Procedure For Hybrid Process Analysis And Design

Performing business processes are a critical asset for manufacturing companies operating on highly competitive markets. Conventional approaches to business process improvement, however, are vulnerable to subjectivity and high manual efforts in their execution. These challenges can be overcome with recent databased approaches that semi-automate process analysis and design. Those approaches formalize methodical knowledge on weakness detection, measure derivation and performance evaluation for business processes into a performance-related decision support. By enabling the databased automation of these tasks this formalization helps to reduce efforts and subjectivity in process analysis and design. However, practice lacks a procedure for applying this decision support in operative business process improvement. Moreover, this decision support only formalises methodological knowledge. Operative business process improvement in practice additionally requires the consideration of experts' contextual knowledge about the company and the business process itself. This paper presents a hybrid approach for the analysis and design of business processes using a databased decision support. First, existing phase models for business process improvement are consolidated into a reference model. Second, an expert-based assessment is conducted on how decision support extends, modifies or eliminates the conventional tasks of process analysis and design. In the third step, a hybrid phase model for process analysis and design is developed that integrates the formalised methodological knowledge of the decision support and contextual knowledge of experts

On partial order semantics for SAT/SMT-based symbolic encodings of weak memory concurrency

Concurrent systems are notoriously difficult to analyze, and technological advances such as weak memory architectures greatly compound this problem. This has renewed interest in partial order semantics as a theoretical foundation for formal verification techniques. Among these, symbolic techniques have been shown to be particularly effective at finding concurrency-related bugs because they can leverage highly optimized decision procedures such as SAT/SMT solvers. This paper gives new fundamental results on partial order semantics for SAT/SMT-based symbolic encodings of weak memory concurrency. In particular, we give the theoretical basis for a decision procedure that can handle a fragment of concurrent programs endowed with least fixed point operators. In addition, we show that a certain partial order semantics of relaxed sequential consistency is equivalent to the conjunction of three extensively studied weak memory axioms by Alglave et al. An important consequence of this equivalence is an asymptotically smaller symbolic encoding for bounded model checking which has only a quadratic number of partial order constraints compared to the state-of-the-art cubic-size encoding.Comment: 15 pages, 3 figure

An empirical study of determinants in decision-making process

This paper presents a new social utility model, which highlights determinants in decision-making process when individuals are in strategic interactions by means of take-it-or-leave-it offer. In our model, the decision-maker seeks to maximize her utility function which depends both on her monetary payoff and payoffs differences between all individuals. We confront the predictions of our model with experimental regularities. We model decisions of player with a veto power by a dummy variable. In particular, we test the assumptions of the model with data obtained in a previous three-player dictator-ultimatum game experiment (Bonein, Serra, 2004). Regression and stepwise procedure allow us to confirm importance of personal payoff and existence of disadvantageous inequality aversion. However, our results dispute advantageous inequality aversion proposed by Fehr, Schmidt (1999). Moreover, advantageous inequality between others players becomes relevant. This last motivation was forgotten in inequality aversion models. This model decreases the importance of fairness motivation in rejection of positive offer. We show that motivation can be selfishness: the decision-maker seeks to maximize a particular utility function.

The Clinical Assessment in the Legal Field: An Empirical Study of Bias and Limitations in Forensic Expertise

According to the literature, psychological assessment in forensic contexts is one of the most controversial application areas for clinical psychology. This paper presents a review of systematic judgment errors in the forensic field. Forty-six psychological reports written by psychologists, court consultants, have been analyzed with content analysis to identify typical judgment errors related to the following areas: (a) distortions in the attribution of causality, (b) inferential errors, and (c) epistemological inconsistencies. Results indicated that systematic errors of judgment, usually referred also as "the man in the street," are widely present in the forensic evaluations of specialist consultants. Clinical and practical implications are taken into account. This article could lead to significant benefits for clinical psychologists who want to deal with this sensitive issue and are interested in improving the quality of their contribution to the justice system

An Evaluation of Effectiveness of Fuzzy Logic Model in Predicting the Business Bankruptcy

In front of the current global financial crisis, the future existence of the firms is uncertain. The characteristics and the dynamics of the current world and the interdependences between the financial and economic markets around it demand a continuous research for new methods of bankruptcy prediction. The purpose of this article is to present a fuzzy logic-based system that predicts bankruptcy for one, two and three years before the possible failure of companies. The proposed fuzzy model uses as inputs financial ratios, that is dynamics of the financial ratios. In order to design and to implement the model, authors have used financial statements of 132 stock equity companies (25 bankrupt and 107 nonbankrupt). The paper presents also the testing and validation of the created fuzzy logic models.bankruptcy, crisis, prediction, fuzzy logic, ratings

Foundations for Uniform Interpolation and Forgetting in Expressive Description Logics

We study uniform interpolation and forgetting in the description logic ALC. Our main results are model-theoretic characterizations of uniform inter- polants and their existence in terms of bisimula- tions, tight complexity bounds for deciding the existence of uniform interpolants, an approach to computing interpolants when they exist, and tight bounds on their size. We use a mix of model- theoretic and automata-theoretic methods that, as a by-product, also provides characterizations of and decision procedures for conservative extensions

Collective economic decisions and the discursive dilemma

Most economic decisions involve judgments. When decisions are taken collectively, various judgment aggregation problems may occur. Here we consider an aggregation problem called the "discursive dilemma", which is characterized by an inconsistency between the aggregate judgment on the premises for a conclusion and the aggregate judgment on the conclusion itself. It thus matter for the decision whether the group uses a premise- or a conclusion-based decisionmaking procedure. The current literature, primarily within jurisprudence, philosophy, and social choice, consider aggregation of qualitative judgments on propositions. Most economic decisions, however, involve quantitative judgments on economic variables. We develop a framework that is suitable for analyzing the relevance of the discursive dilemma for economic decisions. Assuming that decisions are reached either through majority voting or by averaging, we find that the dilemma cannot be ruled out, except under some restrictive assumptions about the relationship between the premise-variables and the conclusion.Collective economic decisions, Judgement aggregation, Inconsistency

Proof theory for hybrid(ised) logics

Hybridisation is a systematic process along which the characteristic features of hybrid logic, both at the syntactic and the semantic levels, are developed on top of an arbitrary logic framed as an institution. In a series of papers this process has been detailed and taken as a basis for a specification methodology for reconfigurable systems. The present paper extends this work by showing how a proof calculus (in both a Hilbert and a tableau based format) for the hybridised version of a logic can be systematically generated from a proof calculus for the latter. Such developments provide the basis for a complete proof theory for hybrid(ised) logics, and thus pave the way to the development of (dedicated) proof support.The authors are grateful to Torben Bräuner for helpful, inspiring discussions, and to the anonymous referees for their detailed comments. This work is funded by ERDF—European Regional Development Fund, through the COMPETE Programme, and by National Funds through Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia(FCT) within project PTDC/EEI-CTP/4836/2014. Moreover, the first and the second authors are sponsored by FCT grants SFRH/BD/52234/2013 and SFRH/BPD/103004/2014, respectively. M. Mar-tins is also supported by the EU FP7 Marie Curie PIRSES-GA-2012-318986 project GeTFun: Generalizing Truth-Functionality and FCT project UID/MAT/04106/2013 through CIDMA. L.Barbosa is further supported by FCT in the context of SFRH/B-SAB/113890/2015