Multi-Model Driven Collaborative Development Platform for Service-Oriented e-Business Systems
Service-oriented architecture can improve e-business applications to be integrated and flexible. This paper proposes a multi-model driven collaborative development platform for service-oriented e-business systems. The platform provides three views, i.e., business view, process view, and service view to support service-oriented software engineering, top-down business planning and bottom-up service-oriented application development. Business and technical consultants can collaborate from distributed sites of, e.g., clients and IT vendors to provide their clients' with rapid development and demonstration. The proposed platform is driven by three models, i.e., service meta model, process model and business model. All of the three models support semantic description and rational operations, and facilitate intelligent service discovery, process execution and business-business integration. Concepts and implementation issues about the proposed platform has been presented in this paper. The platform has been developed and deployed in an innovation centre to be evaluated by visiting customers

title: Combining mediation and bidding mechanisms for agent-based manufacturing scheduling (poster)
abstract: 2.  Future manufacturing systems need to be dynamically reconfigurable to produce customized products in small batches, even down to lot sizes of one unit, with fast turnaround in a cost-efficient manner. Such systems must be implemented with dynamic scheduling mechanisms for rapidly responding to emergent production tasks and orders, and other unforeseen situations such as production tardiness and machine failures.

title: Distributed Manufacturing Scheduling Using Intelligent Agents
abstract: Manufacturing scheduling is an optimization process that allocates limited manufacturing resources over time among parallel and sequential manufacturing activities. This allocation must obey a set of rules or constraints that reflect the temporal relationships between manufacturing activities and the capacity limitations of a set of shared resources. The allocation also affects a schedule's optimality with respect to criteria such as cost, lateness, or throughput. The globalization of manufacturing makes such optimization increasingly important. To survive in this competitive market, manufacturing enterprises must increase their productivity and profitability through greater shop floor agility. Agent-based manufacturing scheduling systems are a promising way to provide this optimization.

title: An autonomous agent development environment for engineering applications
abstract: Agent technology is playing an increasingly important role in developing distributed, intelligent, and collaborative engineering applications. The innate difficulties of interoperation between heterogeneous agent communities and rapid development of multi-agent systems have motivated the emergence of FIPA specifications and the proliferation of multi-agent system platforms or toolkits that implement FIPA specifications. This paper presents a FIPA compliant multi-agent framework called Autonomous Agent Development Environment (AADE). Originating from the engineering fields, AADE can facilitate the rapid development of collaborative engineering applications (especially in engineering design and manufacturing fields) through the provision of reusable packages of agent level components and programming tools. An agent oriented engineering project on the development of a collaborative product design environment is implemented based on the facilities provided by AADE.

title: Adaptive Negotiation for Agent Based Distributed Manufacturing Scheduling
abstract: Manufacturing scheduling problem is typically NP-hard. While traditional heuristic search based approaches have been considered not suitable for dynamic environments because of their inherent centralized nature, agent based approaches are promising for their decentralized, autonomous, coordinated, and rational natures. However, many challenging issues still need to be addressed when applying agent based approaches to complex distributed manufacturing scheduling environments. One of them, namely adaptive negotiation , is to integrate intelligence and rationality into negotiation mechanisms and make the system more adaptive in dynamic environments. This is very important to the manufacturing scheduling problem because the agent based scheduling process is essentially a coordination process among agents. Adaptive negotiation is a way to achieve the coordination in a dynamic scheduling environment. By adaptive negotiation we mean that more intelligence and rationality are integrated into the negotiation mechanism, thus make it adaptive to the changes of the dynamic scheduling environment. To achieve this, issues at three levels have to be addressed: system architecture, agent architecture, and heuristics. At the system architecture level, the system must have the architecture with corresponding characteristics to support adaptive negotiation among agents. At the agent architecture level, an agent must have rational abilities (decision making mechanisms) embedded in the architecture to transfer the knowledge (in our case, negotiation heuristics) and environment conditions into specific negotiation behaviors. The third level is the heuristics level. By this we mean the knowledge that needs to be integrated into the agent negotiation mechanism and can be used by agents in terms of rational decision making.

title: Web Services/Agent-Based Model for Inter-Enterprise Collaboration
abstract: Web Services technology is a promising computing paradigm for applications integration over the Internet. Use of Web services and related technologies facilitates the implementation of virtual enterprises across heterogeneous hardware and software platforms. This paper proposes a Web services/agent-based model for inter-enterprise collaboration. It presents a multi-agent model in different levels of the enterprise’s system architecture to accomplish a suitable selection of a registered service, to check the status of a process, to realize users’ requests, and to react to them in a collaborative way with other agent-based Web services. Moreover, the paper proposes a multi-agent model to define a dynamic workflow capable of coordinating and monitoring the workflow processes.

title: Segmentation and Evaluation of Adipose Tissue from Whole Body MRI Scans
abstract: Accurate quantification of total body and the distribution of regional adipose tissue using manual segmentation is a challenging problem due to the high variation between manual delineations. Manual segmentation also requires highly trained experts with knowledge of anatomy. We present a hybrid segmentation method that provides robust delineation results for adipose tissue from whole body MRI scans. A formal evaluation of accuracy of the segmentation method is performed. This semi-automatic segmentation algorithm reduces significantly the time required for quantification of adipose tissue, and the accuracy measurements show that the results are close to the ground truth obtained from manual segmentations.