Process modeling and enacting concepts are at the center of workflow management. Support for heterogeneous processes, flexibility, reuse, and distribution are great challenges for the design of the next generation process modeling languages and their enactment mechanisms. Furthermore, flexible and collaborative processes depend also on unpredictable changes and hence require human intervention....

This paper addresses quality of service aspects of orchestrated web service-based business processes in service-oriented architectures. The proposed mathematical model uses operations research techniques and formal semantics of the Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL4WS) to estimate expected execution times and counts of invocations of partner web services for each activi...

The coordination of plans of multiple organizations is more than formalizing the interdependences of the constituting plans. It is also about aligning the processes that lead to those plans. However, existing supply chain literature neglects operational planning processes: no general theory or framework is available about the organization of interactions that are crucial both for the individual...

In Object-Oriented system development, a class deenition is the end product of a design process. The class does not normally hold information regarding its design history. Merging documentation and software into a single entity is regarded as important in O-O languages such as Eiiel and it is possible to include the documentation using the assertion mechanisms and comment statements. But Eiiel ...

Current notations for business processes are mainly technological tools and lack strong links with the ontological items, i.e., the tasks and the business entities that information systems consist of. In particular, the information flow is missing from process models and human decisions are not adequately represented. In order to overcome those drawbacks, this paper proposes a notation, called ...

Multi-agent Systems are at the moment an important new paradigm in software development. Several methodologies have been proposed for developing systems within this approach. Also new agile processes have been proposed to be combined with the meta-models of such methodologies. This paper shows how the use of one of those Agent Oriented methodologies following the Scrum process produces improvem...

Within the currently forming pervasive computing environment services and information sources thrive. Instantiations of the service oriented computing paradigm e.g. Web, Peer-to-Peer (P2P) and Grid services are continuously emerging, whilst information can be collected from several information sources e.g. materialisations of the Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 trends, Social Networking apps and Sensor Net...

For the construction industry, the demands for optimization and greater efficiency become particularly urgent when the flow of project information extends beyond the borders of organizations. Driven by the need to attain even greater corporate competitive advantages, many business philosophies advocate the use of “the power of information technology to radically redesign business processes.” Ho...

Multistage/multiphase is an inherent characteristic of many batch processes, which should be taken into consideration to ensure better batch process monitoring, analysis, quality prediction and improvement. In this paper, a series of stage-oriented multivariate statistical methods on such topics are reviewed. Then, the modeling problem of transition between stage and stage is discussed. A new p...

Using Method Engineering for creating agent oriented design processes is a challenging task because of the lack of a fragment repository defined and filled starting from a shared and unique definition of fragment. The creation of a repository implies the fragmentation of existing agent design processes. In this paper we propose a set of guidelines for extracting fragments from agent design proc...