12605479
E-Service/Process Composition Through Multi-agent Constraint Management
E-service/process composition requires allocating suitable resources to a set of services that constitute a composite service/process. The problem is complicated due to undetermined constraints of each component service and unpredictable solutions contributed by service providers. It needs the ability to rapidly identify the suitable solutions as well as effectively coordinate them under various constraints. In this paper, an agent-mediated coordination framework for e-service/process composition is proposed. Each agent works as a broker for each service type, posting service constraints, searching suitable solutions and refining the constraints for achieving coherence among the decisions of each service. Based on the framework, a prototype of multi-agent supported e-supply chain composition is implemented. The experimental results indicate the significant 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.
12957954
Agents and Web Services Supported Business Exception Management
The unpredictability of business processes requires that business applications support exception management with the ability to dynamically adapt to the changing environment. Exception management is a kind of complex process, in which multiple organizations and mixture of human activities and automated tasks may be involved. For a competitive solution to exception management, a web services and agents supported approach is elaborated 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 knowledge-based agents with web services to make use of the advantages from both, this approach leads to more intelligence, flexibility and collaboration in business exception management. A case of exception management in securities trading is developed to demonstrate the validity and benefits of this approach.
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
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.
3479382
Semantic Data Management: Towards Querying Data with their Meaning
Relational database management systems are constantly being extended and augmented to accommodate data in different domains. Recently, with the increasing use of ontology in various applications, the need to support ontology, especially the related inferencing operation, in DBMS has become more concrete and urgent. However, manipulating knowledge along with relational data in DBMSs is not a trivial undertaking due to the mismatch in data models. In this paper, we introduce a framework for managing relational data and hierarchical domain knowledge together. Our framework persists taxonomies contained in ontologies by leveraging XML support in hybrid relational-XML DBMSs (e.g., IBM's DB2 v9) and rewrites ontology-based semantic matching queries using the industry-standard query languages, SQL/XML and XQuery. Compared with previous approaches, our approach does not materialize transitive closures of ontological relationships to support inferencing. Consequently, our method has wide applicability and good performance.
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.
612178
A learning-based approach to estimate statistics of operators in continuous queries: a case study
Statistic estimation such as output size estimation of operators is a well-studied subject in the database research community, mainly for the purpose of query optimization. The assumption, however, is that queries are ad-hoc and therefore the emphasis has been on capturing the data distribution. When long standing continuous queries on a changing database are concerned, a more direct approach, namely building an estimation model for each operator, is possible. In this paper, we propose a novel learning-based method. Our method consists of two steps. The first step is to design a dedicated feature extraction algorithm that can be used incrementally to obtain feature values from the underlying data. The second step is to use a data mining algorithm to generate an estimation model based on the feature values extracted from the historical data. To illustrate the approach, this paper studies the case of similarity-based searches over streaming time series. Experimental results show this approach provides accurate statistic estimates with a low overhead.
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.
1930293
Data mining meets performance evaluation: fast algorithms for modeling bursty traffic
Network, Web, and disk I/O traffic are usually bursty and self-similar and therefore cannot be modeled adequately with Poisson arrivals. However, we wish to model these types of traffic and generate realistic traces, because of obvious applications for disk scheduling, network management, and Web server design. Previous models (like fractional Brownian motion and FARIMA, etc.) tried to capture the 'burstiness'. However, the proposed models either require too many parameters to fit and/or require prohibitively large (quadratic) time to generate large traces. We propose a simple, parsimonious method, the b-model, which solves both problems: it requires just one parameter, and can easily generate large traces. In addition, it has many more attractive properties: (a) with our proposed estimation algorithm, it requires just a single pass over the actual trace to estimate b. For example, a one-day-long disk trace in milliseconds contains about 86 Mb data points and requires about 3 minutes for model fitting and 5 minutes for generation. (b) The resulting synthetic traces are very realistic: our experiments on real disk and Web traces show that our synthetic traces match the real ones very well in terms of queuing behavior.