Autonomous Agents for Business Process Management

Traditional approaches to managing business processes are often inadequate for large-scale organisation-wide, dynamic settings. However, since Internet and Intranet technologies have become widespread, an increasing number of business processes exhibit these properties. Therefore, a new approach is needed. To this end, we describe the motivation, conceptualization, design, and implementation of a novel agent-based business process management system. The key advance of our system is that responsibility for enacting various components of the business process is delegated to a number of autonomous problem solving agents. To enact their role, these agents typically interact and negotiate with other agents in order to coordinate their actions and to buy in the services they require. This approach leads to a system that is significantly more agile and robust than its traditional counterparts. To help demonstrate these benefits, a companion paper describes the application of our system to a real-world problem faced by British Telecom

Implementing a Business Process Management System Using ADEPT: A Real-World Case Study

This article describes how the agent-based design of ADEPT (advanced decision environment for processed tasks) and implementation philosophy was used to prototype a business process management system for a real-world application. The application illustrated is based on the British Telecom (BT) business process of providing a quote to a customer for installing a network to deliver a specified type of telecommunication service. Particular emphasis is placed upon the techniques developed for specifying services, allowing heterogeneous information models to interoperate, allowing rich and flexible interagent negotiation to occur, and on the issues related to interfacing agent-based systems and humans. This article builds upon the companion article (Applied Artificial Intelligence Vol.14, no 2, pgs. 145-189) that provides details of the rationale and design of the ADEPT technology deployed in this application

Characterization of an Ionization Readout Tile for nEXO

A new design for the anode of a time projection chamber, consisting of a charge-detecting "tile", is investigated for use in large scale liquid xenon detectors. The tile is produced by depositing 60 orthogonal metal charge-collecting strips, 3~mm wide, on a 10~\si{\cm} $\times$ 10~\si{\cm} fused-silica wafer. These charge tiles may be employed by large detectors, such as the proposed tonne-scale nEXO experiment to search for neutrinoless double-beta decay. Modular by design, an array of tiles can cover a sizable area. The width of each strip is small compared to the size of the tile, so a Frisch grid is not required. A grid-less, tiled anode design is beneficial for an experiment such as nEXO, where a wire tensioning support structure and Frisch grid might contribute radioactive backgrounds and would have to be designed to accommodate cycling to cryogenic temperatures. The segmented anode also reduces some degeneracies in signal reconstruction that arise in large-area crossed-wire time projection chambers. A prototype tile was tested in a cell containing liquid xenon. Very good agreement is achieved between the measured ionization spectrum of a $^{207}$Bi source and simulations that include the microphysics of recombination in xenon and a detailed modeling of the electrostatic field of the detector. An energy resolution $\sigma/E$=5.5\% is observed at 570~\si{keV}, comparable to the best intrinsic ionization-only resolution reported in literature for liquid xenon at 936~V/\si{cm}.Comment: 18 pages, 13 figures, as publishe

Sensitivity and discovery potential of the proposed nEXO experiment to neutrinoless double beta decay

The next-generation Enriched Xenon Observatory (nEXO) is a proposed experiment to search for neutrinoless double beta ($0\nu\beta\beta$) decay in $^{136}$Xe with a target half-life sensitivity of approximately $10^{28}$ years using $5\times10^3$ kg of isotopically enriched liquid-xenon in a time projection chamber. This improvement of two orders of magnitude in sensitivity over current limits is obtained by a significant increase of the $^{136}$Xe mass, the monolithic and homogeneous configuration of the active medium, and the multi-parameter measurements of the interactions enabled by the time projection chamber. The detector concept and anticipated performance are presented based upon demonstrated realizable background rates.Comment: v2 as publishe

Girls' disruptive behavior and its relationship to family functioning: A review

Although a number of reviews of gender differences in disruptive behavior and parental socialization exist, we extend this literature by addressing the question of differential development among girls and by placing both disruptive behavior and parenting behavior in a developmental framework. Clarifying the heterogeneity of development in girls is important for developing and optimizing gender-specific prevention and treatment programs. In the current review, we describe the unique aspects of the development of disruptive behavior in girls and explore how the gender-specific development of disruptive behavior can be explained by family linked risk and protective processes. Based on this review, we formulate a gender-specific reciprocal model of the influence of social factors on the development of disruptive behavior in girls in order to steer further research and better inform prevention and treatment programs