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

Argumentation schemes for collaborative planning

Postprin

Ethics and the Settlement of Mass Torts: When the Rules Meet the Road

The settlement of mass torts through the class action device presents some difficult and troubling issues, including important questions of due process, fairness, justice, efficiency, equality, equity, and ethics. In this context, some of these foundational values conflict with each other and must be resolved by judges who must decide actual cases. In analyzing the applicable laws and rules (class action rules, constitutional provisions, and ethics rules) we find answers or suggestions that are often ambiguous or contradictory. All of these unresolved ambiguities raise the question of whether mass torts are any different from any number of difficult cases our legal system faces. I do think that mass torts present us with some novel issues that question the transsubstantivity of our laws and rules. While others in this symposium focus on the procedural and substantive issues raised by such cases, I will focus on the ethics of such settlements in two senses: First, at the level of professional ethics, I will examine what is ethically permissible behavior in the way in which such settlements are arranged. Second, at the higher, broader level of ethics, I will examine the nature of an ethically just or fair settlement. Although lawyer ethics are only part of the larger considerations of what makes a settlement ethical, the professional responsibility questions raised in recent mass torts cases reveal a bigger problem for legal ethics generally. This problem involves situations where rules are so ambiguous or self-contradictory that they cannot govern behavior clearly

A planning approach to the automated synthesis of template-based process models

The design-time specification of flexible processes can be time-consuming and error-prone, due to the high number of tasks involved and their context-dependent nature. Such processes frequently suffer from potential interference among their constituents, since resources are usually shared by the process participants and it is difficult to foresee all the potential tasks interactions in advance. Concurrent tasks may not be independent from each other (e.g., they could operate on the same data at the same time), resulting in incorrect outcomes. To tackle these issues, we propose an approach for the automated synthesis of a library of template-based process models that achieve goals in dynamic and partially specified environments. The approach is based on a declarative problem definition and partial-order planning algorithms for template generation. The resulting templates guarantee sound concurrency in the execution of their activities and are reusable in a variety of partially specified contextual environments. As running example, a disaster response scenario is given. The approach is backed by a formal model and has been tested in experiment

A Logic Programming Approach to Knowledge-State Planning: Semantics and Complexity

We propose a new declarative planning language, called K, which is based on principles and methods of logic programming. In this language, transitions between states of knowledge can be described, rather than transitions between completely described states of the world, which makes the language well-suited for planning under incomplete knowledge. Furthermore, it enables the use of default principles in the planning process by supporting negation as failure. Nonetheless, K also supports the representation of transitions between states of the world (i.e., states of complete knowledge) as a special case, which shows that the language is very flexible. As we demonstrate on particular examples, the use of knowledge states may allow for a natural and compact problem representation. We then provide a thorough analysis of the computational complexity of K, and consider different planning problems, including standard planning and secure planning (also known as conformant planning) problems. We show that these problems have different complexities under various restrictions, ranging from NP to NEXPTIME in the propositional case. Our results form the theoretical basis for the DLV^K system, which implements the language K on top of the DLV logic programming system.Comment: 48 pages, appeared as a Technical Report at KBS of the Vienna University of Technology, see http://www.kr.tuwien.ac.at/research/reports

Policy Conflict Analysis in Distributed System Management

Accepted versio

Implementing Distributed Controllers for Systems with Priorities

Implementing a component-based system in a distributed way so that it ensures some global constraints is a challenging problem. We consider here abstract specifications consisting of a composition of components and a controller given in the form of a set of interactions and a priority order amongst them. In the context of distributed systems, such a controller must be executed in a distributed fashion while still respecting the global constraints imposed by interactions and priorities. We present in this paper an implementation of an algorithm that allows a distributed execution of systems with (binary) interactions and priorities. We also present a comprehensive simulation analysis that shows how sensitive to changes our algorithm is, in particular changes related to the degree of conflict in the system.Comment: In Proceedings FOCLASA 2010, arXiv:1007.499