13807032
Coordinating Agents in Shop Floor Environments From a Dynamic Systems Perspective
In this paper, we address agent coordination from a dynamic systems perspective and propose a dynamic coordination model, which is inspired by biological metabolic systems. A new coordination mechanism through dynamic local adjustment (CDLA) is presented, and coordination is achieved when every agent utilizes explicitly the global system dynamics and performs iteratively a dynamic local adjustment procedure. The CDLA mechanism is investigated in an example multiagent shop floor system. The results show that the example manufacturing process is well-coordinated and the coordination approach is practically applicable and effective
8202363
Coordinated Services Provision in Peer-to-Peer Environments
In recent years, inspired by the emerging Web services standard and peer-to-peer technology, a new federated service providing (FSP) system paradigm has attracted increasing research interests. Many existing systems have either explicitly or implicitly followed this paradigm. Instead of exchanging files, peers in FSP systems share their computation resources in order to offer domain-specific services. In this paper, we focused on the coordination problem of how to self-organize the service group structures in response to the varying service demand. We presented our solution in the form of a coordination mechanism, which includes a labor-market model, a recruiting protocol, and a policy-driven decision architecture. Peers make their service providing decisions based on their local policies, which can be added, removed, or modified by users. A general methodology is introduced in this paper to facilitate policy design. Specifically, a heuristic inspired by the extremal optimization technique is utilized to handle potential inconsistencies among policies. A stimulus-response mechanism was further applied to make the decision process adjustable. Experiments under five application scenarios verified our ideas and demonstrated the effectiveness of our coordination mechanism.
8577812
Dynamic Self-Healing for Service Flows with Semantic Web Services
With an increasing complexity of business processes, self-healing capability is becoming an important issue in order to support robust service flow execution. In this paper, a dynamic self-healing mechanism is proposed, which can dynamically identify suitable alternatives and replace faulty services such that a service flow can be performed successfully despite of unexpected exceptions. This mechanism explicitly utilizes semantic Web services for service matching and selection of a composite service in business service flow, and Semantic Web services are equipped with rich business rules in a domain-dependent manner. We explore the self-healing mechanism for supporting self-healable service flow execution which is modeled in BPEL4WS. A demo system of self-healing capable service flow execution is built to validate its effectiveness by a concrete scenario, PC manufacturing application.
14272859
Ant Colony Inspired Self-Healing for Resource Allocation in Service-Oriented Environment Considering Resource Breakdown
The ant colony optimization (ACO) algorithm is a metaheuristic inspired from the behavior of foraging ants. Instead of exploring its ability in finding optimal solutions, the current study investigates another unique property - self-healing mechanism for resource allocation in a service-oriented environment where unexpected resource breakdown can occur. A system architecture is first proposed to detect, diagnose and react to disturbances. Then the performance of the ACO self-healing mechanism is tested and compared based on a modified benchmark problem. The experimental results show that the self-healing mechanism can promptly recover an obsolete schedule with high quality solutions.
15177546
Semantic enhanced rule driven workflow execution in Collaborative Virtual Enterprise
Globalization leads to an efficient new business paradigm generally known as collaborative virtual enterprise (CVE) which demands flexible service orchestration and robust workflow execution. As two major service orchestration strategies, OWL-S and BPEL have their own strength and deficiencies. To meet the challenge in CVE, in this paper, we propose a workflow execution system (WES) that takes advantage of the complementary strengths of these two technologies. On the one hand, having semantic support, OWL-S is used in dynamic service discovery and composition at high level. On the other hand, at the concrete level, industry-based BPEL is exploited in service execution. The description of each semantic Web service is enhanced with rule-based modeling of the essential business logic behind the service interface. In order to realize interoperability in OWL-S and BPEL without loss of semantic information, we further proposed an OWLS2BPEL Mapper to facilitate the workflow robustness and support rule evaluation to increase responsiveness to customers. A concrete scenario in PC manufacturing collaborative virtual enterprise is analyzed to demonstrate the effectiveness of our workflow execution system.
537363
Change propagation algorithm in a unified feature modeling scheme
Product lifecycle stages are inter-related and mutually constraining. Due to the sequential nature of the product development processes, some constraints or conflicts may emerge in a later stage and require modifications to the decisions made in earlier stages. The iterations between stages are hence unavoidable and must be managed carefully to maintain the consistency, integrity and validity of product information models. Due to the inter- or intra-stage relations, a chain of changes is very likely to occur as the consequence of an initial change. Modeling and maintaining these relations are important in collaborative engineering to evolve the state of the whole product model in a consistent manner. This paper introduces a new method of modeling associative engineering relations in a unified feature modeling scheme and elaborates a change propagation algorithm for the information consistency control among multiple applications of product lifecycle stages. The algorithm is established on a JTMS-based dependency network. Two case studies are used to illustrate the proposed dependency network and change propagation algorithm.
40834787
Petri-net-based context-related access control in workflow environment
Access control, which is one of the most important aspects of security services, is becoming increasingly an important challenge in workflow management systems. However, the traditional models of access control, such as the role-based access control (RBAC), are static models without recognition of the dynamic environments in which the workflows are rooted. These context-independent models rarely can meet the requirements that the highly dynamic environments raise. In this paper, we regard authorization as a dynamic process instead of the traditional static view and take two contextual factors into account: (1) the state of related authorization processes; and (2) the state of related process instances. Then, we propose a Petri-net-based model as a practical solution to the context-sensitive access control on this basis.
7031383
Image retrieval based on Sugeno fuzzy integral
In this paper, we propose a fuzzy similarity measure based on the Sugeno fuzzy integral and apply it to the content-based image retrieval. Fuzzy measure is used to formulate the subjective feedback information. Experimental results show that the proposed method can improve the efficiency and reliability of image retrieval system. Our method of formulating the subjective feedback information performs better than the weighted average operator (WAO) and a Choquet-integral-based similarity measure.
15935457
A Design of Data Rebuilding for Decision Support in E-Government System
The E-Government System is composed of three networks and one database. The business network within government offices (the Internal Net), the resource network in central and local administrations and departments (the External Net), the public information network (PIN) relying on the Internet. It is necessary to rebuild data in the three networks of the system in order to construct an effective electronic information database. In data rebuilding, a data exchange platform is set up to enable data sharing between the three networks. The data exchange platform is implemented in a structure that combines the intelligent decision support system (IDSS) and data warehouse (DW).
608386
Complicated product oriented collaborative document management system
The researchers and developers of DM system always ignore the fact that the development of complicated product is composed of several phases, each of which has its own management demands to documents. In this paper, we present a collaborative DM (document management) system to manage heterogeneous, distributed data of complicated products in the large size enterprises. A concept of library was introduced as the basic logic unit for storage and management of document data in accordance with phase. The difference of operations permitted in each library promised distinct management demands of specific phase. Typically, a product was divided into three libraries: a design library, a controlled library and a product library. Automatic document transfer between libraries was implemented in the charge of workflow. According to the concept of library, there could be one-to-one correspondence between each product and an independent database. In addition, each library operated with an individual, distributed file server for high throughput.
16797771
Semi-supervised Multi-label Learning by Solving a Sylvester Equation
Multi-label learning refers to the problems where an instance can be assigned to more than one category. In this paper, we present a novel Semi-supervised algorithm for Multi-label learning by solving a Sylvester Equation (SMSE). Two graphs are first constructed on instance level and category level respectively. For instance level, a graph is defined based on both labeled and unlabeled instances, where each node represents one instance and each edge weight reflects the similarity between corresponding pairwise instances. Similarly, for category level, a graph is also built based on all the categories, where each node represents one category and each edge weight reflects the similarity between corresponding pairwise categories. A regularization framework combining two regularization terms for the two graphs is suggested. The regularization term for instance graph measures the smoothness of the labels of instances, and the regularization term for category graph measures the smoothness of the labels of categories. We show that the labels of unlabeled data finally can be obtained by solving a Sylvester Equation. Experiments on RCV1 data set show that SMSE can make full use of the unlabeled data information as well as the correlations among categories and achieve good performance. In addition, we give a SMSE’s extended application on collaborative filtering.