Toward an Adaptive Enterprise Modelling Platform

For the past three decades, enterprise modelling (EM) has been emerging as a significant yet complex paradigm to tackle holistic systematic enterprise analysis and design. With a high fluctuation in the global economy, industrial stability and technology shift, the necessity of such paradigms becomes crucial in determining the decisions that an enterprise can make for surviving in such a highly dynamic business ecosystem. EM practices have focused for a long time, on the design-time of enterprise systems. Recently, there has been a rapid development in data analytics, machine learning and intelligent systems from which an EM platform can benefit. EM needs to cope with the new changes in both business and technology; it should also help architects to determine optimum decisions and reduce complexity in technical infrastructure. In this paper, the author discusses several challenges facing enterprise modelling practices and offers an architectural notion for future development focusing on the requirements of a platform that can be called intelligent and adaptive

Towards a resilient networked service system

Large service systems today are of highly network structures. In this thesis, these large service systems are called networked service systems. The network nature of these systems has no doubt brought mass customized services but has also created challenges in the management of their safety. The safety of service systems is an important issue due to their critical influences on the functioning of society. Traditional safety engineering methods focus on maintaining service systems in a safe state, in particular aiming to maintain systems to be reliable and robust. However, resilience cannot be absent from safety out of many recent disasters that occur in society. The goal of this thesis is to improve the resilience of networked service systems. Four major works have been performed to achieve this goal. First, a unified definition of service systems was proposed and its relationship to other system concepts was unfolded. Upon the new definition, a domain model of service systems was established by a FCBPSS framework, followed by developing a computational model. Second, a definition of resilience for service systems was proposed, based on which the relationship among three safety properties (i.e., reliability, robustness and resilience) was clarified, followed by developing a framework for resilience analysis. Third, a methodology of resilience measurement for service systems was proposed by four measurement axioms along with corresponding mathematical models. The methodology focused on the potential ability of a service system to create optimal rebalancing solutions. Two typical service systems, transportation system and enterprise information system, were employed to validate the methodology. Fourth, a methodology of enhancing resilience for service systems was proposed by integrating three types of reconfigurations of systems, namely design, planning and management, along with the corresponding mathematical model. This methodology was validated by an example of transportation system. Several conclusions can be drawn from the work above: (1) a service system has a unique characteristic that it meets humans' demand directly, and its safety relies on the balance between the supplies and demands; (2) different from reliability and robustness, the resilience of a service system focuses on the rebalancing ability from imbalanced situations; (3) it makes sense to measure the resilience of a service system only for a particular imbalanced situation and based on evaluation of rebalancing solutions; and (4) integration of design, planning and management is an effective approach for improvement of the resilience for a service system. The contributions of this thesis can be summarized. Scientifically, this thesis work has improved our understanding of service systems and their resilience property; furthermore, this work has advanced the state of knowledge of safety science in particular having successfully responded to two questions: is a service system safe and how to make a service system safer? Technologically or methodologically, the work has advanced the knowledge for modeling and optimization of networked service systems in particular with multiple layer models along with the algorithms for integrated decision making on design, planning, and management

Linguistic Refactoring of Business Process Models

In the past decades, organizations had to face numerous challenges due to intensifying globalization and internationalization, shorter innovation cycles and growing IT support for business. Business process management is seen as a comprehensive approach to align business strategy, organization, controlling, and business activities to react flexibly to market changes. For this purpose, business process models are increasingly utilized to document and redesign relevant parts of the organization's business operations. Since companies tend to have a growing number of business process models stored in a process model repository, analysis techniques are required that assess the quality of these process models in an automatic fashion. While available techniques can easily check the formal content of a process model, there are only a few techniques available that analyze the natural language content of a process model. Therefore, techniques are required that address linguistic issues caused by the actual use of natural language. In order to close this gap, this doctoral thesis explicitly targets inconsistencies caused by natural language and investigates the potential of automatically detecting and resolving them under a linguistic perspective. In particular, this doctoral thesis provides the following contributions. First, it defines a classification framework that structures existing work on process model analysis and refactoring. Second, it introduces the notion of atomicity, which implements a strict consistency condition between the formal content and the textual content of a process model. Based on an explorative investigation, we reveal several reoccurring violation patterns are not compliant with the notion of atomicity. Third, this thesis proposes an automatic refactoring technique that formalizes the identified patterns to transform a non-atomic process models into an atomic one. Fourth, this thesis defines an automatic technique for detecting and refactoring synonyms and homonyms in process models, which is eventually useful to unify the terminology used in an organization. Fifth and finally, this thesis proposes a recommendation-based refactoring approach that addresses process models suffering from incompleteness and leading to several possible interpretations. The efficiency and usefulness of the proposed techniques is further evaluated by real-world process model repositories from various industries. (author's abstract

Multi-Agent Systems

A multi-agent system (MAS) is a system composed of multiple interacting intelligent agents. Multi-agent systems can be used to solve problems which are difficult or impossible for an individual agent or monolithic system to solve. Agent systems are open and extensible systems that allow for the deployment of autonomous and proactive software components. Multi-agent systems have been brought up and used in several application domains

Information systems and e-business technologies: 2nd international united information systems conference, UNISCON 2008, Klagenfurt, Austria, April 22-25, 2008, proceedings

Here are the refereed proceedings of UNISCON 2008, held in Austria. UNISCON combines the ECOMO workshop series and the ISTA conference series. The 19 papers deal with conceptual modeling, model-driven software development and information systems applications