Naturally Refined Series: Rippled

As our world becomes more polluted, sustainable approaches in various aspects of society are gaining popularity and attention. Slow design was proposed after the slow food movement to promote slowing down production processes and increasing product quality and keepsake value (Fletcher, 2008)

Does Distance Matter? An IT Application

In the past decade several distance learning initiatives have been implemented in information technology curricula based upon the principles of natural learning. This paper examines the various ways in which distance learning may contribute to \u27natural learning\u27. The main research question is how distance learning provides support to natural learning processes. Our starting point is that students can learn with information systems instead of from the systems. The paper investigates the relationship between distance learning and natural learning. On this basis, the requirements for distance learning as well as the technologies that might make use of these requirements are identified and analyzed

Activity Relations: A Dataflow Approach to Workflow Design

A key step in workflow design is to determine the activity sequences, which are often driven by the dataflow constraints in a business process. Therefore, the literature has suggested that workflow design can start with dataflow analysis. However, no formalism exists for deriving activity sequences from a set of identified activities and their input and output data. In this paper, we formalize the problem of workflow design on the basis of dataflow analysis. We tackle the problem by using the concept of “activity relations” as an intermediate step for identifying the possible activity execution sequences from dataflow. We investigate how to derive activity relations from dataflow and discuss their implication in workflow design

A Data Flow Perspective for Business Process Integration

Business process integration has become prevalent as business is increasingly crossing organizational boundaries. While workflow technology is a standard solution for business process management, it is imperative for workflow management systems to provide effective and efficient support for collaboration. To address the issue of protecting organizations’ competitive knowledge and private information while also enabling business-to-business (B2B) collaboration, past research has focused on customized public and private process design and structure correctness of the integrated workflow. However, data flow is important for business process integration because data is always sensitive when conducting inter-organizational business and data errors could still happen even given syntactically correct activity dependence. This paper presents a data flow perspective. It gives an approach to define a “public data set” for each involved organization exemplifying the integrated workflow that is needed in order to be free from data anomalies e.g., missing data and redundant data errors

Mining Sequential Relations from Multidimensional Data Sequence for Prediction

By analyzing historical data sequences and identifying relations between the occurring of data items and certain types of business events we have opportunities to gain insights into future status and thereby take action proactively. This paper proposes a new approach to cope with the problem of prediction on data sequence characterized by multiple dimensions. The proposed relation mining approach improves the existing sequential pattern mining algorithm by considering multidimensional data sequences and incorporating time constraints. We demonstrate that multidimensional relations extracted by our approach are an enhancement of single dimensional relations by showing significantly stronger prediction capability, despite of the substantial work done in the latter area. In addition, matching algorithm based on the obtained relations is proposed to make prediction. The effectiveness of the proposed methods is validated by experiments conducted on a mobile user context dataset

A Multi-Agent-Based System for eProcurement

E-procurement has become an important function of enterprise information systems. The process of e-procurement includes automatic definition of product requirements, search and selection for suppliers, negotiation and contracting with suppliers. In this paper, we propose a novel agentbased architecture for e-procurement system, in which various agents take such responsibilities as negotiating and contracting. Moreover, the architecture that we propose can monitor transaction status and enhance the flexibility to handle unexpected exceptions, thus leading to agile procurement management

On The Theoretical Foundation for Data Flow Analysis in Workflow Management

In workflow management, the data flow perspective specifies how data are produced and consumed by activities in a workflow. Data flow analysis can detect data flow anomalies occurring in a workflow while its control flow can be syntactically error-free. Currently, most commercial workflow management systems do not provide the tools for data flow analysis at design time. We have previously proposed a data flow analysis approach and developed the basic concepts and the essential algorithms. As another step forward, this paper examines the issues of data flow anomalies and their verification from a theoretical point of view and validates the correctness of the proposed approach

Intelligent Agents for Negotiation and Recommendation in Mass Customization

Mass customization, as a means to meet individual consumer’s need on a large scale, has recently attracted the attention of both researchers and practitioners. However, as customers and their needs grow increasingly diverse, meeting every consumer’s need has become a surefire way to add unnecessary cost and complexity to operations. Furthermore, consumers are not all really ready for mass customization. They have to face inconveniences such as expensive price, delay delivery and they have to spend time “designing” their product. In order to solve this problem, we proposed a way of intelligent agent assisted negotiation and recommendation. The recommendation is a preference elicitation process, while the negotiation is a communication process based on the situation of manufacturer, such as the inventory level, production cost and lead time. With the aid of intelligent agent of negotiation and recommendation, a good balance between efficiency and customer satisfactions of mass customization can be reached