Agile decision agent for service-oriented e-commerce systems

In a service-oriented e-commerce environment, it is a crucial task to help consumers choose desired products efficiently from a huge amount of dynamically configured product candidates. Decision agents can be designed to provide interactive decision aids for end-users by eliciting their preferences and then recommending matching products. In reality the users' preferences may keep changing along with the dynamic decision environment and may not be fully satisfied. As a result, the decision agent is required to be agile; it should allow decision making with an incomplete user's preference model and should afford users to add, retract or revise their various preferences with little effort. In this paper we propose the general design of an agile decision agent to meet this need. We model users' preferences with the soft constraint technique and elicit them by the example critiquing interaction paradig

A survey of simulation techniques in commerce and defence

Despite the developments in Modelling and Simulation (M&S) tools and techniques over the past years, there has been a gap in the M&S research and practice in healthcare on developing a toolkit to assist the modellers and simulation practitioners with selecting an appropriate set of techniques. This study is a preliminary step towards this goal. This paper presents some results from a systematic literature survey on applications of M&S in the commerce and defence domains that could inspire some improvements in the healthcare. Interim results show that in the commercial sector Discrete-Event Simulation (DES) has been the most widely used technique with System Dynamics (SD) in second place. However in the defence sector, SD has gained relatively more attention. SD has been found quite useful for qualitative and soft factors analysis. From both the surveys it becomes clear that there is a growing trend towards using hybrid M&S approaches

Intangible trust requirements - how to fill the requirements trust "gap"?

Previous research efforts have been expended in terms of the capture and subsequent instantiation of "soft" trust requirements that relate to HCI usability concerns or in relation to "hard" tangible security requirements that primarily relate to security a ssurance and security protocols. Little direct focus has been paid to managing intangible trust related requirements per se. This 'gap' is perhaps most evident in the public B2C (Business to Consumer) E- Systems we all use on a daily basis. Some speculative suggestions are made as to how to fill the 'gap'. Visual card sorting is suggested as a suitable evaluative tool; whilst deontic logic trust norms and UML extended notation are the suggested (methodologically invariant) means by which software development teams can perhaps more fully capture hence visualize intangible trust requirements

Flexible Decision Support in Dynamic Interorganizational Networks

An effective Decision Support System (DSS) should help its users improve decision-making in complex, information-rich, environments. We present a feature gap analysis that shows that current decision support technologies lack important qualities for a new generation of agile business models that require easy, temporary integration across organisational boundaries. We enumerate these qualities as DSS Desiderata, properties that can contribute both effectiveness and flexibility to users in such environments. To address this gap, we describe a new design approach that enables users to compose decision behaviours from separate, configurable components, and allows dynamic construction of analysis and modelling tools from small, single-purpose evaluator services. The result is what we call an “evaluator service network” that can easily be configured to test hypotheses and analyse the impact of various choices for elements of decision processes. We have implemented and tested this design in an interactive version of the MinneTAC trading agent, an agent designed for the Trading Agent Competition for Supply Chain Management

People in the E-Business: New Challenges, New Solutions

[Excerpt] Human Resource Planning Society’s (HRPS) annual State of the Art/Practice (SOTA/P) study has become an integral contributor to HRPS’s mission of providing leading edge thinking to its members. Past efforts conducted in 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998, and 1999 have focused on identifying the issues on the horizon that will have a significant impact on the field of Human Resources (HR). This year, in a divergence from past practice, the SOTA/P effort aimed at developing a deeper understanding of one critical issue having a profound impact on organizations and HR, the rise of e-business. The rise of e-business has been both rapid and dramatic. One estimate puts the rate of adoption of the internet at 4,000 new users each hour (eMarketer, 1999) resulting in the expectation of 250 million people on line by the end of 2000, and 350 million by 2005 (Nua, 1999). E-commerce is expected to reach $1.3 trillion by 2003, and of that, 87 percent will go to the business to business (B2B) and 13 percent to the business to consumer (B2C) segments, respectively (Plumely, 2000)

Integration of decision support systems to improve decision support performance

Decision support system (DSS) is a well-established research and development area. Traditional isolated, stand-alone DSS has been recently facing new challenges. In order to improve the performance of DSS to meet the challenges, research has been actively carried out to develop integrated decision support systems (IDSS). This paper reviews the current research efforts with regard to the development of IDSS. The focus of the paper is on the integration aspect for IDSS through multiple perspectives, and the technologies that support this integration. More than 100 papers and software systems are discussed. Current research efforts and the development status of IDSS are explained, compared and classified. In addition, future trends and challenges in integration are outlined. The paper concludes that by addressing integration, better support will be provided to decision makers, with the expectation of both better decisions and improved decision making processes