30146652
Workflow Quality of Service
Workflow management systems (WfMSs) have been used to support various types of business processes for more than a decade now. In ecommerce processes, suppliers and customers define a binding agreement or contract between the two parties, specifying quality of service (QoS) items such as products or services to be delivered, deadlines, quality of products, and cost of service. Management of such QoS directly impacts success of organizations participating in e-commerce. Organizations operating in modern markets require an excellent degree of quality of service management. Products and services must be available to customers with well-defined specifications. A good management of quality leads to the creation of quality products and services, which in turn fulfills customer expectations and achieves customer satisfaction. Therefore, when services or products are created or managed using workflow processes, the underlying WfMS must accept the specification, be able to predict, monitor, and control the QoS rendered to customers. To achieve these objectives the first step is to develop an adequate QoS model for workflow processes and develop methods to compute QoS.
3039342
Adding Semantics to Web Services Standards
With the increasing growth in popularity of Web services, discovery of relevant Web services becomes a significant challenge. One approach is to develop semantic Web services where by the Web services are annotated based on shared ontologies, and use these annotations for semantics-based discovery of relevant Web services. We discuss one such approach that involves adding semantics to WSDL using DAML+OIL ontologies. Our approach also uses UDDI to store these semantic annotations and search for Web services based on them. We compare our approach with another initiative to add semantics to support Web service discovery, and show how our approach may fit current standards-based industry approach better.
15234568
Demonstrating Dynamic Configuration and Execution of Web Processes
Web processes are next generation workflows on the web, created using Web services. In this paper we demonstrate the METEOR-S Configuration and Execution Environment (MCEE) system. It will illustrate the capabilities of the system to a) Discover partners b) Optimize partner selection using constraint analysis, c) Perform interaction protocol and data mediation. A graphical execution monitor to monitor the various phases of execution will be used to demonstrate various aspects of the system.
2346213
Healthcare Enterprise Process Development and Integration
Healthcare enterprises involve complex processes that span diverse groups and organisations. These processes involve clinical and administrative tasks, large volumes of data, and large numbers of patients and personnel. The tasks can be performed either by humans or by automated systems. In the latter case, the tasks are supported by a variety of software applications and information systems which are very often heterogeneous, autonomous, and distributed. The development of systems to manage and automate these processes has increasingly played an important role in improving the efficiency of healthcare enterprises. In this paper we look at four healthcare and medical applications that involve investigative, clinical, and administrative functions. Based on these applications, we derive the requirements for developing enterprise applications that involve the coordination of a variety of tasks performed by humans, information systems, and legacy applications.
10095666
Simulation modeling within workflow technology
This paper presents an approach for integrating simulation modeling and analysis capabilities within the workflow management system (WFMS) being developed in the Large Scale Distributed Information Systems (LSDIS) Lab at the University of Georgia. Simulation modeling can be used for studying the efficiency of workflow designs as well as studying the general performance and reliability of WFMSs. We also discuss the importance of using sophisticated monitoring and animation capabilities, and the use of workflow management technology to advance simulation technology itself. Finally, we demonstrate a sample simulation where tasks and task managers are simulated.
8657310
Constraint driven Web service composition in METEOR-S
Creating Web processes using Web service technology gives us the opportunity for selecting new services, which best suit our need at the moment. Doing this automatically requires us to quantify our criteria for selection. In addition, there are challenging issues of correctness and optimality. We present a constraint driven Web service composition tool in METEOR-S, which allows the process designers to bind Web services to an abstract process, based on business and process constraints and generate an executable process. Our approach is to reduce much of the service composition problem to a constraint satisfaction problem. It uses a multiphase approach for constraint analysis. This work was done as part of the METEORS framework, which aims to support the complete lifecycle of semantic Web processes.
8310590
Modeling leadership effects and recruit type in an Army recruiting station
Army recruiters have an uphill battle recruiting well-qualified volunteers into military service. With prospering economy, there are many alternatives to joining the military, and all services are having difficulty recruiting young people. United States Army Recruiting Command (USAREC) sponsored our research in simulating the workings of an Army recruiting station in an effort to help understand more about the recruiting process. Specifically, USAREC wanted a management tool to examine the effects of changing a variety of controllable factors on the way an individual recruiting station performs. We focused this study on the effect of recruiting station commander leadership on recruiting productivity, and the differences in processing times and success rates for different types of applicants (potential recruits). This study added capability to a previous simulation model developed at the Air Force Institute of Technology (AFIT) (J.D. Cordeiro and M.A. Friend, 1998). Cordeiro and Friend's model depicted an Army recruiting station with three types of recruiters, and a single (average) recruiter type. For the current work, we needed to gather pertinent data on the effects of leadership and on the differences between different applicant types. In addition, we needed to incorporate the new data into the simulation model. The remainder of the paper includes an overview of the recruiting process, considerations for modeling leadership effects and applicant types, discussion of incorporating these features in the simulation, a brief look at some simulation output, and some future research interests.
7900596
On self-embeddings of computable linear orderings
The Dushnik{Miller Theorem states that every innite countable linear ordering has a nontrivial self-embedding. We examine computability-theoretical aspects of this classical theorem.
6824501
The Undecidability of Iterated Modal Relativization
In dynamic epistemic logic and other fields, it is natural to consider relativization as an operator taking sentences to sentences. When using the ideas and methods of dynamic logic, one would like to iterate operators. This leads to iterated relativization. We are also concerned with the transitive closure operation, due to its connection to common knowledge. We show that for three fragments of the logic of iterated relativization and transitive closure, the satisfiability problems are fi1 Σ11–complete. Two of these fragments do not include transitive closure. We also show that the question of whether a sentence in these fragments has a finite (tree) model is fi0 Σ01–complete. These results go via reduction to problems concerning domino systems.
7380263
Getting more from the data in a multinomial selection problem
We consider the problem of determining which of k simulated systems is most likely to be the best per former based on some objective performance measure. The standard experiment is to generate v in dependent vector observations (replications) across the k- systems. A classical multinomial selection pro cedure, BEM (Bechhofer, Elmaghraby, and Morse), prescribes a minimum number of replications so that the probability of correctly selecting the true best system meets or exceeds a prespecified probability. Assuming that larger is better, BEM selects as best the system having the largest value of the performance measure in more replications than any other. We propose using these same v replications across k systems to form vk pseudoreplications (no longer in dependent) that contain one observation from each system, and again select as best the system having the largest value of the performance measure in more pseudoreplications than any other. We expect that this new procedure, AVC (all vector comparisons), dominates BEM in the sense that AVC will never require more independent replications than DEM to meet a prespecified probability of correct selection. We present analytical and simulation results to show how AVC fares versus BEM for different underly ing distribution families, different numbers of populations and various values of v. We also present results for the closely related problem of estimating the probability that a specific system is the best.
35037776
Assessing the Performance of Neural Encoding Models in the Presence of Noise
An analytical method is introduced for evaluating the performance of neural encoding models. The method addresses a critical question that arises during the course of the development and validation of encoding models: is a given model near optimal in terms of its accuracy in predicting the stimulus-elicited responses of a neural system, or can the predictive accuracy be improved significantly by further model development? The evaluation method is based on a derivation of the minimum mean-square error between actual responses and modeled responses. It is formulated as a comparison between the mean-square error of the candidate model and the theoretical minimum mean-square error attainable through an optimal model for the system. However, no a priori information about the nature of the optimal model is required. The theoretically minimum error is determined solely from the coherence function between pairs of system responses to repeated presentations of the same dynamic stimulus. Thus, the performance of the candidate model is judged against the performance of an optimal model rather than against that of an arbitrarily assumed model.Using this method, we evaluated a linear model for neural encoding by mechanosensory cells in the cricket cercal system. At low stimulus intensities, the best-fit linear model of encoding by single cells was found to be nearly optimal, even though the coherence between stimulus-response pairs (a commonly used measure of system linearity) was low. In this low-stimulus-intensity regime, the mean square error of the linear model was on the order of the power of the cell responses. In contrast, at higher stimulus intensities the linear model was not an accurate representation of neural encoding, even though the stimulus-response coherence was substantially higher than in the low-intensity regime.