International Journal of Cooperative Information Systems

If the purpose of a commercial negotiation is composition of business-to-business e-commerce processes (e-business processes), do any unique decision-support demands arise when using an electronic negotiation (e-negotiation) system? What is the answer when human-driven e-business process negotiation (eBPN), specifically, becomes a necessity? Workflow research already specifies certain tools that allow collaborative design of workflow models by multiple parties. But this paper goes beyond this to describe how peculiar decision-support demands also arise for the negotiation of the other, more "general", terms of such an eBPN contract. It also shows how existing e-negotiation tools lack holistic support for the interplay between "workflow-specific" and "general" strategy. Given this critical gap, this paper presents the "general" strategy-support (GSS) segment of our wider project: "Soft E-business Process Negotiation Approach" (SEPNA). Novel use of multi-criteria decision-making methods in the workflow composition domain and holistic support of the general strategy-support requirements combine as two of its key distinctions vis-à-vis alternative approaches. It specifies re-usable design prescriptions to address this gap, formalized primarily as an object model. Technical feasibility and contribution significance are shown by executing a set of previously unsupported eBPN scenarios on a prototype implementation of these prescriptions.

During the last years a new generation of adaptive Process-Aware Information Systems (PAIS) has emerged, which enables dynamic process changes at runtime, while preserving PAIS robustness and consistency. Such adaptive PAIS allow authorized users to add new process activities, to delete existing activities, or to change pre-defined activity sequences during runtime. Both this runtime flexibility and process configurations at build-time, lead to a large number of process variants being derived from the same process model, but slightly differing in structure due to the applied changes. Generally, process variants are expensive to configure and difficult to maintain. This paper presents selected results from our MinAdept project. In particular, we provide a clustering algorithm that fosters learning from past process changes by mining a collection of process variants. As mining result we obtain a process model for which average distance to the process variant models becomes minimal. By adopting this process model as reference model in the PAIS, need for future process configuration and adaptation decreases. We have validated our clustering algorithm by means of a case study as well as comprehensive simulations. Altogether, our vision is to enable full process lifecycle support in adaptive PAIS.

Presence information was the key enabler to the great success of instant messaging applications. First, this information was limited to simple binary states such as online, offline or busy. However, this is, currently, evolving towards a much more generic, flexible concept to include all context that allows users or applications to adapt and control communications in a more efficient and personalized manner. Presence paves the way for the deployment of advanced communication services and is therefore a key component in the Next-Generation Networks (NGNs). These networks aim to unify fixed and mobile networks in order to provide users with global connectivity to always-on multimedia services. The main barrier to the implantation of next-generation presence-based services is the great amount of traffic involved in the distribution of presence information across domains. We study two strategies described in IETF drafts and one novel solution for reducing inter-domain presence traffic. We present the analytical formulas that calculate the traffic for the three strategies. Building on the analytical results, we analyze the factors that have impact on these strategies and study the suitability of each one under different conditions.