29,112 research outputs found
Collaborative information systems and business process design using simulation
The Information Systems (IS) community promotes the idea that IS analyst should have a clear understanding of the way the organization operates before attempting to propose an IS solution. It is argued that to take a complete advantage of the underlying Information Technology (IT), organizations should first identify any process flaw and then propose a suitable IT solution. Similarly, many process design approaches claim that Business Process (BP) design should be done considering the advantages provided and the limitations imposed by the underlying (IT). Despite this fact research in these domains provides little indication of which mechanisms or tools can help BP and IS analyst to understand the complex relationships amongst these two areas. This paper describes the insights gained during a UK funded research project, namely ASSESS-IT, that aimed to depict the dynamic relationships between IT and BP using simulation. One of the major limitations of the ASSESS-IT project is that it looked at relationship between BP and IT as a three layered structure, namely BP, IS and Computer Networks (CN), and did not explore in detail the relationships between BP and IS alone. This paper uses the outcomes derived from this project and suggests that, is some cases, the relationship between BP and IT could be analyzed by looking at the relationship between BP and IS alone. It then proposes an alternative simulation framework, namely BPISS, that provides the guideline to develop simulation models that portray BP and IS behavior performance measurements, offering in this way an alternative mechanism that can help BP and IS analyst to understand in more detail the dynamic interactions between BP and IS domains
Panel on future challenges in modeling methodology
This panel paper presents the views of six researchers and practitioners of simulation modeling. Collectively we attempt to address a range of key future challenges to modeling methodology. It is hoped that the views of this paper, and the presentations made by the panelists at the 2004 Winter Simulation Conference will raise awareness and stimulate further discussion on the future of modeling methodology in areas such as modeling problems in business applications, human factors and geographically dispersed networks; rapid model development and maintenance; legacy modeling approaches; markup languages; virtual interactive process design and simulation; standards; and Grid computing
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Semantic web services for simulation component reuse and interoperability: An ontology approach
Commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) Simulation Packages (CSPs) are widely used in industry primarily due to economic factors associated with developing proprietary software platforms. Regardless of their widespread use, CSPs have yet to operate across organizational boundaries. The limited reuse and interoperability of CSPs are affected by the same semantic issues that restrict the inter-organizational use of software components and web services. The current representations of Web components are predominantly syntactic in nature lacking the fundamental semantic underpinning required to support discovery on the emerging Semantic Web. The authors present new research that partially alleviates the problem of limited semantic reuse and interoperability of simulation components in CSPs. Semantic models, in the form of ontologies, utilized by the authorsâ Web service discovery and deployment architecture provide one approach to support simulation model reuse. Semantic interoperation is achieved through a simulation component ontology that is used to identify required components at varying levels of granularity (i.e. including both abstract and specialized components). Selected simulation components are loaded into a CSP, modified according to the requirements of the new model and executed. The research presented here is based on the development of an ontology, connector software, and a Web service discovery architecture. The ontology is extracted from simulation scenarios involving airport, restaurant and kitchen service suppliers. The ontology engineering framework and discovery architecture provide a novel approach to inter-organizational simulation, by adopting a less intrusive interface between participants Although specific to CSPs this work has wider implications for the simulation community. The reason being that the community as a whole stands to benefit through from an increased awareness of the state-of-the-art in Software Engineering (for example, ontology-supported component discovery and reuse, and service-oriented computing), and it is expected that this will eventually lead to the development of a unique Software Engineering-inspired methodology to build simulations in future
Human-Machine Collaborative Optimization via Apprenticeship Scheduling
Coordinating agents to complete a set of tasks with intercoupled temporal and
resource constraints is computationally challenging, yet human domain experts
can solve these difficult scheduling problems using paradigms learned through
years of apprenticeship. A process for manually codifying this domain knowledge
within a computational framework is necessary to scale beyond the
``single-expert, single-trainee" apprenticeship model. However, human domain
experts often have difficulty describing their decision-making processes,
causing the codification of this knowledge to become laborious. We propose a
new approach for capturing domain-expert heuristics through a pairwise ranking
formulation. Our approach is model-free and does not require enumerating or
iterating through a large state space. We empirically demonstrate that this
approach accurately learns multifaceted heuristics on a synthetic data set
incorporating job-shop scheduling and vehicle routing problems, as well as on
two real-world data sets consisting of demonstrations of experts solving a
weapon-to-target assignment problem and a hospital resource allocation problem.
We also demonstrate that policies learned from human scheduling demonstration
via apprenticeship learning can substantially improve the efficiency of a
branch-and-bound search for an optimal schedule. We employ this human-machine
collaborative optimization technique on a variant of the weapon-to-target
assignment problem. We demonstrate that this technique generates solutions
substantially superior to those produced by human domain experts at a rate up
to 9.5 times faster than an optimization approach and can be applied to
optimally solve problems twice as complex as those solved by a human
demonstrator.Comment: Portions of this paper were published in the Proceedings of the
International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) in 2016 and
in the Proceedings of Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS) in 2016. The paper
consists of 50 pages with 11 figures and 4 table
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Business process simulation: An alternative modelling technique for the information system development process
This paper discusses the idea that even though information systems development
(ISD) approaches have long advocated the use of integrated organisational views, the
modelling techniques used have not been adapted accordingly and remain focused on
the automated information system (IS) solution. Existing research provides evidence
that business process simulation (BPS) can be used at different points in the ISD
process to provide better integrated organisational views that aid the design of
appropriate IS solutions. Despite this fact, research in this area is not extensive;
suggesting that the potential of using BPS for the ISD process is not yet well
understood. The paper uses the findings from three different case studies to illustrate
the ways BPS has been used at different points in the ISD process. It compares the
results against IS modelling techniques, highlighting the advantages and
disadvantages that BPS has over the latter. The research necessary to develop
appropriate BPS tools and give guidance on their use in the ISD process is discussed
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Distributed simulation and the grid: Position statements
The Grid provides a new and unrivaled technology for large scale distributed simulation as it enables collaboration and the use of distributed computing resources. This panel paper presents the views of four researchers in the area of Distributed Simulation and the Grid. Together we try to identify the main research issues involved in applying Grid technology to distributed simulation and the key future challenges that need to be solved to achieve this goal. Such challenges include not only technical challenges, but also political ones such as management methodology for the Grid and the development of standards. The benefits of the Grid to end-user simulation modelers also are discussed
Overview on agent-based social modelling and the use of formal languages
Transdisciplinary Models and Applications investigates a variety of programming languages used in validating and verifying models in order to assist in their eventual implementation. This book will explore different methods of evaluating and formalizing simulation models, enabling computer and industrial engineers, mathematicians, and students working with computer simulations to thoroughly understand the progression from simulation to product, improving the overall effectiveness of modeling systems.Postprint (author's final draft
Development Process for Multi-Disciplinary Embedded Control Systems
This report contains the progress report for the qualification exam for Industrial PhD student Sune Wolff. Initial work on describing a development process for multi-disciplinary systems using collaborative modelling and co-simulation is described
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