We study optimal policies for design reuse in a software project using a control theoretic approach. A project needs to be developed in minimum time by optimally choosing the proportion of effort allocated towards design activities. We first consider a local case, where the benefits of design activities are restricted within the project. Here the optimal policy follows a bang-bang structure: invest fully in design followed by investing fully in implementation. Next we consider two sequentially linked projects where design capital built in the first project can be reused by the downstream project. For the two project case, the design investment in the upstream project first increases and then decreases with the ability to utilize design capital accumulated in the first project for the second project. We also propose a coordination scheme that rewards the upstream project team so that design investment in this project is chosen in a globally optimal manner.

In this paper, we intend to have a game theoretic study on the concept learning problem in a multi-agent system. Concept learning is a very essential and well-studied domain of machine learning when it is studied under the characteristics of a multi-agent system. The most important reasons are the partiality of the environment perception for any agent and also the communication holdbacks, resulting into a deep need for a collaborative protocol in favor of multi-agent transactions. Here we wish to investigate multi-agent concept learning with the help of its components, thoroughly with a game theoretic taste, esp. on the pre-learning processes. Based on two standard notations, we address the non-unanimity of concepts, classification of objects, voting and communicating protocol, and also the learning itself. In such a game of concept learning, we consider a group of agents, communicating and consulting to upgrade their ontologies based on their conceptualizations of the environment. For this purpose, we investigate the problem in two separate and standard distinctions of game theory study, cooperation and competition. Several solution concepts and innovative ideas from the multi-agent realm are used to produce an approach that contains the reasoning process of the agents in this system. Some experimentations come at the end to show the functionality of our approach. These experimentations come distinctly for both cooperative and competitive views.

The problem of food safety is a critical issue in recent years. To address the issue, the technologies of the Internet of Things are used to offer the possibilities to easily track the processes in the production, storage, transportation, sale, and even using phases of foods. This paper, therefore, introduces the design of an electronic pedigree system for food safety, which uses electronic pedigrees to enhance the safety of food supply. The system implements an extension of the pedigree standard of EPCglobal, and offers a more trustworthily tracking service to monitor and supervise the production and supply of food. We discuss the key issues of the design, and implement a prototype to evaluate the feasibility of the design. Finally, we analyze the trustworthiness assurance and security of our electronic pedigree system.

Adaptability has become one of the major research topics in the area of workflow management. Today's workflow management systems have problems dealing with both ad-hoc changes and evolutionary changes. As a result, the workflow management system is not used to support dynamically changing workflow processes or the workflow process is supported in a rigid manner, i.e., changes are not allowed or handled outside of the workflow management system. In this paper, we focus on a notorious problem caused by workflow change: the “dynamic change bug” (Ellis et al.; Proceedings of the Conference on Organizational Computing Systems, Milpitas, California, ACM SIGOIS, ACM Press, New York, 1995, pp. 10–21). The dynamic change bug refers to errors introduced by migrating a case (i.e., a process instance) from the old process definition to the new one. A transfer from the old process to the new process can lead to duplication of work, skipping of tasks, deadlocks, and livelocks. This paper describes an approach for calculating a safe change region. If a case is in such a change region, the transfer is postponed.

In the age of Business-to-Business (B2B) collaboration, ensuring reliability of workflows underlying inter-organizational business processes is of significant importance. There are, however, quite a few challenges towards achieving seamless operation. Such challenges arise from heterogeneity in infrastructure and coordination mechanism at participant organizations, as well as time and cost associated with recovery from failure. Our research presents foundations for a reliable scheme for recovery from failure of workflow processes spanning through multiple business entities. First, a system model is adapted from the mobile computing literature that serves to establish the requirements to be enforced by each participating organization. In our model, we adopt the Maximal Sequence Path (MSP) approach from Yoo et al. (Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence 2132:222–236, 2001), as a means of decomposing workflows into mobile agent-driven processes that communicate via web services at each organization. This decomposition ensures defining logical points within the dynamics of a workflow instance for locating accurate and consistent states of the system for recovery in case of a failure. Then, a set of algorithms for various business scenarios are developed and presented as practical solutions. These algorithms are shown to create checkpoints such that the system is always in a globally consistent state. As such, these algorithms constitute a set of standards that can be incorporated in business process management suites that support reliable inter-organizational collaboration.

Broadband technology has been introduced to the business community and the public as a rapid way of exploiting the Internet. The benefits of its use (fast reliable connections, and always on) have been widely realised and broadband diffusion is one of the items at the top of the agenda for technology related polices of governments worldwide. In this paper an examination of the impact of the UK government’s polices upon broadband adoption is undertaken. Based on institutional theory a consideration of the manipulation of supply push and demand pull forces in the diffusion of broadband is offered. Using primary and secondary data sources, an analysis of the specific institutional actions related to IT diffusion as pursued by the UK government in the case of broadband is provided. Bringing the time dimension into consideration it is revealed that the UK government has shifted its attention from supply push-only strategies to more interventional ones where the demand pull forces are also mobilised. It is believed that this research will assist in the extraction of the “success factors” in government intervention that support the diffusion of technology with a view to render favourable results if applied to other national settings.

Web service-based development represents an emerging approach for the development of distributed information systems. Web services have been mainly applied by software practitioners as a means to modularize system functionality that can be offered across a network (e.g., intranet and/or the Internet). Although web services have been predominantly developed as a technical solution for integrating software systems, there is a more business-oriented aspect that developers and enterprises need to deal with in order to benefit from the full potential of web services in an electronic market. This ‘ignored’ aspect is the representation of the semantics underlying the services themselves as well as the ‘things’ that the services manage. Currently languages like the Web Services Description Language (WSDL) provide the syntactic means to describe web services, but lack in providing a semantic underpinning. In order to harvest all the benefits of web services technology, a framework has been developed for deriving business semantics from syntactic descriptions of web services. The benefits of such a framework are two-fold. Firstly, the framework provides a way to gradually construct domain ontologies from previously defined technical services. Secondly, the framework enables the migration of syntactically defined web services toward semantic web services. The study follows a design research approach which (1) identifies the problem area and its relevance from an industrial case study and previous research, (2) develops the framework as a design artifact and (3) evaluates the application of the framework through a relevant scenario.

In this research the authors examine member self-disclosure phenomenon at social networking sites. Self-disclosure enables member interactions, service customizations, and digital content generation and hence self-disclosure is imperative to the success of social networking sites. Drawing upon Social Capital Theory, we develop a succinct research model that examines the role of relational capitals in member disclosure behavior. This model also investigates the intricate relationships among relational capitals such as trust, reciprocity, and identification. This research model has been validated through survey data collected from 222 social networking site users and the analysis results provide strong support to the hypothesized relationships. The current study generates new knowledge on the exact role of relational capitals in sustaining social networking sites and it also informs the service providers of social networks to identify strategies that promote member disclosure.

Incident management systems have the potential to improve security dramatically but often experience problems stemming from organizational, interpersonal and social constraints that limit their effectiveness. These limits may cause underreporting of incidents, leading to erroneous perceptions of the actual safety and security situation of the organization. The true security situation may be better understood and underreporting may be reduced if underlying systemic issues surrounding security incident management are taken into account. A dynamic simulation, based on the parallel experience of industrial incident management systems, illustrates the cumulative effects of rewards, learning, and retributions on the fate of a hypothetical knowledge management system designed to collect information about events and incidents. Simulation studies are part of an ongoing research project to develop sustainable knowledge and knowledge transfer tools that support the development of a security culture.

Today, multi-agent technologies are widely used for realizing prevalent ubiquitous computing applications, in which service discovery is a critical task for finding a particular service instance. While JADE is a popular system for multi-agent applications, its directory facilitator (DF) used for service discovery employs a sequential search approach, which shows degraded performance when the number of registered services becomes large. This paper proposes a new DF scheme employing the category-based classification and search approach. It greatly reduces the search space and allows accurate matchmaking. The DF implemented with the proposed approach and JADE-DF are compared in terms of query response time and memory space requirement. It demonstrates that the proposed DF allows faster query processing than JADE-DF and requires smaller memory space, especially for a large number of services and queries of multiple parameters.