Global entrainment of transcriptional systems to periodic inputs

This paper addresses the problem of giving conditions for transcriptional systems to be globally entrained to external periodic inputs. By using contraction theory, a powerful tool from dynamical systems theory, it is shown that certain systems driven by external periodic signals have the property that all solutions converge to a fixed limit cycle. General results are proved, and the properties are verified in the specific case of some models of transcriptional systems. The basic mathematical results needed from contraction theory are proved in the paper, making it self-contained

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