. Conversational case-based reasoning (CBR) shells (e.g., Inference 's CBR Express) are commercially successful tools for supporting the development of help desk and related applications. In contrast to rule-based expert systems, they capture knowledge as cases rather than more problematic rules, and they can be incrementally extended. However, rather than eliminate the knowledge engineering bottleneck, they refocus it on case engineering, the task of carefully authoring cases according to library design guidelines to ensure good performance. Designing complex libraries according to these guidelines is difficult; software is needed to assist users with case authoring. We describe an approach for revising case libraries according to design guidelines, its implementation in Clire, and empirical results showing that, under some conditions, this approach can improve conversational CBR performance. 1 Introduction Now that CBR shells have attained commercial viability, some researchers have...

Conversational case-based reasoning (CCBR) was the first widespread commercially successful form of case-based reasoning. Historically, commercial CCBR tools conducted constrained human-user dialogues and targeted customer support tasks. Due to their simple implementation of CBR technology, these tools were almost ignored by the research community (until recently), even though their use introduced many interesting applied research issues. We detail our progress on addressing three of these issues: simplifying case authoring, dialogue inferencing, and interactive planning. We describe evaluations of our approaches on these issues in the context of NaCoDAE and HICAP, our CCBR tools. In summary, we highlight important CCBR problems, evaluate approaches for solving them, and suggest alternatives to be considered for future research.

Abstract. Although much attention is being paid to business processes during the past decades, the design of business processes and particularly workflow processes is still more art than science. In this workshop paper, we present our view on modeling methods for workflow processes and introduce our research aiming for the development of an “intelligent” software tool for workflow process redesign. This tool uses two approaches to redesign workflows: an evolutionary approach, focussing on local updates to a given process, and a revolutionary approach, starting with a clean-sheet of paper. 1

Abstract: Although extensive literature on BPR is available, there is still a lack of concrete guidance on actually changing processes for the better. It is our goal to provide a redesign approach which describes and supports the steps to derive from an existing process a better performing redesign. In this paper we present an evolutionary approach towards business process redesign and explain its first three steps: 1) modelling the existing process, 2) computing process measures, and 3) evaluating condition statements to find applicable redesign “best practices”. We show the applicability of these steps using an example process and illustrate the remaining steps. Our approach has a formal basis to make it suitable for automation. 1

Abstract. Although extensive literature on BPR is available, there is still a lack of concrete guidance on actually changing processes for the better. In this paper we propose and detail out an evolutionary approach towards business process redesign. We describe the steps to derive a better performing redesign using the existing process model as input. The redesign steps are: 1) computing process measures, 2) evaluating condition statements to find applicable redesign “best practices”, 3) creating alternative models according to these best practices, and 4) evaluating the performance of the created alternatives. The end result is a new process model. We show the applicability of the steps with a case study. Our approach has a formal basis to make it suitable for automation.