Inter-Organizational Learning and Collective Memory in Small Firms Clusters: an Agent-Based Approach

Literature about Industrial Districts has largely emphasized the importance of both economic and social factors in determining the competitiveness of these particular firms\' clusters. For thirty years, the Industrial District productive and organizational model represented an alternative to the integrated model of fordist enterprise. Nowadays, the district model suffers from competitive gaps, largely due to the increase of competitive pressure of globalization. This work aims to analyze, through an agent-based simulation model, the influence of informal socio-cognitive coordination mechanisms on district\'s performances, in relation to different competitive scenarios. The agent-based simulation approach is particularly fit for this purpose as it is able to represent the Industrial District\'s complexity. Furthermore, it permits to develop dynamic analysis of district\'s performances according to different types of environment evolution. The results of this work question the widespread opinion that cooperative districts can answer to environmental changes more effectively that non-cooperative ones. In fact, the results of simulations show that, in the presence of turbulent scenarios, the best performer districts are those in which cooperation and competition, trust and opportunism balance out.Firm Networks, Collective Memory, Agent Based Models, Uncertainty

THE CHANGE � AN IMPERATIVE REQUEST FOR THE DURABLE OR SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT

A credible hypothesis suggests that, in the future the economic growth will not be anymore a general and continuous one, and that the economic agents known from the special literature under the conventional name as organization or company (a group of persons acting conscious and coordinated in order to achieve common objectives), shall survive only if they make sustaining and continuous efforts to assimilate, in due time, the �last moment� technologies, including the ones referring to the organization and management of the performed activity. In this respect the plea in favor of the performance and elaboration of provisions or prognosis, as a premise of durable development, becomes legitimate and credible, contributing to the resolution of problems claimed by the general progress. Starting with XXIst century, the chance of survival of the economic and financial-banking units is proportional with the value of the management action, demarche known in the special literature as strategic management or management of change. But in order to be a successful one, the management must be creative, of prospective type and, as much as possible, non-conflictive.

Information-Matter Bipolarity of the Human Organism and Its Fundamental Circuits: From Philosophy to Physics/Neurosciences-Based Modeling

Starting from a philosophical perspective, which states that the living structures are actually a combination between matter and information, this article presents the results on an analysis of the bipolar information-matter structure of the human organism, distinguishing three fundamental circuits for its survival, which demonstrates and supports this statement, as a base for further development of the informational model of consciousness to a general informational model of the human organism. For this, it was examined the Informational System of the Human Body and its components from the perspective of the physics/information/neurosciences concepts, showing specific functions of each of them, highlighting the correspondence of these centers with brain support areas and with their projections in consciousness, which are: Center of Acquisition and Storing of Information (CASI) reflected in consciousness as memory, Center of Decision and Command (CDC) (decision), Info-Emotional Center (IES) (emotions), Maintenance Informational System (MIS) (personal status), Genetic Transmission System (GTS) (associativity/genetic transmission) and Info Genetic Generator (IGG) related by the body development and inherited behaviors. The Info Connection (IC), detected in consciousness as trust and confidence can explain the Near-Death Experiences (NDEs) and associated phenomena. This connection is antientropic and informational, because from the multitude of uncertain possibilities is selected a certain one, helping/supporting the survival and life. The human body appears therefore as a bipolar structure, connected to two poles: information and matter. It is argued that the survival, which is the main objective of the organism, is complied in three main ways, by means of: (i) the reactive operation for adaptation by attitude; (ii) the info-genetic integration of information by epigenetic processes and genetic transmission of information for species survival, both circuits (i) and (ii) being associated to the information pole; (iii) maintenance of the material body (defined as informed matter) and its functions, associated to the matter pole of the organism. It results therefore that the informational system of the human body is supported by seven informational circuits formed by the neuro-connections between the specific zones of the brain corresponding to the informational subsystems, the cognitive centers, the sensors, transducers and execution (motor/mobile) elements. The fundamental informational circuits assuring the survival are the reactive circuit, expressible by attitude, the epigenetic/genetic circuit, absorbing and codifying information to be transmitted to the next generations, and the metabolic circuit, connected to matter (matter pole). The presented analysis allows to extend the informational modeling of consciousness to an Informational Model of Consciousness and Organism, fully describing the composition/functions of the organism in terms of information/matter and neurosciences concep

Business Intelligence Healthcare Model: Getting the Right Requirements for Malaysian Rural Citizens

It is a big challenge for Malaysian healthcare authorities in providing services to rural communities. To meet up with the challenges, a concept called business intelligence (BI) is employed for their informed decision-making that utilizes their enormous data. However, only a few of BI initiatives have their success stories as many are still struggling to justify the investments. Among the most reason of the failures were that BI requirements were overlooked, leading to poor BI deployments. Taking rural healthcare in Malaysia as a case study, the paper attempts to model BI requirements using goal-oriented approach. Rural healthcare BI requirements were modelled two-folds: (1) decision making requirements, cantered on stakeholders; and (2) BI data requirements, focused on organizational and decisional aspects. The model can guide BI developers on the process and data needed in rural healthcare strategic decision-making. Theoretically it provides new insights and facilitates the improvement of new healthcare knowledge

A Goal and Ontology Based Approach for Generating ETL Process Specifications

Data warehouse (DW) systems development involves several tasks such as defining requirements, designing DW schemas, and specifying data transformation operations. Indeed, the success of DW systems is very much dependent on the proper design of the extracting, transforming, and loading (ETL) processes. However, the common design-related problems in the ETL processes such as defining user requirements and data transformation specifications are far from being resolved. These problems are due to data heterogeneity in data sources, ambiguity of user requirements, and the complexity of data transformation activities. Current approaches have limitations on the reconciliation of DW requirement semantics towards designing the ETL processes. As a result, this has prolonged the process of the ETL processes specifications generation. The semantic framework of DW systems established from this study is used to develop the requirement analysis method for designing the ETL processes (RAMEPs) from the different perspectives of organization, decision-maker, and developer by using goal and ontology approaches. The correctness of RAMEPs approach was validated by using modified and newly developed compliant tools. The RAMEPs was evaluated in three real case studies, i.e., Student Affairs System, Gas Utility System, and Graduate Entrepreneur System. These case studies were used to illustrate how the RAMEPs approach can be implemented for designing and generating the ETL processes specifications. Moreover, the RAMEPs approach was reviewed by the DW experts for assessing the strengths and weaknesses of this method, and the new approach is accepted. The RAMEPs method proves that the ETL processes specifications can be derived from the early phases of DW systems development by using the goal-ontology approach

Requirements analysis method for extracting-transformation-loading (ETL) in data warehouse systems

The data warehouse (DW) system design involves several tasks such as defining the DW schemas and the ETL processes specifications, and these have been extensively studied and practiced for many years.The problems in heterogeneous data integration are still far from being resolved due to the complexity of ETL processes and the fundamental problems of data conflicts in information sharing environments.The understanding of an early phase of DW development is essential in properly tackling the complexity of ETL processes.The method to analyses the DW requirements from the abstract level (e.g. goal, sub-goal, stakeholder, dependency) toward the specification of ETL processes (e.g. extracting, filtering, conversion) are important in order to manage the complexity of the ETL processes design (e.g. semantic heterogeneity problems). However, current approaches that are based on existing software requirement approach still have limitations on translating the business semantics for DW requirements toward the ETL processes specifications.Moreover, the understanding of goal in the perspective of the organization and decision makers are important to ensure the semantic of DW requirements can be properly determined, organized, and implemented by the ETL processes. Therefore, the proposed method will utilize the ontology with goal-driven approach in analyzing the requirements of ETL processes

Iris Codes Classification Using Discriminant and Witness Directions

The main topic discussed in this paper is how to use intelligence for biometric decision defuzzification. A neural training model is proposed and tested here as a possible solution for dealing with natural fuzzification that appears between the intra- and inter-class distribution of scores computed during iris recognition tests. It is shown here that the use of proposed neural network support leads to an improvement in the artificial perception of the separation between the intra- and inter-class score distributions by moving them away from each other.Comment: 6 pages, 5 figures, Proc. 5th IEEE Int. Symp. on Computational Intelligence and Intelligent Informatics (Floriana, Malta, September 15-17), ISBN: 978-1-4577-1861-8 (electronic), 978-1-4577-1860-1 (print