35,356 research outputs found
A core ontology for business process analysis
Business Process Management (BPM) aims at supporting the whole life-cycle necessary to deploy and maintain business processes in organisations. An important step of the BPM life-cycle is the analysis of the processes deployed in companies. However, the degree of automation currently achieved cannot support the level of adaptation required by businesses. Initial steps have been performed towards including some sort of automated reasoning within Business Process Analysis (BPA) but this is typically limited to using taxonomies. We present a core ontology aimed at enhancing the state of the art in BPA. The ontology builds upon a Time Ontology and is structured around the process, resource, and object perspectives as typically adopted when analysing business processes. The ontology has been extended and validated by means of an Events Ontology and an Events Analysis Ontology aimed at capturing the audit trails generated by Process-Aware Information Systems and deriving additional knowledge
Methods and Tools for the Microsimulation and Forecasting of Household Expenditure
This paper reviews potential methods and tools for the microsimulation and forecasting of household expenditure. It begins with a discussion of a range of approaches to the forecasting of household populations via agent-based modelling tools. Then it evaluates approaches to the modelling of household expenditure. A prototype implementation is described and the paper concludes with an outline of an approach to be pursued in future work
Methods and Tools for the Microsimulation and Forecasting of Household Expenditure - A Review
This paper reviews potential methods and tools for the microsimulation and forecasting of household expenditure. It begins with a discussion of a range of approaches to the forecasting of household populations via agent-based modelling
tools. Then it evaluates approaches to the modelling of household expenditure. A prototype implementation is described and the paper concludes with an outline of an
approach to be pursued in future work
Soft behaviour modelling of user communities
A soft modelling approach for describing behaviour in on-line user communities is introduced in this work. Behaviour models of individual users in dynamic virtual environments have been described in the literature in terms of timed transition automata; they have various drawbacks. Soft multi/agent behaviour automata are defined and proposed to describe multiple user behaviours and to recognise larger classes of user group histories, such as group histories which contain unexpected behaviours. The notion of deviation from the user community model allows defining a soft parsing process which assesses and evaluates the dynamic behaviour of a group of users interacting in virtual environments, such as e-learning and e-business platforms. The soft automaton model can describe virtually infinite sequences of actions due to multiple users and subject to temporal constraints. Soft measures assess a form of distance of observed behaviours by evaluating the amount of temporal deviation, additional or omitted actions contained in an observed history as well as actions performed by unexpected users. The proposed model allows the soft recognition of user group histories also when the observed actions only partially meet the given behaviour model constraints. This approach is more realistic for real-time user community support systems, concerning standard boolean model recognition, when more than one user model is potentially available, and the extent of deviation from community behaviour models can be used as a guide to generate the system support by anticipation, projection and other known techniques. Experiments based on logs from an e-learning platform and plan compilation of the soft multi-agent behaviour automaton show the expressiveness of the proposed model
A Calculus of Mobility and Communication for Ubiquitous Computing
We propose a Calculus of Mobility and Communication (CMC) for the modelling
of mobility, communication and context-awareness in the setting of ubiquitous
computing. CMC is an ambient calculus with the in and out capabilities of
Cardelli and Gordon's Mobile Ambients. The calculus has a new form of global
communication similar to that in Milner's CCS. In CMC an ambient is tagged with
a set of ports that agents executing inside the ambient are allowed to
communicate on. It also has a new context-awareness feature that allows
ambients to query their location. We present reduction semantics and labelled
transition system semantics of CMC and prove that the semantics coincide. A new
notion of behavioural equivalence is given by defining capability barbed
bisimulation and congruence which is proved to coincide with barbed
bisimulation congruence. The expressiveness of the calculus is illustrated by
two case studies.Comment: In Proceedings WWV 2015, arXiv:1508.0338
Actors and factors - bridging social science findings and urban land use change modeling
Recent uneven land use dynamics in urban areas resulting from demographic change, economic pressure and the citiesâ mutual competition in a globalising world challenge both scientists and practitioners, among them social scientists, modellers and spatial planners. Processes of growth and decline specifically affect the urban environment, the requirements of the residents on social and natural resources. Social and environmental research is interested in a better understanding and ways of explaining the interactions between society and landscape in urban areas. And it is also needed for making life in cities attractive, secure and affordable within or despite of uneven dynamics.\ud
The position paper upon âActors and factors â bridging social science findings and urban land use change modelingâ presents approaches and ideas on how social science findings on the interaction of the social system (actors) and the land use (factors) are taken up and formalised using modelling and gaming techniques. It should be understood as a first sketch compiling major challenges and proposing exemplary solutions in the field of interest
Monitoring and control in scenario-based requirements analysis
Scenarios are an effective means for eliciting, validating and documenting requirements. At the requirements level, scenarios describe sequences of interactions between the software-to-be and agents in the environment. Interactions correspond to the occurrence of an event that is controlled by one agent and monitored by another.This paper presents a technique to analyse requirements-level scenarios for unforeseen, potentially harmful, consequences. Our aim is to perform analysis early in system development, where it is highly cost-effective. The approach recognises the importance of monitoring and control issues and extends existing work on implied scenarios accordingly. These so-called input-output implied scenarios expose problematic behaviours in scenario descriptions that cannot be detected using standard implied scenarios. Validation of these implied scenarios supports requirements elaboration. We demonstrate the relevance of input-output implied scenarios using a number of examples
A counter abstraction technique for the verification of robot swarms.
We study parameterised verification of robot swarms against temporal-epistemic specifications. We relax some of the significant restrictions assumed in the literature and present a counter abstraction approach that enable us to verify a potentially much smaller abstract model when checking a formula on a swarm of any size. We present an implementation and discuss experimental results obtained for the alpha algorithm for robot swarms
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