A Semantic Grid Oriented to E-Tourism

With increasing complexity of tourism business models and tasks, there is a clear need of the next generation e-Tourism infrastructure to support flexible automation, integration, computation, storage, and collaboration. Currently several enabling technologies such as semantic Web, Web service, agent and grid computing have been applied in the different e-Tourism applications, however there is no a unified framework to be able to integrate all of them. So this paper presents a promising e-Tourism framework based on emerging semantic grid, in which a number of key design issues are discussed including architecture, ontologies structure, semantic reconciliation, service and resource discovery, role based authorization and intelligent agent. The paper finally provides the implementation of the framework.Comment: 12 PAGES, 7 Figure

Coordination approaches and systems - part I : a strategic perspective

This is the first part of a two-part paper presenting a fundamental review and summary of research of design coordination and cooperation technologies. The theme of this review is aimed at the research conducted within the decision management aspect of design coordination. The focus is therefore on the strategies involved in making decisions and how these strategies are used to satisfy design requirements. The paper reviews research within collaborative and coordinated design, project and workflow management, and, task and organization models. The research reviewed has attempted to identify fundamental coordination mechanisms from different domains, however it is concluded that domain independent mechanisms need to be augmented with domain specific mechanisms to facilitate coordination. Part II is a review of design coordination from an operational perspective

Practical applications of multi-agent systems in electric power systems

The transformation of energy networks from passive to active systems requires the embedding of intelligence within the network. One suitable approach to integrating distributed intelligent systems is multi-agent systems technology, where components of functionality run as autonomous agents capable of interaction through messaging. This provides loose coupling between components that can benefit the complex systems envisioned for the smart grid. This paper reviews the key milestones of demonstrated agent systems in the power industry and considers which aspects of agent design must still be addressed for widespread application of agent technology to occur

Integration of BPM systems

New technologies have emerged to support the global economy where for instance suppliers, manufactures and retailers are working together in order to minimise the cost and maximise efficiency. One of the technologies that has become a buzz word for many businesses is business process management or BPM. A business process comprises activities and tasks, the resources required to perform each task, and the business rules linking these activities and tasks. The tasks may be performed by human and/or machine actors. Workflow provides a way of describing the order of execution and the dependent relationships between the constituting activities of short or long running processes. Workflow allows businesses to capture not only the information but also the processes that transform the information - the process asset (Koulopoulos, T. M., 1995). Applications which involve automated, human-centric and collaborative processes across organisations are inherently different from one organisation to another. Even within the same organisation but over time, applications are adapted as ongoing change to the business processes is seen as the norm in today’s dynamic business environment. The major difference lies in the specifics of business processes which are changing rapidly in order to match the way in which businesses operate. In this chapter we introduce and discuss Business Process Management (BPM) with a focus on the integration of heterogeneous BPM systems across multiple organisations. We identify the problems and the main challenges not only with regards to technologies but also in the social and cultural context. We also discuss the issues that have arisen in our bid to find the solutions

Context-Aware Information Retrieval for Enhanced Situation Awareness

In the coalition forces, users are increasingly challenged with the issues of information overload and correlation of information from heterogeneous sources. Users might need different pieces of information, ranging from information about a single building, to the resolution strategy of a global conflict. Sometimes, the time, location and past history of information access can also shape the information needs of users. Information systems need to help users pull together data from disparate sources according to their expressed needs (as represented by system queries), as well as less specific criteria. Information consumers have varying roles, tasks/missions, goals and agendas, knowledge and background, and personal preferences. These factors can be used to shape both the execution of user queries and the form in which retrieved information is packaged. However, full automation of this daunting information aggregation and customization task is not possible with existing approaches. In this paper we present an infrastructure for context-aware information retrieval to enhance situation awareness. The infrastructure provides each user with a customized, mission-oriented system that gives access to the right information from heterogeneous sources in the context of a particular task, plan and/or mission. The approach lays on five intertwined fundamental concepts, namely Workflow, Context, Ontology, Profile and Information Aggregation. The exploitation of this knowledge, using appropriate domain ontologies, will make it feasible to provide contextual assistance in various ways to the work performed according to a user’s taskrelevant information requirements. This paper formalizes these concepts and their interrelationships

Enterprise application reuse: Semantic discovery of business grid services

Web services have emerged as a prominent paradigm for the development of distributed software systems as they provide the potential for software to be modularized in a way that functionality can be described, discovered and deployed in a platform independent manner over a network (e.g., intranets, extranets and the Internet). This paper examines an extension of this paradigm to encompass ‘Grid Services’, which enables software capabilities to be recast with an operational focus and support a heterogeneous mix of business software and data, termed a Business Grid - "the grid of semantic services". The current industrial representation of services is predominantly syntactic however, lacking the fundamental semantic underpinnings required to fulfill the goals of any semantically-oriented Grid. Consequently, the use of semantic technology in support of business software heterogeneity is investigated as a likely tool to support a diverse and distributed software inventory and user. Service discovery architecture is therefore developed that is (a) distributed in form, (2) supports distributed service knowledge and (3) automatically extends service knowledge (as greater descriptive precision is inferred from the operating application system). This discovery engine is used to execute several real-word scenarios in order to develop and test a framework for engineering such grid service knowledge. The examples presented comprise software components taken from a group of Investment Banking systems. Resulting from the research is a framework for engineering servic

Design patterns for multi-agent simulations

The advent of mobile agent technology has brought along a few difficulties in designing a stable, efficient and scalable system for a certain problem. Agent-based simulations prove to be powerful tools for economic analyses. In this paper we aim at describing a set of design patterns which were specifically built for agents and multi-agent systems. The details of each design pattern discussed are presented and the possible applications and known issues are noted. In order to aid the software designers, we provide some examples of the basic implementation of these patterns using the JADE multi-agent framework.intelligent agent, multi-agent design, multi-agent simulation.