What Automated Planning Can Do for Business Process Management

Business Process Management (BPM) is a central element of today organizations. Despite over the years its main focus has been the support of processes in highly controlled domains, nowadays many domains of interest to the BPM community are characterized by ever-changing requirements, unpredictable environments and increasing amounts of data that influence the execution of process instances. Under such dynamic conditions, BPM systems must increase their level of automation to provide the reactivity and flexibility necessary for process management. On the other hand, the Artificial Intelligence (AI) community has concentrated its efforts on investigating dynamic domains that involve active control of computational entities and physical devices (e.g., robots, software agents, etc.). In this context, Automated Planning, which is one of the oldest areas in AI, is conceived as a model-based approach to synthesize autonomous behaviours in automated way from a model. In this paper, we discuss how automated planning techniques can be leveraged to enable new levels of automation and support for business processing, and we show some concrete examples of their successful application to the different stages of the BPM life cycle

Semantic-based policy engineering for autonomic systems

This paper presents some important directions in the use of ontology-based semantics in achieving the vision of Autonomic Communications. We examine the requirements of Autonomic Communication with a focus on the demanding needs of ubiquitous computing environments, with an emphasis on the requirements shared with Autonomic Computing. We observe that ontologies provide a strong mechanism for addressing the heterogeneity in user task requirements, managed resources, services and context. We then present two complimentary approaches that exploit ontology-based knowledge in support of autonomic communications: service-oriented models for policy engineering and dynamic semantic queries using content-based networks. The paper concludes with a discussion of the major research challenges such approaches raise

Leveraging Semantic Web Service Descriptions for Validation by Automated Functional Testing

Recent years have seen the utilisation of Semantic Web Service descriptions for automating a wide range of service-related activities, with a primary focus on service discovery, composition, execution and mediation. An important area which so far has received less attention is service validation, whereby advertised services are proven to conform to required behavioural specifications. This paper proposes a method for validation of service-oriented systems through automated functional testing. The method leverages ontology-based and rule-based descriptions of service inputs, outputs, preconditions and effects (IOPE) for constructing a stateful EFSM specification. The specification is subsequently utilised for functional testing and validation using the proven Stream X-machine (SXM) testing methodology. Complete functional test sets are generated automatically at an abstract level and are then applied to concrete Web services, using test drivers created from the Web service descriptions. The testing method comes with completeness guarantees and provides a strong method for validating the behaviour of Web services

Semantic Blockchain to Improve Scalability in the Internet of Things

Generally scarce computational and memory resource availability is a well known problem for the IoT, whose intrinsic volatility makes complex applications unfeasible. Noteworthy efforts in overcoming unpredictability (particularly in case of large dimensions) are the ones integrating Knowledge Representation technologies to build the so-called Semantic Web of Things (SWoT). In spite of allowed advanced discovery features, transactions in the SWoT still suffer from not viable trust management strategies. Given its intrinsic characteristics, blockchain technology appears as interesting from this perspective: a semantic resource/service discovery layer built upon a basic blockchain infrastructure gains a consensus validation. This paper proposes a novel Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) based on a semantic blockchain for registration, discovery, selection and payment. Such operations are implemented as smart contracts, allowing distributed execution and trust. Reported experiments early assess the sustainability of the proposal

HTN planning: Overview, comparison, and beyond

Hierarchies are one of the most common structures used to understand and conceptualise the world. Within the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) planning, which deals with the automation of world-relevant problems, Hierarchical Task Network (HTN) planning is the branch that represents and handles hierarchies. In particular, the requirement for rich domain knowledge to characterise the world enables HTN planning to be very useful, and also to perform well. However, the history of almost 40 years obfuscates the current understanding of HTN planning in terms of accomplishments, planning models, similarities and differences among hierarchical planners, and its current and objective image. On top of these issues, the ability of hierarchical planning to truly cope with the requirements of real-world applications has been often questioned. As a remedy, we propose a framework-based approach where we first provide a basis for defining different formal models of hierarchical planning, and define two models that comprise a large portion of HTN planners. Second, we provide a set of concepts that helps in interpreting HTN planners from the aspect of their search space. Then, we analyse and compare the planners based on a variety of properties organised in five segments, namely domain authoring, expressiveness, competence, computation and applicability. Furthermore, we select Web service composition as a real-world and current application, and classify and compare the approaches that employ HTN planning to solve the problem of service composition. Finally, we conclude with our findings and present directions for future work. In summary, we provide a novel and comprehensive viewpoint on a core AI planning technique.<br/

Device Cooperation in Ad-hoc Multimedia Ensembles

Users can be overwhelmed by the abundance of functionality that smart ad-hoc environments offer. This thesis investigates how to assist the user in controlling such environments. We present an approach that enables the devices in an ad-hoc environment to cooperatively generate and execute an action sequence to fulfill the user's goals. Device cooperation happens spontaneously and in a completely distributed fashion. In a quantitative user study, we show that users accept the assistance such a system provides even if it is suboptimal.Nutzer von intelligenten Ad-hoc-Umgebungen sind oft überfordert von der Fülle an Funktionalität, die solche Umgebungen bieten. Im Mittelpunkt dieser Arbeit steht die Frage, wie man Nutzern solcher Umgebungen assistieren kann. Der vorgestellte Ansatz versetzt die Geräte in Ad-hoc-Umgebungen in die Lage, kooperativ eine Aktionssequenz zu generieren und auszuführen, die die Nutzerziele erfüllt. Die Gerätekooperation erfolgt spontan und komplett verteilt. In einer quantitativen Nutzerstudie zeigen wir, dass Nutzer die Assistenz eines solchen Systems akzeptieren, auch wenn sie suboptimal ist

An Integrated Formal Task Specification Method for Smart Environments

This thesis is concerned with the development of interactive systems for smart environments. In such scenario different interaction paradigms need to be supported and according methods and development strategies need to be applied to comprise not only explicit interaction (e.g., pressing a button to adjust the light) but also implicit interactions (e.g., walking to the speaker’s desk to give a talk) to assist the user appropriately. A task-based modeling approach is introduced allowing basing the implementing of different interaction paradigms on the same artifact

Ubiquitous Computing

The aim of this book is to give a treatment of the actively developed domain of Ubiquitous computing. Originally proposed by Mark D. Weiser, the concept of Ubiquitous computing enables a real-time global sensing, context-aware informational retrieval, multi-modal interaction with the user and enhanced visualization capabilities. In effect, Ubiquitous computing environments give extremely new and futuristic abilities to look at and interact with our habitat at any time and from anywhere. In that domain, researchers are confronted with many foundational, technological and engineering issues which were not known before. Detailed cross-disciplinary coverage of these issues is really needed today for further progress and widening of application range. This book collects twelve original works of researchers from eleven countries, which are clustered into four sections: Foundations, Security and Privacy, Integration and Middleware, Practical Applications