Design Requirements of Office Systems

Automation of office work constitutes a new growing appl ication of information systems. The original characteri stics of an Office Information System (OIS) in comparison with a conventional information system imply the need for devel opi ng new design methodol ogies and model s, which are cl assified and discussed in this paper. OIS are not just document management systems (or word processing systems), 1.e., they do not consider only, or mainly, static aspects of data: they are in fact more general information systems where documents are only one of the many elements of the system. In addition, while conventional IS are often applied to support operational activities, office work shows many different facets, and therefore it is not reduci bl e to a set of operatl onal activities. Correspondi ngly, whil e the main phases that are commonly recognized in the design of a conventional IS (such as requi rements analysis, requi rements specification, logical design, optimization and implementation, system eval uatl on and . modification) can be transferred al so to OIS design, the , conceptual models for requirements specifications, on which the early design phases are based, should instead be changed in order to allow the specification of particular aspects of an OIS. Such aspects include new functionalities, such as filtering of data, reminding of activities to be performed, scheduling of manual and automatic activities, and communication; some specific types of data are also needed in an OIS: groups of data (documents and dossiers), unstructured and incomplete data, sophisticated handling of time, and of compl ex situations, distributed data, office workers roles. Other particular aspects are related to the fact that an office system is intrisically evol uti onary, and with the usage of the system: highly interactive, integrating different functions, requiring great flexibility with possible interruptions of tasks and with a high number of exceptions arising during the work

Knowledge based approach to flexible workflow management systems

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST).Today's business environments are characterized by dynamic and uncertain environments. In order to effectively support business processes in such contexts, workflow management systems must be able to adapt themselves effectively. In this dissertation, the workflow is redefined in concept and represented with a set of business rules. Business rules play a central role in organizational workflows in context of cooperation among actors. To achieve business goals, they constrain the flow of works, use of resources, and responsibility mapping between tasks and actors using role concept. Business rules are explicitly modeled in the Knowledge-based Workflow Model (KWM) using frames. To increase the adaptability of workflow management system, KWM has several distinctive features. First, it increases expressiveness of workflow model so that exception handling rules and responsibility mapping rules between tasks and actors as well as task scheduling rules are explicitly modeled. Secondly, formal definition of KWM enables one to define and to analyze correctness of workflow schema. Knowledge-based approach enables more powerful analysis on workflow schema including checking consistency and compactness of routing rules as well as terminality of a workflow. Thirdly, providing change propagation mechanism which assures correctness of workflow after the modification of workflow schema increases adaptability. Change propagation rules for the modification primitives are provided to manage workflow evolution. On the other hand, metarules that control rules in KWM are used to handle exceptions that occur in a running workflow instance. Workflow participants can easily change workflow schema of a workflow instance with the support of extra rules and a metarule. Based on KWM, K-WFMS (Knowledge-based WorkFlow Management System) has been implemented in client/server architecture. Inference shell of knowledge-based systems is employed for enactment of business rules and integrated with database systems. From a real application based on the KWM architecture, it has been shown that system performance can increase notably by reducing the number of rules and facts that are used in the course of workflow enactment

An analysis framework for CSCW systems

Software toolkits are under development to help construct applications that support group-working. Toolkit developers adopt different approaches to group-work support in order to tackle different issues and a toolkit is commonly characterised by the approach adopted. It is difficult to compare toolkits because of this lack of apparent commonality and it is difficult to decide which toolkits meet specific application requirements. [Continues.

Extensions to the ACM dataflow model

Call number: LD2668 .T4 CMSC 1987 F57Master of ScienceComputing and Information Science

SMART: a tool for the study of the ACM model of concurrent computation

Call number: LD2668 .T4 1986 Y84Master of ScienceComputing and Information Science

A programming language and compiler based on an augmentation of the ACM model

Call number: LD2668 .T4 CMSC 1987 S54Master of ScienceComputing and Information Science

A unified approach to the development and usage of mobile agents

Mobile agents are an interesting approach to the development of distributed systems. By moving freely accross the network, they allow for the distribution of computation as well as gathering and filtering of information in an autonomous way. Over the last decade, the agent research community has decidedly achieved tremendous results. However, the community was not able to provide easy to use toolkits to make this paradigm available to a broader audience. By embracing simplicity during the creation of a formal model and a reference implementation to create and execute instances of that model, our aim is to enable a wide audience – even non-experts – to create, adapt and use mobile agents. The proposed model allows for the creation of agents by combining atomic, self-contained building blocks and we provide an approachable, easy to use graphical editor for the creation of model instances. In two evaluations, we could reinforce our believes that, with the achieved results, we could reach our aims