Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

E-commerce has rapidly grown with the advent of information and communication technologies. It has also become a promising field for applying VR and AI techniques. However, customers are not provided with the realistic shopping experience as they will enjoy in an actual store or mall. Therefore this paper proposes a multi-agent support for collaborative shopping systems by focusing on simulation and interaction. With combination of the sociality with a virtual environment, the proposed Easy Mall system cannot only imitate real interaction among target customers who are favorable to the same products, but also support the communication between multiple avatars. The system is implemented using VRML, intelligent agents and computer network technologies.

With Digital Virtual Human as a foundation, a distance education prototype system is presented in the paper. The implementation methods of two key technologies in the system are proposed and described. One is to manage Digital Virtual Human mass data based on data grid technology, and the other is to support group collaborations with application collaboration tools. A case study is used to show the validity and feasibility of the system.

Due to increased complexity and flexibility of processes and lack of modelling information, workflow processes are not always defined completely before their execution. Support for incompletely specified processes which require on-the-fly articulation of processes has become a desirable feature of workflow management systems. Unfortunately, this aspect is rather weak in contemporary workflow research. This paper reports innovative research on incompletely specified process support carried out in the context of SwinDeW, a peer-to-peer based decentralised workflow system. In order to extend the SwinDeW architecture and system functions seamlessly for supporting incompletely specified processes, a hierarchical process modelling and execution approach is presented in this paper. This approach supports stepwise elaboration of incompletely-specified processes on-the-fly. Further elaboration of a process is innovatively modelled as essential steps towards the process goal, thus being scheduled to execute as ordinary tasks.

To improve the flexibility of workflow systems, efforts need to be made in the process of workflow modeling and system design. One of the enhancements would be the support of dynamic selection. In this paper, a workflow model based on the extended time interval Petri net with fired mark is presented, which satisfies the requirement of the dynamic treatment of workflows at the execution phase. A three-phase strategy and special node types are used to support dynamic selection, and the discussion about how they could improve the flexibility of the workflow systems is also given. Finally, a prototype system is presented to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed model.

This paper proposes an approach to modeling workflow services based on temporal logic. This model supports the formal specifications of various entities and workflow services for a workflow system. The model can specify the workflow process and its evolution, which are difficult to be supported by the previous models. This model is used to design a workflow specification language. Based on this language, we have developed a workflow service editing tool, which is the kernel of an interactive workflow design environment.

Existing workflow management systems assume that each task is executed by a single worker. There is usually no support for group and cooperative work concepts. This paper extends the traditional organizational model with group concept, proposes a cooperative work enabled workflow model, and discusses the implementation of this workflow system. This involves a marriage of workflow systems and some cooperative tools. The model and system are then illustrated through a case study. The results of applications show some advantages of the proposed approach for supporting cooperative work and potential applications in next generation workflow management systems.

Modern software development puts much emphasis on unified and standard software development processes, such as RUP (Rational Unified Process), TSP (Team Software Process), PSP (Personal Software Process), and XP (Extreme Programming). In order to support these standard processes, this paper proposes a software development process supported platform that takes workflow engine as its core and contains a number of effective elements such configuration management, knowledge management, and agent-assisted personal software process. Based on this integrated platform, the development process of software organizations can be fully automatically controlled with high performance.

Product development (PD) process modeling has been a critical problem in modern PD process management. First we discuss the many benefits of PD process modeling, and then we outline the characteristics of PD pattern in order to provide a full and exact description of it. A powerful modeling language is introduced which is based on the characteristics of modern PD and Hierarchical Timed Colored Petri Nets (HTCPN). A pump development process model based on HTCPN is proposed. The performance analysis of HTCPN and the HTCPN-based process model are presented. Various performance measures of PD process can be generated from the proposed model.

Petri nets are powerful and versatile tools for modeling, simulating, analyzing, designing and controlling of many complex systems. This paper addresses a hybrid approach combining competitive neural network and Petri nets in the formal model of intelligent Petri nets. The proposed model not only takes the descriptive advantages of Petri nets, but also has neuron learning and knowledge reduction ability like competitive neural network. It is suitable for dynamic process and information, e.g., the weights are adjustable. For the simulation of the model, it is applied in the conceptual modeling of supply chain for inter-organizational cooperation in manufacturing industry. The intelligent Petri nets model is an innovative method concerning intelligent transition of Petri nets. Meanwhile, the numerical example illustrates that the proposed model can be applied to the real-time supplier selection for intelligent decision-making, and a novel method is provided for modeling in supply chain concerned.

SystemC can be considered as the best possible language today for system level design and exploration of embedded systems. However, testing SystemC descriptions is still an open issue, since the language is new and researchers are looking for efficient error models and coverage metrics, which can be indifferently applied to hardware and software modules. In this paper we propose a novel approach to automate the test coverage analysis for SystemC descriptions using UML and Aspect-Oriented technology. SystemC meta-model and aspect meta-model are established to support UML customization and extension. They also provide the foundation for aspect weaver and SystemC code generator. Expected functional coverage metric could be extracted from UML timing descriptions so that it is possible to automate the whole test coverage analysis. By using the aspect-oriented technology test functionalities could be added or replaced without modifying the original design. It makes system designs more readable and easier to maintain.