12,346 research outputs found
ADEPT2 - Next Generation Process Management Technology
If current process management systems shall be applied to a broad spectrum of applications, they will have to be significantly improved with respect to their technological capabilities. In particular, in dynamic environments it must be possible to quickly implement and deploy new processes, to enable ad-hoc modifications of single process instances at runtime (e.g., to add, delete or shift process steps), and to support process schema evolution with instance migration, i.e., to propagate process schema changes to already running instances. These requirements must be met without affecting process consistency and by preserving the robustness of the process management system. In this paper we describe how these challenges have been addressed and solved in the ADEPT2 Process Management System. Our overall vision is to provide a next generation process management technology which can be used in a variety of application domains
Digital Ecosystems: Ecosystem-Oriented Architectures
We view Digital Ecosystems to be the digital counterparts of biological
ecosystems. Here, we are concerned with the creation of these Digital
Ecosystems, exploiting the self-organising properties of biological ecosystems
to evolve high-level software applications. Therefore, we created the Digital
Ecosystem, a novel optimisation technique inspired by biological ecosystems,
where the optimisation works at two levels: a first optimisation, migration of
agents which are distributed in a decentralised peer-to-peer network, operating
continuously in time; this process feeds a second optimisation based on
evolutionary computing that operates locally on single peers and is aimed at
finding solutions to satisfy locally relevant constraints. The Digital
Ecosystem was then measured experimentally through simulations, with measures
originating from theoretical ecology, evaluating its likeness to biological
ecosystems. This included its responsiveness to requests for applications from
the user base, as a measure of the ecological succession (ecosystem maturity).
Overall, we have advanced the understanding of Digital Ecosystems, creating
Ecosystem-Oriented Architectures where the word ecosystem is more than just a
metaphor.Comment: 39 pages, 26 figures, journa
Abmash: Mashing Up Legacy Web Applications by Automated Imitation of Human Actions
Many business web-based applications do not offer applications programming
interfaces (APIs) to enable other applications to access their data and
functions in a programmatic manner. This makes their composition difficult (for
instance to synchronize data between two applications). To address this
challenge, this paper presents Abmash, an approach to facilitate the
integration of such legacy web applications by automatically imitating human
interactions with them. By automatically interacting with the graphical user
interface (GUI) of web applications, the system supports all forms of
integrations including bi-directional interactions and is able to interact with
AJAX-based applications. Furthermore, the integration programs are easy to
write since they deal with end-user, visual user-interface elements. The
integration code is simple enough to be called a "mashup".Comment: Software: Practice and Experience (2013)
Practical applications of multi-agent systems in electric power systems
The transformation of energy networks from passive to active systems requires the embedding of intelligence within the network. One suitable approach to integrating distributed intelligent systems is multi-agent systems technology, where components of functionality run as autonomous agents capable of interaction through messaging. This provides loose coupling between components that can benefit the complex systems envisioned for the smart grid. This paper reviews the key milestones of demonstrated agent systems in the power industry and considers which aspects of agent design must still be addressed for widespread application of agent technology to occur
Personalizing Situated Workflows for Pervasive Healthcare Applications
In this paper, we present an approach where a workflow system is combined with a policy-based framework for the specification and enforcement of policies for healthcare applications. In our approach, workflows are used to capture entitiespsila responsibilities and to assist entities in fulfilling them. The policy-based framework allows us to express authorisation policies to define the rights that entities have in the system, and event-condition-action (ECA) policies that are used to adapt the system to the actual situation. Authorisations will often depend on the context in which patientspsila care takes place, and our policies support predicates that reflect the environment. ECA policies capture events that reflect the current state of the environment and can perform actions to accordingly adapt the workflow execution. We show how the approach can be used for the Edema treatment and how fine-grained authorisation and ECA policies are expressed and used
Natural Language Dialogue Service for Appointment Scheduling Agents
Appointment scheduling is a problem faced daily by many individuals and
organizations. Cooperating agent systems have been developed to partially
automate this task. In order to extend the circle of participants as far as
possible we advocate the use of natural language transmitted by e-mail. We
describe COSMA, a fully implemented German language server for existing
appointment scheduling agent systems. COSMA can cope with multiple dialogues in
parallel, and accounts for differences in dialogue behaviour between human and
machine agents. NL coverage of the sublanguage is achieved through both
corpus-based grammar development and the use of message extraction techniques.Comment: 8 or 9 pages, LaTeX; uses aclap.sty, epsf.te
Designing Traceability into Big Data Systems
Providing an appropriate level of accessibility and traceability to data or
process elements (so-called Items) in large volumes of data, often
Cloud-resident, is an essential requirement in the Big Data era.
Enterprise-wide data systems need to be designed from the outset to support
usage of such Items across the spectrum of business use rather than from any
specific application view. The design philosophy advocated in this paper is to
drive the design process using a so-called description-driven approach which
enriches models with meta-data and description and focuses the design process
on Item re-use, thereby promoting traceability. Details are given of the
description-driven design of big data systems at CERN, in health informatics
and in business process management. Evidence is presented that the approach
leads to design simplicity and consequent ease of management thanks to loose
typing and the adoption of a unified approach to Item management and usage.Comment: 10 pages; 6 figures in Proceedings of the 5th Annual International
Conference on ICT: Big Data, Cloud and Security (ICT-BDCS 2015), Singapore
July 2015. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1402.5764,
arXiv:1402.575
Service Oriented Toolkit for Research Data Management Final Report
The Service Oriented Toolkit for Research Data Management project was co-funded by the JISC Managing Research Data Programme 2011-2013 and The University of Hertfordshire. The project focused on the realisation of practical benefits for operationalising an institutional approach to good practice in RDM. The objectives of the project were to audit current best practice, develop technology demonstrators with the assistance of leading UH research groups, and then reflect these developments back into the wider internal and external research community via a toolkit of services and guidance. The overall aim was to contribute to the efficacy and quality of research data plans, and establish and cement good data management practice in line with local and national policy
Knowledge management support for enterprise distributed systems
Explosion of information and increasing demands on semantic processing web applications have software systems to their limits. To address the problem we propose a semantic based formal framework (ADP) that makes use of promising technologies to enable knowledge generation and retrieval. We argue that this approach is cost effective, as it reuses and builds on existing knowledge and structure. It is also a good starting point for creating an organisational memory and providing knowledge management functions
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