History-aware, real-time risk detection in business processes (Extended Version)

This paper proposes a novel approach for identifying risks in executable business processes and detecting them at run time. The approach considers risks in all phases of the business process management lifecycle, and is realized via a distributed, sensor-based architecture. At design-time, sensors are defined to specify risk conditions which when fulfilled, are a likely indicator of faults to occur. Both historical and current execution data can be used to compose such conditions. At run-time, each sensor independently notifies a sensor manager when a risk is detected. In turn, the sensor manager interacts with the monitoring component of a process automation suite to prompt the results to the user who may take remedial actions. The proposed architecture has been implemented in the YAWL system and its performance has been evaluated in practice.

Viscous dissipation effects on natural convection from a vertical plate with uniform surface heat flux placed in a thermally stratified media

In the present study we investigate the effect of viscous dissipation on natural convection from a vertical plate placed in a thermally stratified environment. The reduced equations are integrated by employing the implicit finite difference scheme of Keller box method and obtained the effect of heat due to viscous dissipation on the local skin friction and local Nusselt number at various stratification levels, for fluids having Prandtl numbers of 10, 50, and 100. Solutions are also obtained using the perturbation technique for small values of viscous dissipation parameters $\xi$ and compared to the finite difference solutions for 0 · $\xi$ · 1. Effect of viscous dissipation and temperature stratification are also shown on the velocity and temperature distributions in the boundary layer region.

Natural convection in a triangular enclosure subject to periodic thermal forcing

The effects of periodic thermal forcing on the flow field and heat transfer through an attic space are examined numerically in this paper. We consider the case with a fixed aspect ratio of 0.5 and a fixed Grashof number of 1.33×106. The numerical results reveal that, during the daytime, the flow is stratified; whereas at the night-time, the flow becomes unstable. A number of regular plumes and vortices are observed in the contours of isotherms and stream functions respectively. Moreover, the flow appears to be symmetric during the daytime, and becomes asymmetric at the night-time. It is also found that the flow is weaker during the daytime than that at the night-time in the present case, and the calculated heat transfer rate at the night-time is approximately three times greater than the heat transfer rate during the daytime.

SOA efforts

As the Service-oriented architecture paradigm has become ever more popular, different standardization efforts have been proposed by various consortia to enable interaction among heterogeneous environments through this paradigm. This chapter will overview the most prevalent of these SOA Efforts. It will first show how technical services can be described, how they can interact with each other and be discovered by users. Next, the chapter will present different standards to facilitate service composition and to design service-oriented environments in light of a universal understanding of service orientation. The chapter will conclude with a summary and a discussion on the limitations of the reviewed standards along their ability to describe service properties. This paves the way to the next chapters where the USDL standard will be presented, which aim to lift such limitations.

Application of Mesenchymal Stem Cells for repair and regeneration of cartilage and bone

Australian efforts to provide orthopaedic surgeons with living, load-bearing scaffolds suitable for current joint (knee and hip) replacement surgery, non-union fracture repair, and miniscal and growth plate cartilage regeneration are being lead by teams at the Institute for Medical and Veterinary Science and Women's and Children's Hospital in Adelaide; the Peter MacCallum and St Vincent's Medical Research Institutes in Melbourne; and the Mater Medical Research Institute and new Institute for Health and Biomedical Innovation at QUT, Brisbane. In each case multidisciplinary teams are attempting to develop autologous living tissue constructs, utilising mesenchymal stem cells (MSC), with the intention of effecting seamless repair and regeneration of skeletal trauma and defects. In this article we will briefly review current knowledge of the phenotypic properties of MSC and discuss the potential therapeutic applications of these cells as exemplified by their use in cartilage repair and tissue engineering based approaches to the treatment of skeletal defects.

Modeling intrinsic noise and delays in chemical kinetics of coupled autoregulated oscillating cells

Delays are an important feature in temporal models of genetic regulation due to slow biochemical processes, such as transcription and translation. In this paper, we show how to model intrinsic noise effects in a delayed setting by either using a delay stochastic simulation algorithm (DSSA) or, for larger and more complex systems, a generalized Binomial τ-leap method (Bτ-DSSA). As a particular application, we apply these ideas to modeling somite segmentation in zebra fish across a number of cells in which two linked oscillatory genes (her1 and her7) are synchronized via Notch signaling between the cells.

Understanding user differences in open-source workflow management system usage intentions

Open-source software systems have become a viable alternative to proprietary systems. We collected data on the usage of an open-source workflow management system developed by a university research group, and examined this data with a focus on how three different user cohorts – students, academics and industry professionals – develop behavioral intentions to use the system. Building upon a framework of motivational components, we examined the group differences in extrinsic versus intrinsic motivations on continued usage intentions. Our study provides a detailed understanding of the use of open-source workflow management systems in different user communities. Moreover, it discusses implications for the provision of workflow management systems, the user-specific management of open-source systems and the development of services in the wider user community.

Understanding business process models : the costs and benefits of structuredness

Previous research has put forward a number of properties of business process models that have an impact on their understandability. Two such properties are compactness and(block-)structuredness. What has not been sufficiently appreciated at this point is that these desirable properties may be at odds with one another. This paper presents the results of a two-pronged study aimed at exploring the trade-off between compactness and structuredness of process models. The first prong of the study is a comparative analysis of the complexity of a set of unstructured process models from industrial practice and of their corresponding structured versions. The second prong is an experiment wherein a cohort of students was exposed to semantically equivalent unstructured and structured process models. The key finding is that structuredness is not an absolute desideratum vis-a-vis for process model understandability. Instead, subtle trade-offs between structuredness and other model properties are at play.

Ensuring Correctness During Process Configuration via Partner Synthesis

Variants of the same process can be encountered within one organization or across different organizations. For example, different municipalities, courts, and rental agencies all need to support highly similar processes. In fact, procurement and sales processes can be found in almost any organization. However, despite these similarities, there is also the need to allow for local variations in a controlled manner. Therefore, many academics and practitioners have advocated the use of configurable process models (sometimes referred to as reference models). A configurable process model describes a family of similar process models in a given domain. Such a model can be configured to obtain a specific process model that is subsequently used to handle individual cases, for instance, to process customer orders. Process configuration is notoriously difficult as there may be all kinds of interdependencies between configuration decisions. In fact, an incorrect configuration may lead to behavioral issues such as deadlocks and livelocks. To address this problem, we present a novel verification approach inspired by the “operating guidelines” used for partner synthesis. We view the configuration process as an external service, and compute a characterization of all such services which meet particular requirements via the notion of configuration guideline. As a result, we can characterize all feasible configurations (i. e., configurations without behavioral problems) at design time, instead of repeatedly checking each individual configuration while configuring a process model.