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The Application of Petri Nets to Workflow Management
(1998)
Workflow management promises a new solution to an age-old problem: controlling, monitoring, optimizing and supporting business processes. What is new about workflow management is the explicit representation of the business process logic which allows for computerized support. This paper discusses the use of Petri nets in the context of workflow management. Petri nets are an established tool for modeling and analyzing processes. On the one hand, Petri nets can be used as a design language for the specification of complex workflows. On the other hand, Petri net theory provides for powerful analysis techniques which can be used to verify the correctness of workflow procedures. This paper introduces workflow management as an application domain for Petri nets, presents state-of-the-art results with respect to the verification of workflows, and highlights some Petri-net-based workflow tools. 1 Introduction In former times, information systems were designed to support the execution of indivi...
Van Aalst
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Coloured Petri Nets: Basic Concepts, Analysis Methods and Practical Use (Volume 1)
Vol. 1 (28 April 2003)
This three-volume work presents a coherent description of the theoretical and practical aspects of coloured Petri nets. These CP-nets are shown to be a full-fledged language for the design, specification, simulation, validation and implementation of large software systems.The introductory first volume contains the formal definition of CP-nets and the mathematical theory behind their analysis methods. It gives a detailed presentation of many small examples and a brief overview of some industrial applications. The purpose of the book is to teach the reader how to construct CP-net models and analyse them by means of simulation. The book is also attractive to readers who are more interested in applications than in the underlying mathematics.
Kurt Jensen
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Data mining tools comparison - Summary
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Agent assignment for process management: agent performance evaluation
In FIT '09: Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Frontiers of Information Technology (2009), pp. 1-6, doi:10.1145/1838002.1838055
Workflow Management Systems not only need to provide a mechanism to represent the organizational elements involved during the execution of workflow processes but they also must provide the mechanism for continuous improvements within these elements. But, in almost, all workflow management systems the role concept is determined once at the introduction of a workflow application and is not reevaluated to observe how successfully certain processes are performed by the authorized agents. This paper describes an approach which evaluates whether agents assigned to a process are working successfully and feed this information back for future agent assignments promising best business benefit for the enterprise. The approach is called Agent Performance Evaluation (APE) and is based on data mining technique combined with post processing technique.
Stefan Jablonski, Ramzan Talib
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Workflow Management: Modeling Concepts, Architecture and Implementation
(26 September 1996)
Offering an overview of WFMS, this book includes a reference model and architecture that might serve as a preliminary standard for the technology. A range of applications and examples are included, from industries such as banking, insurance, automobiles, aircraft, and oil. This title should appeal to both users and developers of WFMS in the fields of business, engineering and computers.
Stefan Jablonski, Christoph Bussler
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Efficient Distributed Workflow Management Based on Variable Server Assignments
In Advanced Information Systems Engineering, 12th International Conference CAiSE 2000, Vol. 1789 (2000), pp. 94-109
Abstract. For enterprise-wide and cross-enterprise workflow (WF) applications, the load of the WF servers and the amount of communication in the subnets may become a bottleneck. This paper shows how a distributed WF control can be realized in a way that the load of the components at run time is minimized. For that purpose, the control of a WF instance may migrate from one WF server to another. The WF servers are assigned to the WF activities in a way that minimizes the communication load. The server assignments are determined at build time by analyzing the WF model with respect to the actor assignments. As these actor assignments may depend on preceding activities, static server assignments are not always reasonable. Hence, so-called variable server assignment expressions are introduced, which allow dynamic server assignment without expensive run time analyses. 1
Thomas Bauer, Peter Dadam
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Interacting Workflow Processes
Vol. 10, No. 4. (2001)
... This paper introduces and advocates the use of interacting proclets, i.e. lightweight workflow processes. By promoting interactions to first-class citizens it is possible to model complex workflows in a more natural manner. In addition, the expressive power and flexibility are improved compared to the more traditional workflow modeling languages
WMP Van Der Aalst, P Barthelmess, CA Ellis, J Wainer
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From Centralized Workflow Specification to Distributed Workflow Execution
Journal of Intelligent Information Systems, Vol. 10, No. 2. (1 March 1998), pp. 159-184, doi:10.1023/A:1008608810770
Current workflow management systems fall short of supporting large-scale distributed, enterprise-wide applications. We present a scalable, rigorously founded approach to enterprise-wide workflow management, based on the distributed execution of state and activity charts. By exploiting the formal semantics of state and activity charts, we develop an algorithm for transforming a centralized state and activity chart into a provably equivalent partitioned one, suitable for distributed execution. A synchronization scheme is developed that guarantees an execution equivalent to a non-distributed one. This basic solution is further refined in order to reduce communication overhead and exploit parallelism between partitions whenever possible. The developed synchronization schemes are compared in terms of the number and size of synchronization messages.
Peter Muth, Dirk Wodtke, Jeanine Weissenfels, Angelika Dittrich, Gerhard Weikum
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Description logic for coalitions
In AAMAS (1) (2009), pp. 425-432, doi:10.1145/1558013.1558071
Inanç Seylan, Wojciech Jamroga
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Model Checking Abilities of Agents: A Closer Look
Theory Comput. Syst., Vol. 42, No. 3. (2008), pp. 366-410, doi:10.1007/s00224-007-9080-z
Wojciech Jamroga, Jürgen Dix
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Towards Adaptive Workflow Enactment Using Multiagent Systems
Information Technology and Management, Vol. 6, No. 1. (1 January 2005), pp. 61-87, doi:10.1007/s10799-004-7775-2
Advances in Information Technology have created opportunities for business enterprises to redesign their information and process management systems. The redesigned systems will likely employ some form of workflow management system. Workflow management systems exactly enact business processes described in a process description language. Unfortunately, such strict adherence to the prescribed workflow makes it impossible for the system to adapt to unforeseen circumstances. We firmly believe that the historic trajectory of software development paradigms and IT advancements will establish multiagent systems as the workflow enactment mechanism of the future. In this paper we provide a critical survey of workflow, workflow description languages, web services and agent technologies. We propose that workflow description languages and their associated design tools can be used to specify a multiagent system. Specifically, we advance the idea that the Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL4WS) can be used as a specification language for expressing the initial social order of the multiagent system, which can then intelligently adapt to changing environmental conditions.
Paul Buhler, José Vidal
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Strategic Planning through Model Checking of ATL Formulae
In ICAISC, Vol. 3070 (2004), pp. 879-884
Wojciech Jamroga
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A Flexible Middleware Platform with Piped Workflow
In On The Move to Meaningful Internet Systems 2003: OTM 2003Workshops, Vol. 2889 (2003), pp. 950-959-959, doi:10.1007/978-3-540-39962-9_92
Wanjun Huang, Uwe Roth, Christoph Meinel
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PARALLEL AND DISTRIBUTED DATA PIPELINING WITH KNIME
In recent years a new category of data analysis applications have evolved, known as data pipelining tools, which enable even nonexperts to perform complex analysis tasks on potentially huge amounts of data. Due to the complex and computing intensive analysis processes and methods used, it is often neither sufficient nor possible to simply rely on the increase of performance of single processors. Promising solutions to this problem are parallel and distributed approaches that can accelerate the analysis process. In this paper we discuss the parallel and distribution potential of pipelining tools by demonstrating several parallel and distributed implementations in the open source pipelining platform KNIME. We verify the practical applicability in a number of real world experiments.
C Sieb, T Meinl, MR Berthold
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OntoDataClean: Ontology-Based Integration and Preprocessing of Distributed Data
In Biological and Medical Data Analysis, Vol. 4345 (2006), pp. 262-272-272, doi:10.1007/11946465_24
Within the knowledge discovery in databases (KDD) process, previous phases to data mining consume most of the time spent analysing data. Few research efforts have been carried out in theses steps compared to data mining, suggesting that new approaches and tools are needed to support the preparation of data. As regards, we present in this paper a new methodology of ontology-based KDD adopting a federated approach to database integration and retrieval. Within this model, an ontology-based system called OntoDataClean has been developed dealing with instance-level integration and data preprocessing. Within the OntoDataClean development, a preprocessing ontology was built to store the information about the required transformations. Various biomedical experiments were carried out, showing that data have been correctly transformed using the preprocessing ontology. Although OntoDataClean does not cover every possible data transformation, it suggests that ontologies are a suitable mechanism to improve quality in the various steps of KDD processes. Keywords: Knowledge Discovery in Databases, Preprocessing, Data Cleaning, Database Integration, Ontologies.
David Perez-Rey, Alberto Anguita, Jose Crespo
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An Ontology-Based Method to Link Database Integration and Data Mining within a Biomedical Distributed KDD
In Artificial Intelligence in Medicine, Vol. 5651 (2009), pp. 355-359-359, doi:10.1007/978-3-642-02976-9_48
Over the last years, collaborative research has been continuously growing in many scientific areas such as biomedicine. However, traditional Knowledge Discovery in Databases (KDD) processes generally adopt centralized approaches that do not fully address many research needs in these distributed environments. This paper presents a method to improve traditional centralized KDD by adopting an ontology-based distributed model. Ontologies are used within this model: (i) as Virtual Schemas (VS) to solve structural heterogeneities in databases and (ii) as frameworks to guide automatic transformations when data is retrieved by usersâPreprocessing Ontologies (PO). Both types of ontologies aim to facilitate data gathering and preprocessing while maintaining data source decentralization. This ontology-based approach allows to link database integration and data mining, improving final results, reusability and interoperability. The results obtained present improvements in outcome performance and new capabilities compared to traditional KDD processes.
David Perez-Rey, Victor Maojo
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Agent based workflow ontology for dynamic business process composition
International Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work in Design, Vol. 1 (2005), doi:10.1109/CSCWD.2005.194214
OWLS (Web Ontology Language for Services) is being widely concerned of composing a Web service based workflow. However, a complete workflow should include both internal and external processes for their strong correlation that can be expressed by the logic power of the Web Ontology Language. Moreover, agent based workflow, from another point of view, provides a flexible mechanism for service discovery and dynamic workflow coordination at run time. This paper presents an agent based workflow ontology model for the purpose of semantic workflow building, reasoning, and process reconfiguration.
S Wang, W Shen, Q Hao
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A framework for agent-based distributed machine learning and data mining
In AAMAS '07: Proceedings of the 6th international joint conference on Autonomous agents and multiagent systems (2007), pp. 1-8, doi:10.1145/1329125.1329243
This paper proposes a framework for agent-based distributed machine learning and data mining based on (i) the exchange of meta-level descriptions of individual learning processes among agents and (ii) online reasoning about learning success and learning progress by learning agents. We present an abstract architecture that enables agents to exchange models of their local learning processes and introduces a number of different methods for integrating these processes. This allows us to apply existing agent interaction mechanisms to distributed machine learning tasks, thus leveraging the powerful coordination methods available in agent-based computing, and enables agents to engage in meta-reasoning about their own learning decisions. We apply this architecture to a real-world distributed clustering application to illustrate how the conceptual framework can be used in practical systems in which different learners may be using different datasets, hypotheses and learning algorithms. We report on experimental results obtained using this system, review related work on the subject, and discuss potential future extensions to the framework.
Jan Tozicka, Michael Rovatsos, Michal Pechoucek
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On agent-mediated electronic commerce
IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, Vol. 15, No. 4. (July 2003), pp. 985-1003, doi:10.1109/TKDE.2003.1209014
This paper surveys and analyzes the state of the art of agent-mediated electronic commerce (e-commerce), concentrating particularly on the business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) aspects. From the consumer buying behavior perspective, agents are being used in the following activities: need identification, product brokering, buyer coalition formation, merchant brokering, and negotiation. The roles of agents in B2B e-commerce are discussed through the business-to-business transaction model that identifies agents as being employed in partnership formation, brokering, and negotiation. Having identified the roles for agents in B2C and B2B e-commerce, some of the key underpinning technologies of this vision are highlighted. Finally, we conclude by discussing the future directions and potential impediments to the wide-scale adoption of agent-mediated e-commerce.
Minghua He, NR Jennings, Ho-Fung Leung
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Data storage in unreliable multi-agent networks
In AAMAS '05: Proceedings of the fourth international joint conference on Autonomous agents and multiagent systems (2005), pp. 1339-1340, doi:10.1145/1082473.1082762
The distributed data storage on unreliable devices, connected by a short-range radio network is analyzed. Failing devices incur loss of data. To prevent the loss, the data is split and distributed across the network. The graph-based connectivity model assuming independent erasures is given, and the capacity of such graph is computed. It is shown by an information-theoretic argument that multi-agent systems with unreliable connectivity can increase overall data storage reliability through cooperation.
Filip Miletić, Patrick Dewilde
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JADE: A software framework for developing multi-agent applications. Lessons learned
Information and Software Technology In Special issue with two special sections. Section 1: Most-cited software engineering articles in 2001. Section 2: Requirement engineering: Foundation for software quality, Vol. 50, No. 1-2. (January 2008), pp. 10-21, doi:10.1016/j.infsof.2007.10.008
Since a number of years agent technology is considered one of the most innovative technologies for the development of distributed software systems. While not yet a mainstream approach in software engineering at large, a lot of work on agent technology has been done, many research results and applications have been presented, and some software products exists which have moved from the research community to the industrial community. One of these is JADE, a software framework that facilitates development of interoperable intelligent multi-agent systems and that is distributed under an Open Source License. JADE is a very mature product, used by a heterogeneous community of users both in research activities and in industrial applications. This paper presents JADE and its technological components together with a discussion of the possible reasons for its success and lessons learned from the somewhat detached perspective possible nine years after its inception.
F Bellifemine, G Caire, A Poggi, G Rimassa
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WADE: a software platform to develop mission critical applications exploiting agents and workflows
In AAMAS '08: Proceedings of the 7th international joint conference on Autonomous agents and multiagent systems (2008), pp. 29-36
In this paper, we describe two mission critical applications currently deployed by Telecom Italia in the Operations Support System domains. The first one called "Network Neutral Element Manager" implements a mediation layer between network elements and OSS systems. The second one, known as "Wizard", provides step-by-step guidance to technicians performing maintenance operations in the fields.
Giovanni Caire, Danilo Gotta, Massimo Banzi
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The Application of Petri Nets to Workflow Management
The Journal of Circuits, Systems and Computers, Vol. 8, No. 1. (1998), pp. 21-66
Workflow management promises a new solution to an age-old problem: controlling, monitoring, optimizing and supporting business processes. What is new about workflow management is the explicit representation of the business process logic which allows for computerized support. This paper discusses the use of Petri nets in the context of workflow management. Petri nets are an established tool for modeling and analyzing processes. On the one hand, Petri nets can be used as a design language for the ...
Wil van der Aalst
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Agent-based workflow management systems (WfMSs)
Information Systems and E-Business Management, Vol. 4, No. 1. (1 January 2006), pp. 5-23, doi:10.1007/s10257-005-0010-9
Workflow management systems (WfMSs) based on agent technology can cope with the rapidly evolving business environment better than most other systems as they are more flexible and open. In this paper we describe a possible architecture of such a system by means of our prototype WfMS called JBees. The combination of collaborating agents and the Coloured Petri Net (CPN)-formalism in JBees enables a flexible and adaptive system with the possibility of simulation, analysis, and monitoring of the process execution in order to identify potential inconsistencies and to provide appropriate information to the workflow administrator for the purpose of the process improvement.
Lars Ehrler, Martin Fleurke, Maryam Purvis, Bastin Savarimuthu
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Workflow Management Coalition Terminology & Glossary (Document No. WFMC-TC-1011)
Workflow Management Coalition Specification
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Integration of Workflow and Agent Technology for Business Process Management
In In The Sixth International Conference on CSCW in Design (2001), pp. 420-426
Both workflow and agent technology have recently been applied to business process management. The integration of these two technologies will definitely provide solutions to the problems not to be solved by any of them. This paper summaries the capabilities of these two technologies and discusses the forms and their benefits of integrating them for business process management. Generally, agent enhanced workflow management and agent-based workflow management are the main forms for applications of intelligent agents to workflow systems. Some research issues in each form are discussed. A conclusion with discussions of future research directions is also given.
Yuhong Yan, Zakaria Maamar, Weiming Shen
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Agent-based integration of Web Services with Workflow Management Systems
In AAMAS '05: Proceedings of the fourth international joint conference on Autonomous agents and multiagent systems (2005), pp. 1345-1346, doi:10.1145/1082473.1082765
Rapid changes in the business environment call for more flexible and adaptive workflow systems. Researchers have proposed that Workflow Management Systems (WfMSs) comprising multiple agents can provide these capabilities. We have developed a multiagent based workflow system, JBees, which supports distributed process models and the adaptability of executing processes. Modern workflow systems should also have the flexibility to integrate available Web Services as they are updated. In this paper we discuss how our agent-based architecture can be used to bind and access Web Services in the context of executing a workflow process model.
Bastin Tony Roy Savarimuthu, Maryam Purvis, Martin Purvis, Stephen Cranefield
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Distributed Workflow Co-ordination by Proactive Software Agents
In In Intelligent Workflow and Process Management. The New Frontier for AI in Business IJCAI-99 Workshop (1999)
We argue that the use of proactive software agents with workflow systems can enrich the co-ordinated distribution of work via negotiation. We present the use of software agents in the: provision of distributed workflow; reactive and proactive negotiation of work due to process failure; facilitation of workflow interoperability; visualisation and verification of decentralised processes. This approach links the software agency with a standard workflow product that is in charge of the enactment stage of the business process. Our implementation includes a number of industry standard components, such as FIPA Agent Communication Language, CORBA, JAVA and the Process Interchange Format. The target domain was a `single front office, multiple back office' configuration, based on a simplification of a live business process. Introduction Virtual and other extended enterprises have become increasingly common as organisations seek new ways of delivering value to their shareholders a...
BR Odgers, JW Shepherdson, SG Thompson
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DartFlow: A Workflow Management System On The Web Using Transportable Agents
(1997)
Workflow management systems help streamline business processes and increase productivity. This paper describes the design and implementation of the DartFlow workflow management system. DartFlow uses Web-browser embedded Java applets as its front end and transportable agents as the backbone. While Java applets provide a safe and platform independent GUI, the use of transportable agents makes DartFlow highly flexible and scalable. This paper describes the design and implementation of DartFlow, as well as a workflow application that exploits DartFlow's agent-based design. 1. Introduction Rising costs, international competition, and rapidly changing boundary conditions require fast and flexible adaptation to a quickly evolving business environment. While earlier improvement efforts left the internal business organization intact, business process reengineering (BPR) [Ham92] places its whole emphasis on rebuilding the corporation. As enabling technology for BPR, workflow management has exper...
Ting Cai, Peter Gloor, Saurab Nog
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Casting Mobile Agents to Workflow Systems: On Performance and Scalability Issues
In Database and Expert Systems Applications , Vol. 2113 (28 August 2001), pp. 254-263, doi:10.1007/3-540-44759-8_26
In this paper we describe two important design issues of mobile agents-based workflow systems; in architecture and workflow execution levels. Solutions for better performance and scalability of workflow systems are proposed. We suggest 3-layer architecture and agent delegation model in architecture and workflow execution levels of workflow systems respectively. Mobile agents effectively distribute workloads of a naming/location server and a workflow engine to others based on the proposed methods. In consequence, the performance and the scalability of workflow systems are improved. This effectiveness is shown through comparison with client server-based and another mobile agent-based workflow systems with stochastic Petri-nets simulation. Simulation results show that our approach not only outperforms others in massive workflow environment but also comes up with the scalability of previous mobile agent-based workflow systems.
Jeong-Joon Yoo, Young-Ho Suh, Dong-Ik Lee, Seung-Woog Jung, Choul-Soo Jang, Joong-Bae Kim
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Monitoring and controlling of a multi-agent based workflow system
In ACSW Frontiers '04: Proceedings of the second workshop on Australasian information security, Data Mining and Web Intelligence, and Software Internationalisation (2004), pp. 127-132
Business processes are often likely to undergo drastic changes and hence the workflow systems that model, simulate and enact these processes should support the monitoring and controlling of processes. In extension to our previous work on the framework for an adaptive and distributed agent based workflow system JBees, this paper describes the agents that are embedded to our system, that can monitor and control the system based upon the data obtained through simulation. In the monitoring part we focus on the performance indicators such as occupation rate, throughput time and average waiting time of various processes and tasks. We also compare the efficiency of various resources for the similar tasks. The controlling agent continuously looks for the anomalies against the criteria defined by the human manager/user with the data obtained from the system and informs the management agent to initiate appropriate action.
Bastin Tony Roy Savarimuthu, Maryam Purvis, Martin Fleurke
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Workflow Management Systems: A Survey
In in Proceedings of IEEE International Conference on Communication Technology (1998)
ABSTRACT Workflow management systems can help business goals to be achieved with high efficiency by means of sequencing work activities and invoking appropriate human and/or information resources associated with these activities. As computer networks are used more and more widely in daily work, workflow management attracts more and more attention from both industry and research communities. This paper summarizes the state of art in WfMS research, detailing some workflow-related concepts and its typologies, the WfMS reference model proposed by WfMC, and some of the current research trends and hotspots.
Shi Meilin, Yang Guangxin, Xiang Yong, Wu Shangguang
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YALE: rapid prototyping for complex data mining tasks
In KDD '06: Proceedings of the 12th ACM SIGKDD international conference on Knowledge discovery and data mining (2006), pp. 935-940, doi:10.1145/1150402.1150531
KDD is a complex and demanding task. While a large number of methods has been established for numerous problems, many challenges remain to be solved. New tasks emerge requiring the development of new methods or processing schemes. Like in software development, the development of such solutions demands for careful analysis, specification, implementation, and testing. Rapid prototyping is an approach which allows crucial design decisions as early as possible. A rapid prototyping system should support maximal re-use and innovative combinations of existing methods, as well as simple and quick integration of new ones.This paper describes Y ale , a free open-source environment forKDD and machine learning. Y ale provides a rich variety of methods whichallows rapid prototyping for new applications and makes costlyre-implementations unnecessary. Additionally, Y ale offers extensive functionality for process evaluation and optimization which is a crucial property for any KDD rapid prototyping tool. Following the paradigm of visual programming eases the design of processing schemes. While the graphical user interface supports interactive design, the underlying XML representation enables automated applications after the prototyping phase.After a discussion of the key concepts of Y ale , we illustrate the advantages of rapid prototyping for KDD on case studies ranging from data pre-processing to result visualization. These case studies cover tasks like feature engineering, text mining, data stream mining and tracking drifting concepts, ensemble methods and distributed data mining. This variety of applications is also reflected in a broad user base, we counted more than 40,000 downloads during the last twelve months.
Ingo Mierswa, Michael Wurst, Ralf Klinkenberg, Martin Scholz, Timm Euler
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KNIME: The Konstanz Information Miner
Data Analysis, Machine Learning and Applications In Data Analysis, Machine Learning and Applications (2008), pp. 319-326, doi:10.1007/978-3-540-78246-9_38
The Konstanz Information Miner is a modular environment, which enables easy visual assembly and interactive execution of a data pipeline. It is designed as a teaching, research and collaboration platform, which enables simple integration of new algorithms and tools as well as data manipulation or visualization methods in the form of new modules or nodes. In this paper we describe some of the design aspects of the underlying architecture and briefly sketch how new nodes can be incorporated.
Michael Berthold, Nicolas Cebron, Fabian Dill, Thomas Gabriel, Tobias Kötter, Thorsten Meinl, Peter Ohl, Christoph Sieb, Kilian Thiel, Bernd Wiswedel
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F-TRADE 3.0: An Agent-Based Integrated Framework for Data Mining Experiments
Web Intelligence and Intelligent Agent Technology, IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on In WI-IAT '08: Proceedings of the 2008 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Web Intelligence and Intelligent Agent Technology, Vol. 3 (2008), pp. 612-615, doi:10.1109/WIIAT.2008.230
Data mining researches focus on algorithms that mine valuable patterns from particular domain. Apart from the theoretical research, experiments take a vast amount of effort to build. In this paper, we propose an integrated framework that utilises a multi-agent system to support the researchers to rapidly develop experiments. Moreover, the proposed framework allows extension and integration for future researches in mutual aspects of agent and data mining. The paper describes the details of the framework and also presents a sample implementation.
Peerapol Moemeng, Longbing Cao, Chengqi Zhang
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Towards the Use of XPDL as Planning and Scheduling Modeling Tool: The Workflow Patterns Approach
In Advances in Artificial Intelligence – IBERAMIA 2008 , Vol. 5290 (2008), pp. 52-61, doi:10.1007/978-3-540-88309-8_6
This paper presents a transformation from a business process model diagram stored in XPDL format, into a hierarchical extension of the PDDL planning language, using the concept of workflow patterns as base of the translation process. The proposed architecture is evaluated within a specific teamwork project management scenario: the allocation of human resources and web services for the cooperative development of on-line courses in an e-learning center.
Arturo González-Ferrer, Juan Fdez-Olivares, Luis Castillo, Lluvia Morales
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Decentralised Workflows and Software Agents
BT Technology Journal, Vol. 17, No. 4. (1 October 1999), pp. 65-71, doi:10.1023/A:1009694925231
This paper argues that the combination of software agents with existing workflow management systems can facilitate the degree of co-ordination and collaboration required to make virtual enterprises a reality. It describes the use of software agents in the setting-up of decentralised workflows, the reactive and proactive redistribution of work during process failures, the promotion of interoperability between workflow management systems, and the visualisation and monitoring of decentralised business processes.
JW Shepherdson, SG Thompson, BR Odgers
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Agent-based workflow: TRP Support Environment (TSE)
Computer Networks and ISDN Systems, Vol. 28, No. 7-11. (May 1996), pp. 1501-1511, doi:10.1016/0169-7552(96)00068-2
The Technology Reinvestment Project Support Environment (TSE) introduces the notion of “agent-based workflow” in order to facilitate various parts of workflow process. Unlike some of the well known groupware products such as InterNotes or Web Forum which simply provide a passive information space, the goal of TSE is to enable active collaborative work among participants working on the TRP's “component based software engineering environment”.
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An agent-based approach for coordinating product design workflows
Computers in Industry, Vol. 56, No. 3. (April 2005), pp. 235-259, doi:10.1016/j.compind.2004.12.003
New product development processes in manufacturing organizations are distributed and knowledge-intensive. Such product development processes interleave complex manual and software-enabled design decision-making activities. In current approaches to product development, design activities are accomplished by teams of engineers in an ad hoc, resource-intensive manner. Though well-developed tools exist for enabling individual engineering activities, support for autonomous coordination of distributed design tasks is minimal. In this paper, we present an Agent-based Process Coordination (APC) framework for distributed design process management. The proposed approach embeds autonomous agents in a workflow-based distributed systems infrastructure. The framework utilizes a centralized decision-making and task sharing approach to support design activities. A design process plan is executed by a centralized coordination agent with the help of service agents. We evaluate the applicability of the APC framework to support design in an industrial context with a case study. The study illustrates the utility of deploying agent-based workflow technologies to: (a) enable incremental and large-scale process and product knowledge acquisition and management, (b) facilitate design process knowledge reuse in different contexts, and (c) support distributed dynamic process management.
T Madhusudan
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Agent-enhanced Workflow
BT Technology Journal, Vol. 16, No. 3. (1 July 1998), pp. 79-85, doi:10.1023/A:1009677814958
In agent-enhanced workflow, a community of intelligent, distributed and autonomous software agents is used to improve the management of business processes under the control of a workflow management system. These improvements are achieved by allowing the software agents to negotiate with each other to establish contracts that govern the distribution of work across a number of processing centres. Furthermore, the agents collaborate to perform real-time exception handling, and to co-ordinate the redistribution of work items to meet changing circumstances.
DW Judge, BR Odgers, JW Shepherdson, Z Cui
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The WEKA data mining software: an update
SIGKDD Explorations, Vol. 11, No. 1. (November 2009), pp. 10-18, doi:10.1145/1656274.1656278
More than twelve years have elapsed since the first public release of WEKA. In that time, the software has been rewritten entirely from scratch, evolved substantially and now accompanies a text on data mining [35]. These days, WEKA enjoys widespread acceptance in both academia and business, has an active community, and has been downloaded more than 1.4 million times since being placed on Source-Forge in April 2000. This paper provides an introduction to the WEKA workbench, reviews the history of the project, and, in light of the recent 3.6 stable release, briefly discusses what has been added since the last stable version (Weka 3.4) released in 2003.
Mark Hall, Eibe Frank, Geoffrey Holmes, Bernhard Pfahringer, Peter Reutemann, Ian Witten
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Agent-Based Distributed Data Mining: A Survey
In Data Mining and Multi-agent Integration (2009), pp. 47-58, doi:10.1007/978-1-4419-0522-2_3
Distributed data mining is originated from the need of mining over decentralised data sources. Data mining techniques involving in such complex environment must encounter great dynamics due to changes in the system can affect the overall performance of the system. Agent computing whose aim is to deal with complex systems has revealed opportunities to improve distributed data mining systems in a number of ways. This paper surveys the integration of multi-agent system and distributed data mining, also known as agent-based distributed data mining, in terms of significance, system overview, existing systems, and research trends.
Chayapol Moemeng, Vladimir Gorodetsky, Ziye Zuo, Yong Yang, Chengqi Zhang
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Multi-agent planning as a coordination model for self-organized systems
Intelligent Agent Technology, 2003. IAT 2003. IEEE/WIC International Conference on (2003), pp. 218-224
Self-organized systems need sophisticated coordination mechanisms. This paper proposes a model based on multi-agent planning to coordinate such systems. In our application framework: tactical aircraft simulation, it is important to deal with environment changes. For that, we based our approach on the hybrid automata formalism. The main advantage of this formalism is to model different clocks evolving with different speeds, for example, the altitude, the kerosene, the time, etc. In fact, all the parameters evolving dynamically can be modeled by a clock. This paper also shows how to obtain coherent multi-agent plans from individual one's in such a context. This coherence is guaranteed through consistent coordination mechanisms well-founded since they are based on hybrid automata and their synchronization. The result is a flexible multi-agent plan in the form of a synchronized network of individual hybrid automata. This paper carries on introducing a first implementation of this approach in a project named SCALA developed at Dassault Aviation.
F Marc, I Degirmenciyan-Cartault
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Multi-agent technology for planning, scheduling, and resource allocation
Multi Agent Systems, 1998. Proceedings. International Conference on In Multi Agent Systems, 1998. Proceedings. International Conference on (1998), pp. 429-430, doi:10.1109/ICMAS.1998.699247
A large number of hot applications are reducible to combinatorial models. Almost all of them are at least NP-hard and cannot be solved in a traditional way. We consider an agent-based approach to solve a set of planning and scheduling applications under real time and temporal constraints. The problem is formalised as a contract allocation task over a set of companies and specified as an auction-based competition of agents managed by a meta-agent. The contributions are: the multi-agent system architecture; knowledge-based specification of real time and temporal constraints; and a knowledge-based auction management model
V Gorodetski, A Lebedev
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Multi-agent planning: An introduction to planning and coordination
In: Handouts of the European Agent Summer (2005), pp. 1-32
Many day-to-day situations involve decision making: for example, a taxi company has some transportation tasks to be carried out, a large firm has to distribute a lot of complicated tasks among its subdivisions or subcontractors, and an air-traffic controller has to assign time slots to planes that are landing or taking off. Intelligent agents can aid in
Mathijs De Weerdt, Adriaan Mors, Cees Witteveen
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Privacy-preserving agent-based distributed data clustering
Web Intelli. and Agent Sys., Vol. 4, No. 2. (2006), pp. 221-238
A growing number of applications in distributed environment involve very large data sets that are inherently distributed among a large number of autonomous sources over a network. The demand to extend data mining technology to such distributed data sets has motivated the development of several approaches to distributed data mining and knowledge discovery, of which only a few make use of agents. We briefly review existing approaches and argue for the potential added value of using agent technology in the domain of knowledge discovery, discussing both issues and benefits. We also propose an approach to distributed data clustering, outline its agent-oriented implementation, and examine potential privacy violating attacks which agents may incur.
Josenildo da Silva, Matthias Klusch, Stefano Lodi, Gianluca Moro
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BDI Agent Programming in AgentSpeak Using Jason (Tutorial Paper)
Computational Logic in Multi-Agent Systems (2006), pp. 143-164, doi:10.1007/11750734_9
This paper is based on the tutorial given as part of the tutorial programme of CLIMA-VI. The tutorial aimed at giving an overview of the various features available in Jason, a multi-agent systems development platform that is based on an interpreter for an extended version of AgentSpeak. The BDI architecture is the best known and most studied architecture for cognitive agents, and AgentSpeak is an elegant, logic-based programming language inspired by the BDI architecture.
Rafael Bordini, Jomi Hübner
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Efficiency of JADE agent platform
Sci. Program., Vol. 13, No. 2. (2005), pp. 159-172
Agent oriented programming is often claimed to become the next breakthrough in development and implementation of large-scale complex software systems. At the same time it is rather difficult to find successful applications of agent technology, in particular when large-scale systems are considered. The aim of this paper is to investigate if one of the possible limits could be the scalability of existing agent environments. For this purpose we have selected JADE agent platform and investigated its performance in a number of test-scenarios. Results of our experiments are presented and discussed.
Krzysztof Chmiel, Maciej Gawinecki, Pawel Kaczmarek, Michal Szymczak, Marcin Paprzycki
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JADE Based Multi-Agent E-Commerce Environment: Initial Implementation
Abstract. Recent advances in software engineering, business process management and computational intelligence resulted in methods and techniques for developing advanced e-commerce applications as well as supporting automating e-commerce business processes. Despite this fact, up to now, the most successful e-commerce systems are still based on humans to make the most important decisions in various activities within an e-business transaction. In this context, development of automatic negotiations is one of the most important research issues. While, depending on the type of the transaction, different negotiation procedures could be utilized, only few proposed frameworks are generic and flexible enough to handle multiple scenarios. On the other hand, agent technology is often claimed to be the best approach for automating e-commerce business processes (including price negotiations). However, it is difficult to find successful large-scale agent-based e-commerce applications to confirm this claim. This paper presents negotiating agents that change their negotiation protocol and strategy through dynamic loading of negotiation modules. These, as well as other agents of different types and playing different roles have been implemented to in-
Maria Ganzha, Marcin Paprzycki, Amalia Pirvănescu, Costin Bădică, Ajith Abraham
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Designing safe, profitable automated stock trading agents using evolutionary algorithms
In GECCO '06: Proceedings of the 8th annual conference on Genetic and evolutionary computation (2006), pp. 1777-1784, doi:10.1145/1143997.1144285
Trading rules are widely used by practitioners as an effective means to mechanize aspects of their reasoning about stock price trends. However, due to the simplicity of these rules, each rule is susceptible to poor behavior in specific types of adverse market conditions. Naive combinations of such rules are not very effective in mitigating the weaknesses of component rules. We demonstrate that sophisticated approaches to combining these trading rules enable us to overcome these problems and gainfully utilize them in autonomous agents. We achieve this combination through the use of genetic algorithms and genetic programs. Further, we show that it is possible to use qualitative characterizations of stochastic dynamics to improve the performance of these agents by delineating safe, or feasible, regions. We present the results of experiments conducted within the Penn-Lehman Automated Trading project. In this way we are able to demonstrate that autonomous agents can achieve consistent profitability in a variety of market conditions, in ways that are human competitive.
Harish Subramanian, Subramanian Ramamoorthy, Peter Stone, Benjamin Kuipers
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