Meta Modeling for Business Process Improvement

Conducting business process improvement (BPI) initiatives is a topic of high priority for today’s companies. However, performing BPI projects has become challenging. This is due to rapidly changing customer requirements and an increase of inter-organizational business processes, which need to be considered from an end-to-end perspective. In addition, traditional BPI approaches are more and more perceived as overly complex and too resource-consuming in practice. Against this background, the paper proposes a BPI roadmap, which is an approach for systematically performing BPI projects and serves practitioners’ needs for manageable BPI methods. Based on this BPI roadmap, a domain-specific conceptual modeling method (DSMM) has been developed. The DSMM supports the efficient documentation and communication of the results that emerge during the application of the roadmap. Thus, conceptual modeling acts as a means for purposefully codifying the outcomes of a BPI project. Furthermore, a corresponding software prototype has been implemented using a meta modeling platform to assess the technical feasibility of the approach. Finally, the usability of the prototype has been empirically evaluated

Homeostatic regulation of sleep in a genetic model of depression in the mouse effects of muscarinic and 5-HT1A receptor activation

In depressed patients, sleep undergoes marked alterations, especially sleep onset insomnia, sleep fragmentation, and disturbances of the Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep. Abnormalities of rest-activity rhythms and of hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenocortical function have also been described in these patients. In the present study, we examined the presence of such abnormalities in a recently developed line of mice (Helpless mice-H) that exhibit depression-like behaviors in validated tests, compared to the nonhelpless (NH) line derived from the same colony. Experiments were essentially carried out in females for which previous studies showed marked differences between H and NH lines. Compared to NH mice, the H line exhibited (i) lower basal locomotor activity, (ii) sleep fragmentation, shift towards lighter sleep stages, and facilitation of REM sleep reflected by increased amounts and decreased latency, (iii) larger response to the REM sleep promoting effect of muscarinic receptor stimulation (by arecoline). In contrast, H and NH mice were equally responsive to the REM sleep inhibitory effect of 5-HT1A receptor stimulation (by 8-OH-DPAT). In addition, a deficiency in delta power enhancement after sleep deprivation was observed in the H group, and acute immobilization stress in this group failed to elicit a REM sleep rebound and was associated with a long-lasting raise in serum corticosterone levels. These results further validate H mice as a depression model and suggest they might be of particular interest for investigating the neurobiological mechanisms and possibly genetic substrates underlying sleep alterations associated with depression