Autoren: Matthias Frank, Frank Kargl, Burkhard Stiller

Abstract Proceedings of the 7th Workshop on
Wireless and Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks (WMAN 2013)
March 11, 2013

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Autoren: Andreas Lanz, Manfred Reichert, Barbara Weber

Companies increasingly adopt process-aware information systems (PAISs) to coordinate, monitor and evolve their business processes. Although the proper handling of temporal constraints (e.g., deadlines and minimum time lags between activities) is crucial in many application domains, existing PAISs vary significantly regarding their support of the temporal perspective of business processes. Both the formal specification and operational support of temporal constraints constitute fundamental challenges in this context. In previous work, we introduced time patterns facilitating the comparison of PAISs in respect to their support of the temporal perspective and provided empirical evidence for them. To avoid ambiguities and to ease the use as well as implementation of the time patterns, this paper formally defines their semantics. To enable pattern use in a wide range of process modeling languages and pattern integration with existing PAISs, this semantics is expressed independent of a particular process meta model. Altogether, the presented pattern formalization will foster the integration of the temporal perspective in PAISs.

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Autoren: Matthias Lohrmann and Manfred Reichert

Improving the operational eciency of processes is an important goal of business process management (BPM). There exist many proposals with regard to process improvement patterns (PIPs) as practices that aim at supporting this task. Nevertheless, there is still a gap with respect to validating PIPs in terms of their actual business value for a specic organization. Based on empirical research and experience from consulting projects, this paper proposes a method to tackle this challenge. Our approach towards a-priori validation of process improvement patterns considers real-world constraints such as the role of senior stakeholders and opportunities such as process mining techniques. In the sense of an experience report, our approach as well as results are illustrated on the basis of a real-world business process from human resources management, covering a transactional volume of about 29,000 process instances over the period of one year. Overall, our proposal enables practitioners and researchers to subject PIPs to a sound validation procedure before taking any process implementation decision.

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Autoren: Andreas Steigmiller, Birte Glimm, Thorsten Liebig

Nominal schemas have recently been introduced as a new approach for the integration of DL-safe rules into the Description Logic framework. The efficient processing of knowledge bases with nominal schemas remains, however, challenging. We address this by extending the well-known optimisation of absorption as well as the standard tableau calculus to directly handle the (absorbed) nominal schema axioms. We implement the resulting extension of standard tableau calculi in a novel reasoning system and we integrate further optimisations. In our empirical evaluation, we show the effect of these optimisations and we find that the proposed approach performs well even when compared to other DL reasoners with dedicated rule support.

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Autoren: Daniel Ott, Alexander Raschke

One of the most common ways to ensure the quality of industry specifications is technical review, as the documents are typically written in natural language. Unfortunately, review activities tends to be less effective because of the increasing size and complexity of the specifications. For example at Mercedes-Benz, a specification and its referenced documents often sums up to 3.000 pages. Given such large specifications, reviewers have major problems in finding defects, especially consistency or completeness defects, between
requirements with related information that are spread over large or even different documents.
The classification of each requirement according to related topics is one possibility to improve the review efficiency. The reviewers can filter the overall document set according to particular topics to check consistency and completeness between the requirements within one topic.
In this paper, we investigate whether this approach really can help to improve the review situation by presenting an experiment with students reviewing specifications originating from Mercedes-Benz with and without such a classification.
In addition, we research the experiment participants’ acceptance of an automatic classification derived from text classification algorithms compared to a manual classification and how much manual effort is needed to improve the automatic classification.
The results of this experiment, combined with the results of previous research, lead us to the conclusion that an automatic pre-classification is an useful aid in review tasks for finding consistency and completeness defects.

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Autoren: Philip Geiger, Rüdiger Pryss, Marc Schickler, Manfred Reichert

Daily business routines more and more require to access information systems in a mobile manner, while preserving a desktoplike feeling at the same time. However, the design and implementation of sophisticated mobile business applications constitutes a challenging task. On the one hand, a developer must cope with limited physical resources of mobile devices (e.g., limited battery capacity, or limited screen size) as well as with non-predictable user behaviour (e.g., mindless instant shutdowns). On the other, mobile devices provide new technical capabilities like motion sensors, a GPS-sensor, or a potent camera system [1], and hence new types of applications types can be designed and implemented. Integrating sensors and using data recorded by them, however, is a non-trivial task when considering requirements like robustness and scalability. In this work, we present the engineering of such an application, which provides location-based augmented reality, and discuss the various challenges to be tackled in this context.

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