Agent-based coalitions in dynamic supply chains

Coalition formation is an important issue in multi-agent systems. Recent work in the area has focused on reducing the complexity of forming coalitions, i.e., each agent deliberately searches for potential coalition members before negotiating with them. We propose a framework for coalition formation of agents in a dynamic supply chain environment. The framework is composed of a negotiation protocol and a decision mechanism. The negotiation protocol allows thorough communication among agents across sectors (buyers, sellers, logistic providers). With the decision mechanism, agents take two steps to form coalitions: i) agents in each sector form loosely-coupled coalitions in order to decrease the complexity of the negotiation, and ii) agents form coalitions across sectors in order to deliver goods to end customers. We provide an example of how they can help agents form coalitions successfully

Auditing business process compliance

Compliance issues impose significant management and reporting requirements upon organizations.We present an approach to enhance business process modeling notations with the capability to detect and resolve many broad compliance related issues. We provide a semantic characterization of a minimal revision strategy that helps us obtain compliant process models from models that might be initially non-compliant, in a manner that accommodates the structural and semantic dimensions of parsimoniously annotated process models. We also provide a heuristic approach to compliance resolution using a notion of compliance patterns. This allows us to partially automate compliance resolution, leading to reduced levels of analyst involvement and improved decision support

Dealing with Web service QoS factors using constraint hierarchy

Functionality and non-functional properties are two critical factors in web service technology, but non-functional properties (quality factors) are often ignored. Usually, these are articulated as statements of objectives, as opposed to prepositional assertions. A key challenge in dealing with objectives is that there is no obvious means to decide when they are satisfied. In effect, these objectives are never fu lly satisfied, but satisficed to varying degrees. Alternative design decisions need to trade-off varying degrees of satisfaction of potentially mutually contradictory non-functional requirements. In some circumstances, non-Junctional properties are crucial; they do affect the design decision. Upon a request, there are a range o f web services that might provide the required functionality, so the web service selection can only be done based on their Quality of Service (QoS). Therefore, a quality-based web service model is in high demand. The key contribution of this paper is the use of the hierarchical constraint logic programming framework [9, 10] in dealing with quality factors. We show how quality factors can be formulated as soft constraints and how the machinery associated with constraint hierarchies can be used to evaluate the web services

IS Solution for the Global Environmental Challenge: An Australian Initiative

There is a complex range of interrelated environmental issues that currently challenge decision-makers across the world. To date the reputation of the information and communication technology (ICT) industry in Australia, and elsewhere, has been quite negative with respect to its effect on the environment. The recent ‘Green IT’ initiatives of the Australian Computer Society to reduce carbon emission are manifestations of this. While not denying the worth of this agenda, the authors of this paper suggest that it is timely to promote a more positive position for ICT as a source of solutions to environmental problems. In this paper, we draw on the Australian experience and our own research into various ICT-tools, to map out the territory where these solutions may be found and to identify first steps in their implementation

Correlating Business Process and Organizational Models to Manage Change

Business Process Management (BPM) provides the methods, tools and modelling notations to support a processcentric organizational view and management capability. As organizations grow in size and complexity, process improvement initiatives may involve change that has direct / significant impact across an organization. Thus, we provide methods and extensions to existing process modelling notations to analyse change against high- level models of the organization. Our approach permits improved analysis against higher-level organizational structures, motivations, inter-dependencies and capabilities that should be ideally considered as primary requirements during process design. Additionally, the organizational model becomes the ‘scaffolding’ with which to construct effective process architectures and management portfolios. This paper discusses our approach in the context of two modelling notations – the i* framework as an organizational modelling notation, and the BPMN notation for business process modelling

On Business Services Representation – The 3 x 3 x 3 Approach

The increasing popularity and influence of service-oriented computing give rise to the need of representational and methodological supports for the development and management of business services. From an IT perspective, there is a proliferation of methods and languages for representing Web services. Unfortunately, there has not been much work in modeling high-level services from a business perspective. Modeling business services should arguably capture their inherent features, along with many other representational artifacts. We propose a novel approach for business services representation featuring a three-dimensional representational space of which dimensions stand for the service consumer, service provider and service context. We also discuss how the proposed representation approach provides methodological supports to the area of service orientation. Finally, we present in-progress work on the application of our approach

Towards green business process management

There is a global consensus on the need to reduce our collective carbon footprint. While much research attention has focused on developing alternative energy sources, automotive technologies or waste disposal techniques, we often ignore the fact that the ability to optimize (existing) operations to reduce their emissions impact is fundamental to this exercise. We believe that by transforming the problem into the domain of Business Process Management (BPM) we can leverage the rich expertise in this field to address issues associated with identifying areas for improvement, understanding the implication and performing carbon footprint minimization. We will use the term “Green BPM” to describe a novel class of technologies that leverage and extend existing BPM technology to enable process design, analysis, execution and monitoring in a manner informed by the carbon footprint of process designs and instances. This article describes the first steps in the development of this class of technologies