17954201
Dynamic Supply Chain Integration through Intelligent Agents
The success of supply chains depends on the match between the requirements and offerings that deliver the services. It can be ensured by separating requirements from the means of realization as well as dynamically assigning available resources to requests. To achieve this, we need coordinate the flow of information among the services and link their business processes under various constraints. Existing approaches to this problem have relied on complete information of services and resources, and have failed to adequately address the dynamics and uncertainties of the operating environments. The problem is complicated as a result of undetermined requirements of decomposed individual services and unpredictable solutions contributed by service providers. This paper examines an agent-mediated coordination approach to dynamic supply chain integration. Each agent works as a broker for each service involved in the chain, exploring service requests as well as identifying suitable resources for achieving compatibility and coherence among the decisions of individual services. Based on the approach, a prototype has been implemented with simulated experiments highlighting the effectiveness of the approach
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.
12211000
Intelligent Agent Supported Business Process Management
The complex business environment requires managing business processes with the ability to adapt to changes and to collaborate in activities. Conventional workflow approaches based on predefined logical procedure offer little support for the dynamic business environment. A cognitive agent-based approach is proposed to manage business activities based on situational awareness and real-time decisions on activities. Business activities are delegated to a number of cognitive and collaborative problem-solving agents. Each software agent perceives its environment by capturing events and monitoring the state of tasks and resources. Based on the continuous perception of environment, business rules concerning process routing, operational constraint, exception handling and business strategy are used by such software agents to perform appropriate actions. The mechanism of this approach is investigated, and a case application of exception management in securities trading is developed to demonstrate the validity and benefits of this approach.
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.
5446179
Declarative Agent Programming Support for a FIPA-Compliant Agent Platform
Multi-agent system(MAS) is a blooming research area, which exhibits a new paradigm for the design, modeling and implementation of complex systems. A significant amount of effort has been made in establishing standards for agent communication and MAS platforms. However, communication is not the only difficulty faced by agent researchers. Research is also directed towards the formal aspects of agents and declarative approaches to model agents. This paper explores the bonding between high-level reasoning engines and low-level agent platforms in the practical setting of using three formal agent reasoning implementations together with an existing agent platform, OPAL, that supports the FIPA standards. We focus our discussion in this paper on our approach to provide declarative agent programming support in connection with the OPAL platform, and show how declarative goals can be used to glue the internal micro agents together to form the hierarchical architecture of the platform.
39861836
A Novel Method for Eye Features Extraction
Extraction of the eye features, like the pupil center and radius, eye corners and eyelid contours from the frontal face images often provides us useful cues in many important applications, such as face recognition, facial expression recognition and 3D face modeling from 2D images. Assuming the rough eye window is known, the color information, Gabor features are extracted from the eye window and then these two features and their mutual relationship have been incorporated into the design of our algorithm. Firstly, after the pupil center is detected in H channel of HSV color space, the pupil radius is estimated and refined. Secondly, eye corners are localized using eye-corner filter based on Gabor feature space. Finally, eyelid curves are fitted by spline function. The new algorithm has been tested on our SJTU database and some other pictures taken from the web. The experimental results show that our algorithm has high accuracy and is robust under different conditions.
19020482
A cost-effective three-in-one personal digital assistant input control
Abstract We attach an inexpensive pressure sensor to the side of a personal digital assistant and use it as three input devices at once. Users can squeeze the device to provide near-continuous input to applications. At the same time the drivers interpret a sudden full squeeze as the push of a virtual button. A user's sudden pressure release while squeezing is detected as the push of a second virtual button. We briefly describe our hardware and signal processing techniques. The remainder of the writing describes an experiment that explores whether users can cope cognitively with the 3-in-1 control. We compare against a three-control setup consisting of a jog wheel and two physical buttons. We show that the three-in-one control enables a 13% faster reaction time over the three-control one, but that the three-in-one control suffers a 4% penalty in the accuracy of users choosing between the two buttons in response to cues from an application. We show that a good choice of application cue is more important for assuring accuracy in the 3-in-1 than in the more traditional set of separate controls.
12835964
Dribbling Control of Omnidirectional Soccer Robots
This paper focuses on the dribbling control problem of an omnidirectional mobile robot. Because the movement of the dribbled object must be considered, dribbling control is more challenging than normal mobile robot motion control. A new feedback control algorithm, which steers a reference point to follow the desired movement and keeps the ball near to this point simultaneously, is proposed. To dribble a rolling ball along a given path, the robot should provide the ball with appropriate force by consecutive pushing operations when they travel in an environment with obstacles. Based on the analysis of the forces acting on the ball with respect to the mobile robot coordinate system, a constraint for robot movement in the dribbling process is also introduced. The simulation and real-world experiments address the performance of this control algorithm.
15871879
A Growth-Based Address Allocation Scheme for IPv6
IP address allocation policies significantly impact the Internet infrastructure, affecting many parties such as router manufacturers, ISPs, and end users. An address allocation policy can also directly affect the performance of the Internet. For example, address fragmentation, a key problem in IPv4, degrades address lookup performance in routers. Thus, a well-designed address allocation policy needs to minimize fragmentation while using the address space efficiently. 
 
This paper attempts toquantify the performance of address allocation policies by modeling key features that lead to fragmentation and inefficient address space usage. Our main contributions are: (i) we identify a drawback of the current IPv6 address allocation policy, which treats all entities uniformly, (ii) we propose a scheme that takes future growth rate into account for allocations, and (iii) an analytical model for measuring the efficiency of allocation schemes, allowing us to quantify the improvement our proposal offers over the current scheme.We believe that a quantitative study of allocation policies is timely since IPv6 address allocation is just beginning in earnest.