identify and remove performance bottlenecks. The graphical representation of business process models has proven to be a very effective tool for presenting information to business stakeholders, including business analysts and system developers. Unfortunately most of the graphical business process modeling standards (including de facto standard BPMN) do not support attaching simulation information to the models. Major business process modelling tools and suites still provide ability to add simulation data and execute those models. However, only models designed with the tools themselves can be simulated and no extensibility mechanism is provided to add new features or change the pre-built simulation and reporting options. This paper proposes a meta-model for specifying simulation scenarios on the top of the BPMN meta-model. Also, the paper advocates using CPN Tools as an open and extensible business process model simulator. The paper provides an initial design of a transformation from BPMN process models to CPN models. The proposed design has been validated through one fully-worked case study

Verifying service continuity in a satellite reconfiguration procedure: application to a satellite

The paper discusses the use of the TURTLE UML profile to model and verify service continuity during dynamic reconfiguration of embedded software, and space-based telecommunication software in particular. TURTLE extends UML class diagrams with composition operators, and activity diagrams with temporal operators. Translating TURTLE to the formal description technique RT-LOTOS gives the profile a formal semantics and makes it possible to reuse verification techniques implemented by the RTL, the RT-LOTOS toolkit developed at LAAS-CNRS. The paper proposes a modeling and formal validation methodology based on TURTLE and RTL, and discusses its application to a payload software application in charge of an embedded packet switch. The paper demonstrates the benefits of using TURTLE to prove service continuity for dynamic reconfiguration of embedded software

Sixth Workshop and Tutorial on Practical Use of Coloured Petri Nets and the CPN Tools Aarhus, Denmark, October 24-26, 2005

This booklet contains the proceedings of the Sixth Workshop on Practical Use of Coloured Petri Nets and the CPN Tools, October 24-26, 2005. The workshop is organised by the CPN group at the Department of Computer Science, University of Aarhus, Denmark. The papers are also available in electronic form via the web pages: http://www.daimi.au.dk/CPnets/workshop0

Performance Analysis of Business Process Models with Advanced Constructs

The importance of actively managing and analysing business processes is acknowledged more than ever in or- ganisations nowadays. Business processes form an essential part of an organisation and their application areas are manifold. Most organisations keep records of various activities that have been carried out for auditing pur- poses, but they are rarely used for analysis purposes. This paper describes the design and implementation of a process analysis tool that replays, analyses and visualises a variety of performance metrics using a process definition and its corresponding execution logs. The replayer uses a YAWL process model example to demon- strate its capacity to support advanced language constructs

ATAMM analysis tool

Diagnostics software for analyzing Algorithm to Architecture Mapping Model (ATAMM) based concurrent processing systems is presented. ATAMM is capable of modeling the execution of large grain algorithms on distributed data flow architectures. The tool graphically displays algorithm activities and processor activities for evaluation of the behavior and performance of an ATAMM based system. The tool's measurement capabilities indicate computing speed, throughput, concurrency, resource utilization, and overhead. Evaluations are performed on a simulated system using the software tool. The tool is used to estimate theoretical lower bound performance. Analysis results are shown to be comparable to the predictions