Interaction-driven definition of e-business processes

Business-to-business interaction (B2Bi) is the next step for corporate IT [1]. Business relationships become increasingly dynamic, and new requirements emerge for data and process management. Standardisation initiatives are successfully targeting business ontology [4]. Still, business agility mainly depends on the flexibility of the business processes of a company. In the B2B space, traditional approaches to process modelling and management are inadequate. Today more than ever, traditional workflow management is crucial for the internal effectiveness of a company. Internal efficiency is a prerequisite for external agility. From both a technical and a business perspective, internal workflow management relies on specific assumptions in terms of resources involved in the process, as well as the process itself [2]. Level of control, availability, reliability, and cost stability are parameters that traditional process models and technology can almost take for granted. A single authority ruling on the process definition and the total control over process execution are also basic concepts for internal workflows. From a business perspective, a big upfront investment is put in the complete definition of process specifications. A different conceptual framework is required for the definition and management of e-business processes [3, 5]. The intrinsic capability to adapt to rapidly changing business requirements becomes crucial. The line of research explored in this paper derives from an approach to process modelling and management that explicitly targets the peculiarities and dynamics of B2Bi. In the model we propose, the upfront specification of the interaction logic of a company can be limited to partially specified processes and basic interaction rules. Specific information is then gathered from the observation of actual instances of business interaction, and used to refine and extend the initial model. In addition to the enforcement of explicit business requirement, the goal is to capture and leverage implicit operational knowledge. In the following sections, we present an overview of the methodology we are currently experimenting with for the inference of complex processes from business interaction flows. For our initial experiments, we focus on business messages compliant with the RosettaNet standard [4]

Space station pressurized laboratory safety guidelines

Before technical safety guidelines and requirements are established, a common understanding of their origin and importance must be shared between Space Station Program Management, the User Community, and the Safety organizations involved. Safety guidelines and requirements are driven by the nature of the experiments, and the degree of crew interaction. Hazard identification; development of technical safety requirements; operating procedures and constraints; provision of training and education; conduct of reviews and evaluations; and emergency preplanning are briefly discussed

INTEGRATION OF MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS IN RAILWAY TRANSPORT

The mandatory management systems implemented since 2008 in rail transport resulting from legal requirements [1-8], very often (especially in the first years of implementing the requirements) functioned independently of the optional procedural approach - ISO standard [9-10]. Currently, integration of requirements in both the mandatory and voluntary areas has become common practice. Legal requirements and recommendations do not define or recommend any specific form of extending the existing management systems. Regulation EC 402/2013 in Article 3 point 7 [8] defines only the obligation of interaction between systems (interfaces mean all interaction points during the system or subsystem life cycle). The publication describes the relationship between the requirements in the field of management systems currently used in the railway system resulting from legal requirements (Safety Management System - SMS) and voluntary implementations (Quality Management and Environmental Management System)

Data, Data Everywhere, and Still Too Hard to Link: Insights from User Interactions with Diabetes Apps

For those with chronic conditions, such as Type 1 diabetes, smartphone apps offer the promise of an affordable, convenient, and personalized disease management tool. How- ever, despite significant academic research and commercial development in this area, diabetes apps still show low adoption rates and underwhelming clinical outcomes. Through user-interaction sessions with 16 people with Type 1 diabetes, we provide evidence that commonly used interfaces for diabetes self-management apps, while providing certain benefits, can fail to explicitly address the cognitive and emotional requirements of users. From analysis of these sessions with eight such user interface designs, we report on user requirements, as well as interface benefits, limitations, and then discuss the implications of these findings. Finally, with the goal of improving these apps, we identify 3 questions for designers, and review for each in turn: current shortcomings, relevant approaches, exposed challenges, and potential solutions

Requirements Management and its Application to the Corporate Website of the University

Requirements management understood as recording and analysis of the claims made by the stakeholders as well as the interaction with them is essential to maintain the quality of the project. The effective requirements management involves their collection, classification, and prioritization, analysis, setting the objectives to meet such requirements, and storing the information on them. The paper reviews the research on the requirements management. The process can apply to different fields. For its effective functioning it is necessary to develop the requirements management system which should verify and analyze the requirements entering it. The work examines the construction features of this system and focuses on the specific management of the requirements for the corporate websites of universities

A Formal Framework for Concrete Reputation Systems

In a reputation-based trust-management system, agents maintain information about the past behaviour of other agents. This information is used to guide future trust-based decisions about interaction. However, while trust management is a component in security decision-making, many existing reputation-based trust-management systems provide no formal security-guarantees. In this extended abstract, we describe a mathematical framework for a class of simple reputation-based systems. In these systems, decisions about interaction are taken based on policies that are exact requirements on agents’ past histories. We present a basic declarative language, based on pure-past linear temporal logic, intended for writing simple policies. While the basic language is reasonably expressive (encoding e.g. Chinese Wall policies) we show how one can extend it with quantification and parameterized events. This allows us to encode other policies known from the literature, e.g., ‘one-out-of-k’. The problem of checking a history with respect to a policy is efficient for the basic language, and tractable for the quantified language when policies do not have too many variables

Predicting business/ICT alignment with AntMiner+.

In this paper we report on the results of a European survey on business/ICT alignment practices. The goal of this study is to come up with some practical guidelines for managers on how to strive for better alignment of ICT investments with business requirements. Based on Luftman's alignment framework we examine 18 ICT management practices belonging to 6 different competency clusters. We use AntMiner+, a rule induction technique, to create an alignment rule set. The results indicate that B/ICT alignment is a multidimensional goal which can only be obtained through focused investments covering different alignment aspects. The obtained rule set is an interesting mix of both formal engineering and social interaction processes and structures. We discuss the implication of the alignment rules for practitioners.Alignment; Artificial ant systems; Business; Business/ICT alignment; Data; Data mining; Framework; Investment; Investments; Management; Management practices; Managers; Practical guidelines; Processes; Requirements; Rules; Structure; Studies; Systems;

Capital requirements and competition in banking industry

This paper focuses on the interaction between regulation and competition in an industrial organisation model. We analyze how capital requirements affect the profitability of two banks that compete as Cournot duopolists on a market for loans. Bank management of both banks choose optimal levels of loans provided, equity ratio and effort to reduce loan losses so as to maximize profits. From the regulator's point of view, the free market solution is not optimal as private banks do not take in to account the consumer surplus and the social cost of bankruptcy (financial stability aspects). It is show that capital requirements may improve welfare, even under conditions that both banks would ever default. Moreover, we find that higher capital requirements impose a higher burden on the inefficient bank than on the efficient one, even though the requirement may only be binding for the efficient bank. If the inefficient bank chooses a strategy that might result in bankruptcy, capital requirements are particularly welfare improving.Bank capital ; Competition

Economic Evaluation of Food Traceability Systems through Reference Models

Food supply chains complexity present a real challenge to perform economic evaluation of food traceability systems and their innovation/upgrades. In order to perform a supply chain wide economic evaluation a conceptual framework is developed using food traceability reference models. Reference models allow interaction with chain members’ requirements that come from legal and/or customer sources. The paper demonstrates how the requirements will have a definite effect on the costs and design of food traceability systems through the resources they demand. Even though this is a first step into addressing the challenge, more investigation is needed to clarify the boundaries of the two requirements and their economic effects on food traceability systems and their innovations/upgrades.Food traceability, Food traceability systems, Reference models, Economic evaluation., Agribusiness, Agricultural and Food Policy, Farm Management, Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety, Industrial Organization,