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Business process management is a challenging task that requires business processes being described, executed, monitored and continuously enhanced. This process management lifecycle requires business as well as IT people working together, whereby the view on business process is quite different on both sides. One important means for bridging the gap between both consists in having a modeling notation that can be easily understood but also has a precise semantics and can be used as a basis for workflow execution. Although existing approaches like BPMN and EPCs aim at being such as notation they are already very activity oriented and do not consider the underlying motivations of processes. Introducing the goal oriented process modeling notation (GPMN) a new language is presented that has the objective of bringing together both sides by establishing higher-level modeling concepts for workflows. This results in an increased intelligibility of workflow descriptions for business people and greater consideration for the way processes are described on the business side. The core idea of the approach consists in introducing different kinds of goals and goal relationships in addition to the established activity-centered behavior model. The applicability of the approach is further illustrated with an example workflow from Daimler AG.

Evacuation modeling is a promising measure to support decision making in scenarios such as flooding, explosion, terrorist attack and other emergency incidents. Given the special attention to the terrorist attack, we build up an agent-based evacuation model in a railway station square under sarin terrorist attack to analyze such incident. Sarin dispersion process is described by Gaussian puff model. Due to sarin’s special properties of being colorless and odorless, we focus more on the modeling of agents’ perceiving and reasoning process and use a Belief, Desire, Intention (BDI) architecture to solve the problem. Another contribution of our work is that we put forward a path planning algorithm which not only take distance but also comfort and threat factors into consideration. A series of simulation experiments demonstrate the ability of the proposed model and examine some crucial factors in sarin terrorist attack evacuation. Though far from perfect, the proposed model could serve to support decision making.

At first there are few researches of the Chinese context formalization at present in Chinese understanding. So the character of formalization of the semantic balance and restriction, which have been summarized from the Chinese context's concepts, and the combination of the character of agent's BDI thinking state have been presented for the research of the Chinese context formalization. And the model of the semantic restriction has been set up for the single agent inner thinking state for the Chinese producing system, and the model of the semantic balance for the multi agents producing language has been set up. The two models have formed the context semantic model based on multi-agents. The related couple of semantic relation and the arithmetic of semantic composing have been presented in the thesis. The lab system of politics semanteme has been set up for the application of information security content judging and identifying. The example of “Three representative” has been tested through this model.

Forward Freight Agreements or FFAs are futures contracts that allow shipping industry participants to trade in future level of freight rates. Freight is a physical commodity that, unlike others, cannot be stored. Therefore, the traditional arbitrage free model cannot be used for freight futures pricing. The pricing method used relies exclusively on the expectation of what the spot (underlying) freight price will be during the time of the settlement and, subsequently, the supply and demand for a contract at a specific price. This chapter aims to give an overview of the development of the freight futures market and describe pricing and trading strategies for hedging freight exposure both from the ship-owners' and shippers perspective. Given the limited history and depth of the container and tanker freight derivatives market, the focus of this chapter is primarily on the dry bulk futures.