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Knowledge and Information Systems |
Abstract. Agent technology has been considered as an important approach for developing distributed intelligent manufacturing systems. A number of researchers have attempted to apply agent technology to manufacturing enterprise integration, supply chain management, manufacturing planning, scheduling and control, materials handling, and holonic manufacturing systems. This paper gives a brief survey of some related projects in this area, and discusses some key issues in developing agent-based manufacturing systems such as agent technology for enterprise integration and supply chain management, agent encapsulation, system architectures, dynamic system reconfiguration, learning, design and manufacturability assessments, distributed dynamic scheduling, integration of planning and scheduling, concurrent scheduling and execution, factory control structures, potential tools and standards for developing agent-based manufacturing systems. An extensive annotated bibliography is provided.
Abstract. The dynamic nature of events, in particular business
processes, is a natural and accepted feature of today's business
environment. Therefore, workflow systems, if they are to successfully
model portions of the real world, need to acknowledge the temporal
aspect of business processes. This is particularly true for processes
where any deviation from the prescribed model is either very
expensive, dangerous or even illegal. Such processes include legal
processes, airline maintenance or hazardous material
handling. However, time modeling in workflows is still an open
research problem. This paper proposes a framework for time modeling in
production workflows. Relevant temporal constraints are presented, and
rules for their verification are defined. Furthermore, to enable
visualization of some temporal constraints, a concept of ``duration
space" is introduced. The duration algorithm which calculates the
shortest/longest workflow instance is presented. It is a
generalization of two categories of algorithms: the shortest-path
partitioning algorithm and the Critical Path Method (CPM). Based on
the duration algorithm, the verification algorithm is designed to
check the consistency of introduced temporal constraints.
Abstract. Making the database schema hierarchical can help a
casual user retrieve information from a complex database. The
hierarchical database schema provides further insight into database
content and focuses on meaningful data by a top-down method. The user
can proceed with a hierarchical visual query, which ultimately
simplifies the query, reduces the syntax error rate and conserves the
query time. In this paper, we present a hierarchical graph which makes
the database schema hierarchical, naturally integrates the browsing
and querying and, consequently, allows the user to proceed with an
incremental query on the hierarchical database schema. Also proven
herein are the existence, uniformity, and consistency of the
hierarchical graph to verify that the graph can be used to query the
database. This paper also discusses the semantics of high-level nodes
and conducts an experiment to evaluate users' performance. Finally, we
describe how one can use the hierarchical graph to unify the tasks of
making the schema hierarchical, creating concept hierarchies, and
integrating the databases.
Abstract. In this paper, a hierarchical algorithm,
HierarchyScan, is proposed to efficiently locate one-dimensional
subsequences within a collection of sequences with arbitrary length.
The proposed algorithm performs correlation between the stored
sequences and the template pattern in the transformed domain to
identify subsequences in a scale- and phase-independent fashion. This
is in contrast to those approaches based on the computation of
Euclidean distance in the transformed domain. In the proposed
hierarchical algorithm, the transformed domain representation of each
original sequence is divided into multiple groups of coefficients.
The matching is performed hierarchically from the group with the
greatest filtering capability to the group with the lowest filtering
capability. Only those subsequences whose maximum correlation value
is higher than a predefined threshold will be selected for additional
screening. This approach is compared to the sequential scanning and
an order-of-magnitude speedup is observed.
Abstract. Time representation is important in many
applications, such as temporal databases, planning, and
multi-agents. Since Allen's work on binary interval relations (called
interval algebra), many researchers have further investigated temporal
information processing based on interval calculus. However, there are
still some limitations, e.g. constraint satisfaction is a NP-hard
problem in interval calculus. For this reason, we propose a new
interpretation for interval relationships and their calculus in this
paper, which establishes a new method to transform interval calculus
into matrix calculus. Our experiments show that this method
propagates temporal relations faster than interval algebra.
Making Database Schema Hierarchical for Visual Access to
Databases
Ping-Kuen Chen and Gwo-Dong ChenHierarchyScan: A Hierarchical Algorithm for Similarity Search in
Databases Consisting of Long Sequences
Chung-Sheng Li, Philip S. Yu, and Vittorio CastelliShort Papers
IMC: A Method for Interval Calculus in Matrix
Shichao Zhang and Chengqi Zhang
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