40999406
Multi-agent collaboration for B2B workflow monitoring
Business-to-business (B2B) applications environments are exceedingly dynamic and competitive. This dynamism is manifested in the form of changing process requirements and time constraints. However, current workflow management technologies have difficulties to solve the challenges problems, such as: how to deal with the dynamic nature of B2B commerce processes, how to manage the distributed knowledge and recourses, and how to reduce the transaction risk. In this paper, a collaborative multi-agent system has been proposed. Multiple intelligent agents in our system can work together not only to identify the workflow problems, but also to solve such problems, by applying business rules, such as re-organizing the procurement and the transaction processes, and making necessary workflow process changes.
9229028
A conceptual model of personalized virtual learning environments
The Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) is one of the fastest growing areas in educational technology research and development. In order to achieve learning effectiveness, ideal VLEs should be able to identify learning needs and customize solutions, with or without an instructor to supplement instruction. They are called Personalized VLEs (PVLEs). In order to achieve PVLEs success, comprehensive conceptual models corresponding to PVLEs are essential. Such conceptual modeling development is important because it facilitates early detection and correction of system development errors. Therefore, in order to capture the PVLEs knowledge explicitly, this paper focuses on the development of conceptual models for PVLEs, including models of knowledge primitives in terms of learner, curriculum, and situational models, models of VLEs in general pedagogical bases, and particularly, the definition of the ontology of PVLEs on the constructivist pedagogical principle. Based on those comprehensive conceptual models, a prototyped multiagent-based PVLE has been implemented. A field experiment was conducted to investigate the learning achievements by comparing personalized and non-personalized systems. The result indicates that the PVLE we developed under our comprehensive ontology successfully provides significant learning achievements. These comprehensive models also provide a solid knowledge representation framework for PVLEs development practice, guiding the analysis, design, and development of PVLEs.
7170273
Intelligent student profiling with fuzzy models
Traditional Web-based educational systems still have several shortcomings when comparing with real-life classroom teaching, such as lack of contextual and adaptive support, lack of flexible support of the presentation and feedback, lack of the collaborative support between students and systems. Based on educational theory, personalization increases learning motivation, which can increase the learning effectiveness. A fuzzy epistemic logic has been built to present the student's knowledge state, while the course content is modeled by the concept of context. By applying such fuzzy epistemic logic, the content model, the student model, and the learning plan have been defined formally. A multi-agent based student profiling system has been presented. Our profiling system stores the learning activities and interaction history of each individual student into the student profile database. Such profiling data is abstracted into a student model. Based on the student model and the content model, dynamic learning plans for individual students are made. Students get personalized learning materials, personalized quizzes, and personalized advice. In order to understand the students' perception of our prototype system and to evaluate the students' learning effectiveness, a field survey has been conducted. The results from the survey indicate that our prototype system makes great improvement on personalization of learning and achieves learning effectiveness.
11019838
Intelligent Decision Support for Family Financial Planning
In today’s financial markets characterized by constantly changing tax laws and increasingly complex transactions, the demand for family financial planning (FFP) services is rising dramatically. However, the current trend to develop advisory systems that focus mainly on the financial or investment side fails to consider the whole picture of FFP. Separating financial or investment advice from legal and accounting advice may result in conflicting advice or important omissions that could lead to users suffering financial loss. In this paper, we propose a conceptual model for FFP decision-making process, followed by a novel architecture to support an aggregated FFP decision process by utilizing intelligent-agents and Web-services technology. A prototype system for supporting FFP decision is presented to demonstrate the advances of the proposed Web-service multi-agents-based system architecture and business value.
7484569
The design of intelligent workflow monitoring with agent technology
In recent years, workflow technology has been widely used in business process management. With the increased complexity, uncertainty and risks in business operations, workflow monitoring is gaining growing attention in business process controlling and supervision. However, monitoring functions provided in traditional workflow systems lack flexibility, and provide little support for managing complex and dynamical changes in business process. In this paper, we propose a novel workflow monitoring approach, in which various intelligent agents work together to perform flexible monitoring tasks in an autonomous and collaborative way. By using customized monitoring plan and proactive monitoring process, the workflow monitoring activities can be executed flexibly and efficiently. The application of intelligent agents for such flexible, adaptive and collaborative workflow monitoring is investigated through an intelligent monitoring system in securities trading.
7446737
A web-service agent-based decision support system for securities exception management
Abstract With rising trading volumes and increasing risks in securities transactions, the securities industry is making an effort to shorten the trade lifecycle and minimize transaction risks. While attempting to achieve this, exception management is crucial to pass trade information within the trade lifecycle in a timely and accurate fashion. For a competitive solution to exception management, a web-service-agent-based decision support system is developed in this paper. Agent technology is applied to deal with the dynamic, complex, and distributed processes in exception management; web services techniques are proposed for more scalability and interoperability in network-based business environment. By integrating agent technology with web services to make use of the advantages from both, this approach leads to more intelligence, flexibility and collaboration in business exception management. The effectiveness of this approach is evaluated through a use case and demonstration feedback.
18364869
Threat-driven modeling and verification of secure software using aspect-oriented Petri nets
Design-level vulnerabilities are a major source of security risks in software. To improve trustworthiness of software design, this paper presents a formal threat-driven approach, which explores explicit behaviors of security threats as the mediator between security goals and applications of security features. Security threats are potential attacks, i.e., misuses and anomalies that violate the security goals of systems' intended functions. Security threats suggest what, where, and how security features for threat mitigation should be applied. To specify the intended functions, security threats, and threat mitigations of a security design as a whole, we exploit aspect-oriented Petri nets as a unified formalism. Intended functions and security threats are modeled by Petri nets, whereas threat mitigations are modeled by Petri net-based aspects due to the incremental and crosscutting nature of security features. The unified formalism facilitates verifying correctness of security threats against intended functions and verifying absence of security threats from integrated functions and threat mitigations. As a result, our approach can make software design provably secured from anticipated security threats and, thus, reduce significant design-level vulnerabilities. We demonstrate our approach through a systematic case study on the threat-driven modeling and verification of a real-world shopping cart application.
2868377
Intelligent decision system and its application in business innovation self assessment
In this paper, it is described how a multiple criteria decision analysis software tool, the Intelligent Decision System (IDS), can be used to help business self-assessment. Following a brief outline of a model for assessing business innovation capability and the IDS software, the process of using IDS to implement different types of assessment questions is discussed. It is demonstrated that IDS is a flexible tool capable of handling different types of data in self-assessment, including uncertain and incomplete data, and providing a wide range of information including scores, performance diversity, strength and weakness profile and graphics.
14517551
Misuse case-based design and analysis of secure software architecture
This paper presents an approach to the architectural design and analysis of secure software systems based on the system requirements elicited in the form of use cases and misuse cases. We identify architectural components and their connections and analyze whether or not a candidate architecture can address security concerns. This provides a smooth transition from requirements specification to high-level design for engineering secure software systems, and greatly improves the traceability of security concerns, which allows a system developer to know what requirement an architectural component references back to. We demonstrate our approach through a case study on a security-intensive hospital information system.
9746543
Design an Interoperable Mobile Agent System Based on Predicate Transition Net Models
Mobile agents provide an effective and flexible style to develop advanced distributed systems. In order to promote interoperability and ensure the quality of mobile agent systems, it is necessary to formalize software architecture of mobile agent systems. In this paper, we not only define the software architecture of interoperable mobile agent systems using predicate transition nets, but also analyze the interoperability between agents. In addition, a formal model-driven design method to develop mobile agent systems is described with examples. Our method naturally integrates formal methods and practical approaches in the agent system design phase. The method can be used to develop other complex software systems as well.
28175373
Mesh editing with poisson-based gradient field manipulation
In this paper, we introduce a novel approach to mesh editing with the Poisson equation as the theoretical foundation. The most distinctive feature of this approach is that it modifies the original mesh geometry implicitly through gradient field manipulation. Our approach can produce desirable and pleasing results for both global and local editing operations, such as deformation, object merging, and smoothing. With the help from a few novel interactive tools, these operations can be performed conveniently with a small amount of user interaction. Our technique has three key components, a basic mesh solver based on the Poisson equation, a gradient field manipulation scheme using local transforms, and a generalized boundary condition representation based on local frames. Experimental results indicate that our framework can outperform previous related mesh editing techniques.