A Knowledge-Based Approach to Handling Exceptions in Workflow Systems (2000)

by M Klein, C Dellarocas
Venue:Journal of Computer Supported Collaborative Work
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AGENT WORK: a workflow system supporting rule-based workflow adaptation

by Robert Müller, Ulrike Greiner, Erhard Rahm - Data & Knowledge Engineering
"... Current workflow management systems still lack support for dynamic and automatic workflow adaptations. However, this functionality is a major requirement for next-generation workflow systems to provide sufficient flexibility to cope with unexpected failure events. We present the concepts and impleme ..."
Abstract - Cited by 99 (0 self) - Add to MetaCart
Current workflow management systems still lack support for dynamic and automatic workflow adaptations. However, this functionality is a major requirement for next-generation workflow systems to provide sufficient flexibility to cope with unexpected failure events. We present the concepts and implementation of AGENTWORK, an event-based workflow management system supporting automated workflow adaptations in a comprehensive way. In particular, AGENTWORK uses temporal estimates to determine which remaining parts of running workflows are affected by an exception and is able to predictively perform suitable workflow adaptations. This helps ensure that necessary adaptations are performed in time with minimal user interaction which is especially valuable in complex applications such as for medical treatments.
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Towards High-Precision Service Retrieval

by Abraham Bernstein , Mark Klein - IEEE INTERNET COMPUTING , 2002
"... The ability to rapidly locate useful on-line services (e.g. software applications, software components, process models, or service organizations), as opposed to simply useful documents, is becoming increasingly critical in many domains. Current service retrieval technology is, however, notoriously ..."
Abstract - Cited by 96 (6 self) - Add to MetaCart
The ability to rapidly locate useful on-line services (e.g. software applications, software components, process models, or service organizations), as opposed to simply useful documents, is becoming increasingly critical in many domains. Current service retrieval technology is, however, notoriously prone to low precision. This paper describes a novel service retrieval approached based on the sophisticated use of process ontologies. Our preliminary evaluations suggest that this approach offers qualitatively higher retrieval precision than existing (keyword and tablebased) approaches without sacrificing recall and computational tractability/scalability.

Searching for Services on the Semantic Web Using Process Ontologies

by Mark Klein, Abraham Bernstein - IN PROCEEDINGS OF THE INTERNATIONAL SEMANTIC WEB WORKING SYMPOSIUM (SWWS , 2001
"... The ability to rapidly locate useful on-line services (e.g. software applications, software components, process models, or service organizations), as opposed to simply useful documents, is becoming increasingly critical in many domains. As the sheer number of such services increases it will becom ..."
Abstract - Cited by 56 (2 self) - Add to MetaCart
The ability to rapidly locate useful on-line services (e.g. software applications, software components, process models, or service organizations), as opposed to simply useful documents, is becoming increasingly critical in many domains. As the sheer number of such services increases it will become increasingly more important to provide tools that allow people (and software) to quickly find the services they need, while minimizing the burden for those who wish to list their services with these search engines. This can be viewed as a critical enabler of the `friction-free' markets of the `new economy'. Current service retrieval technology is, however, seriously deficient in this regard. The information retrieval community has focused on the retrieval of documents, not services per se, and has as a result emphasized keyword-based approaches. Those approaches achieve fairly high recall but low precision. The software agents and distributed computing communities have developed...
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Negotiating Complex Contracts

by Mark Klein, Peyman Faratin, Hiroki Sayama, Yaneer Bar-yam - IEEE Intelligent Systems Journal, special issue on Agents and Markets , 2002
"... contracts consisting of one or a few independent issues and tractable contract spaces. Many real-world contracts, by contrast, are much more complex, consisting of multiple inter-dependent issues and intractably large contract spaces. This paper describes a simulated annealing based approach approp ..."
Abstract - Cited by 49 (8 self) - Add to MetaCart
contracts consisting of one or a few independent issues and tractable contract spaces. Many real-world contracts, by contrast, are much more complex, consisting of multiple inter-dependent issues and intractably large contract spaces. This paper describes a simulated annealing based approach appropriate for negotiating such complex contracts that achieves near-optimal social welfares for negotiations with binary issue dependencies.
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Research commentary: workflow management issues in e-business

by Amit Basu, Akhil Kumar - Information Systems Research , 2002
"... Trends towards increased business process automation, e-commerce, and e-business have led to increasing interest in the field of workflow management. In this paper, we provide a perspective on the state of research in workflow management systems, and discuss possible future research directions in th ..."
Abstract - Cited by 39 (0 self) - Add to MetaCart
Trends towards increased business process automation, e-commerce, and e-business have led to increasing interest in the field of workflow management. In this paper, we provide a perspective on the state of research in workflow management systems, and discuss possible future research directions in this area, with a particular emphasis on workflow systems in integrating interorganizational processes and enabling e-commerce solutions.

An experimental evaluation of domain-independent fault handling services in open multi-agent systems

by Chrysanthos Dellarocas, Mark Klein, Chrysanthos Dellarocas Phd, Mark Klein Phd - In Proc. of the Fourth Int , 2000
"... Abstract. A critical challenge to creating effective open multi-agent systems is allowing them to operate effectively in the face of potential failures. In this paper we present an experimental evaluation of a set of domain-independent services designed to handle the failure modes ("exceptions& ..."
Abstract - Cited by 30 (1 self) - Add to MetaCart
Abstract. A critical challenge to creating effective open multi-agent systems is allowing them to operate effectively in the face of potential failures. In this paper we present an experimental evaluation of a set of domain-independent services designed to handle the failure modes ("exceptions") that can occur in such environments, applied to the well-known "Contract Net " multi-agent system coordination protocol. We show that these services can produce substantially more effective fault handling behavior than standard existing techniques, while allowing simpler agent implementations.
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KNOWLEDGE SHARING, COORDINATED EXCEPTION HANDLING, AND INTELLIGENT PROBLEM SOLVING FOR CROSS-ORGANIZATIONAL BUSINESS PROCESSES

by Zongwei Luo , 2001
"... To date, Workflow Management Systems (WfMSs) have been used to support enterprise-wide business processes. With the advent of Internet commerce, business processes increasingly span organizational boundaries. Consequently, workflow technology needs to be extended to support such cross-organizational ..."
Abstract - Cited by 27 (2 self) - Add to MetaCart
To date, Workflow Management Systems (WfMSs) have been used to support enterprise-wide business processes. With the advent of Internet commerce, business processes increasingly span organizational boundaries. Consequently, workflow technology needs to be extended to support such cross-organizational processes. Three of the most important research issues that arise in developing solutions for cross-organizational business processes are-- process construction, service fulfillment, and conflict resolution. This research primarily addresses the challenge of conflict resolution in cross-organizational processes using exception-handling techniques. Compared to extensive prior work on exception handling in programming languages and distributed system, cross-organizational processes present new challenges. Key challenges are the need to determine responsible party for handling exceptions, a variety of differences between exception handling mechanisms of each WfMS participating in cross-organizational processes, and lack of understanding or knowledge of outsourced or contracted processes. This dissertation represents one of the earliest comprehensive researches on the topic of conflict resolution in cross-organizational processes. We have proposed a detailed exception-handling strategy, have implemented a prototype system, and have conducted experiments using realistic

Interactive Process Models

by Håvard D. Jørgensen, Til Anniken - Norwegian University of Science and Technology , 2004
"... Contemporary business process systems are built to automate routine procedures. Automation demands well-understood domains, repetitive processes, clear organisational roles, an established terminology, and predefined plans. Knowledge work is not like that. Plans for knowledge intensive processes are ..."
Abstract - Cited by 26 (1 self) - Add to MetaCart
Contemporary business process systems are built to automate routine procedures. Automation demands well-understood domains, repetitive processes, clear organisational roles, an established terminology, and predefined plans. Knowledge work is not like that. Plans for knowledge intensive processes are elaborated and reinterpreted as the work progresses. Interactive process models are created and updated by the project participants to reflect evolving plans. The execution of such models is controlled by users and only partially automated. An interactive process system should - Enable modelling by end users, - Integrate support for ad-hoc and routine work, - Dynamically customise functionality and interfaces, and - Integrate learning and knowledge management in everyday work.
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M (2002) Discovering services: towards high precision service retrieval

by Abraham Bernstein, Mark Klein - In: Proceedings of the CaiSE workshop onWeb Services, e-business, and the Semantic , 2002
"... Abstract. The ability to rapidly locate useful on-line services (e.g. software ap-plications, software components), as opposed to simply useful documents, is becoming increasingly critical in many domains. Current service retrieval tech-nology is, however, notoriously prone to low precision. This pa ..."
Abstract - Cited by 21 (1 self) - Add to MetaCart
Abstract. The ability to rapidly locate useful on-line services (e.g. software ap-plications, software components), as opposed to simply useful documents, is becoming increasingly critical in many domains. Current service retrieval tech-nology is, however, notoriously prone to low precision. This paper describes a novel service retrieval approached based on the sophisticated use of process ontologies. Our preliminary evaluations suggest that this approach offers quali-tatively higher retrieval precision than existing (keyword and table-based) ap-proaches without sacrificing recall and computational tractability/scalability. 1 The Challenge: High Precision Service Retrieval Increasingly, on-line repositories such as the World Wide Web are being called upon to provide access not just to documents that collect useful information, but also to services that describe or even provide useful behavior. Potential examples of such services abound: • Software applications such as web services that can be invoked remotely by people or software. E.g., www.salcentral.com. • Software components that can be downloaded for use when creating a new appli-
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Towards a systematic repository of knowledge about managing collaborative design conflicts

by Mark Klein, Mark Klein Phd - MIT Sloan School of Management Working Paper , 1999
"... Abstract. Increasingly, complex artifacts such as cars, planes and even software are designed using large-scale and often highly distributed collaborative processes. A key factor in the effectiveness of these processes concerns how well conflicts are managed. Better approaches need to be developed a ..."
Abstract - Cited by 21 (3 self) - Add to MetaCart
Abstract. Increasingly, complex artifacts such as cars, planes and even software are designed using large-scale and often highly distributed collaborative processes. A key factor in the effectiveness of these processes concerns how well conflicts are managed. Better approaches need to be developed and adopted, but the lack of systematization and dissemination of the knowledge in this field has been a big barrier to the cumulativeness of research in this area as well as to incorporating these ideas into design practice. This paper describes a growing repository of conflict management expertise, built as an augmentation of the MIT Process Handbook, that is designed to address these challenges. 1. The Challenge Increasingly, complex artifacts such as cars, planes and even software are designed using large-scale and often highly distributed collaborative processes. Conflict (i.e. incompatibilities between design decisions and/or goals) is common in such highly interdependent activities. In one study, for example, half of all interactions between collaborating architectural designers were found to involve detecting and resolving conflicts (Klein and Lu 1991). Better conflict management practices are needed. Current, mainly manual practices are being
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