The Hong Kong Museum of Medical Sciences

published_or_final_versio

Agent-based negotiation and decision making for dynamic supply chain formation

Modern businesses are facing the challenge of effectively coordinating their supply chains from upstream to downstream services. It is a complex problem to search, schedule, and coordinate a set of services from a large number of service resources under various constraints and uncertainties. Existing approaches to this problem have relied on complete information regarding service requirements and resources, without adequately addressing the dynamics and uncertainties of the environments. The real-world situations are complicated as a result of ambiguity in the requirements of the services, the uncertainty of solutions from service providers, and the interdependencies among the services to be composed. This paper investigates the complexity of supply chain formation and proposes an agent-mediated coordination approach. Each agent works as a broker for each service type, dedicated to selecting solutions for each service as well as interacting with other agents in refining the decision making to achieve compatibility among the solutions. The coordination among agents concerns decision making at strategic, tactical, and operational level. At the strategic level, agents communicate and negotiate for supply chain formation; at the tactical level, argumentation is used by agents to communicate and understand the preferences and constraints of each other; at the operational level, different strategies are used for selecting the preferences. Based on this approach, a prototype has been implemented with simulated experiments highlighting the effectiveness of the approach. © 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.postprin

Guest editorial: COVID-19 pandemic and health informatics part 3

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Emerald via the DOI in this recordAfter more than three years, we start to see the end of the tunnel of the COVID-19 pandemic and are ready for reopening (Abbass et al., 2022; Suh and Alhaery, 2022; Kumar et al., 2021). Here, the guest editors and co-editors would like to wish all of our readers and authors good health and let us walk through the pandemic together. We continue to present part 3 of our special issue on the COVID-19 Pandemic and Health Informatics in this issue. In the past two parts (Huang et al., 2021, 2022), we presented 28 papers; in this issue, we present the following 14 papers on three aspects of research

Web interface-driven cooperative exception handling in ADOME workflow management system

Exception handling in workflow management systems (WFMSs) is a very important problem since it is nor possible to specify all possible outcomes and alternatives. On the other hand, cooperative support for user-driven computer supported resolution of unexpected exceptions and workflow evolution at run-time is vital far an adaptive WFMS. We have been developing ADOME-WFMS as a comprehensive framework in which the problem of workflow exception handling can be adequately addressed. In this paper, we present an adaptive exception manager and its web-based interface for ADOME-WFMS with procedures for supporting the following: effective management of Problem Solving Agents, cooperative exception handling,user-driven computer supported resolution of unexpected exceptions, and workflow evolution

Towards ubiquitous communication support for distance education with alert management

In distance education, communications among students, educators, and administrators have been one of the most important problems. The distance education programs in The Open University of Hong Kong (OUHK) span not only Hong Kong but also many cities over a large area in China. To improve and monitor the quality of communications among students, tutors, and staff, we propose a communications management infrastructure based on an alert mechanism. Requests and messages in these systems (referred to as alerts) have to be delivered and handled timely to provide ubiquitous distance education communication support and management. We also propose using this platform for the integration of partners in China with the OUHK offices. Presently, most systems cannot address urgency and alerts are often handled in an ad-hoc manner. In this paper, we propose a sophisticated alert management system (AMS) for ubiquitous communications management in distance education under various requirements. We develop a model for managing alerts, in which alerts are associated with communication tasks and a set of parameters are captured for message routing and urgency management. The AMS matches the specialties of the educators and staff who receive an alert, based on the alert specification. We then propose a routing mechanism that is initiated when the alert message is not acknowledged or handled within the deadline, so that the alert can be re-routed if necessary. Monitoring is especially essential to ensure timeliness and availability of consultation or decision, otherwise suitable exceptions should be raised and handled. We outline our implementation framework for communications among education administrators, education staff, students, and system administrators, enhanced by alter management via various communication devices for ubiquitous support of communication in distance education.link_to_subscribed_fulltex

A Research Agenda for Enhancing Teacher Librarians’ Roles and Practice in Hong Kong’s 21st Century Learning Environments

In many countries, especially in Asia, there has always been a lack of understanding on the role of the school librarians. Through interviews on two school librarians in Hong Kong which has some outstanding achievements, this paper highlights some enhancing roles and good practices of school librarians in the Asian context that worth further exploration. Previous studies were limited to small numbers of empirical quantitative studies on the issue. In fact, this is one of very few qualitative studies on this topic, highlighting some key topics in our research agenda on exploring such emerging issues under the current digital age

Workflow view based e-contracts in a cross-organizational E-services environment

In an e-service environment, workflow involves not only a single organization but also a number of business partners. Therefore, workflow inter-operability in such an environment is an important issue for enacting workflows. In this article, we introduce our approach of using workflow views as a fundamental support for E-service workflow inter-operability and for controlled visibility of (sub-)workflows by external parties. We discuss various aspects of a workflow view, and their semantics with example usage. Furthermore, we develop a contract model based on workflow views and demonstrate how management of e-contracts can be facilitated, with an Internet start-up E-service inter-organization workflow example

Workflow view driven cross-organizational interoperability in a web service environment

Workflow technology has recently been employed not only within businesses but also as a framework for implementing e-services over the Internet. Such e-services typically require collaborative enactment of workflows across multiple organizations. In this paper, we propose the use of workflow views as a fundamental support mechanism for the interoperability of multiple workflows across business organizations. We present a meta-model of workflow views and their semantics using a cross-organization workflow example based on a supply-chain e-service. We also formulate an interoperation model of workflow views and its consistency criteria. Finally, this paper presents an implementation of the model based on XML and contemporary Web services technologies, with adaptation to our E-ADOME workflow engine