Henrik Stormer

Modeling and analyzing separation of duties in workflow environments

With the rise of global networks like the Internet the importance of workflow systems is growing. However, security questions in such environments often only address is secure communication. Another important topic that is often ignored is the separation of duties which is important part of a companys security policy to prevent fraud. This paper introduces a prototype that supports the graphical modeling and analysis of seperation of duties in workflow environments. Security officers can use this tool to design and analyze the security rules associated with workflow specifications.

Trading Workflows Electronically: The ANAISOFT Architecture

The ANAISOFT project develops a marketplace for the electronic trading of workflow executions over the Internet. This paper introduces the underlying business architecture and proposes a software architecture to implement it. The software architecture, derived from wellknown architectures for federated database management systems, allows to build flexible and scalable workflow trading systems from scratch and to integrate pre-existing trading platforms. In the latter case, only the trading platform itself must be adapted while its clients can gain access to a larger market without any modifications.

Personalized websites for mobile devices using dynamic cascading style sheets

With the rise of mobile devices like cellphones and Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) in the last years, the demand for specialized mobile solutions grows. Newly defined protocols like WAP or i‐Mode can be used to adapt Internet appearances to mobile devices. However, it is often an elaborate work to achieve these adaptions as almost all pages have to be rewritten. This paper shows an approach of semi automatical page generation for mobile devices. It is assumed that a general HTML page is already existing. Based on this page, an approach of generating personalized mobile device compatible pages is shown. This approach is illustrated using the software eSarine. eSarine is an e‐shop softare that can be used to set up an electronic shop.

Personalized Discount - A Fuzzy Logic Approach

A growing challenge for the companies in the e-business era is customer retention. In today’s global economy this task is getting, at the same time, more difficult and more important. In order to retain the potentially good customers and to improve their buying attitude this paper proposes to calculate personalized discounts. This calculus is based on a fuzzy classification which can derive the customers’ value for an enterprise. This approach allows the company to drive the customer equity which treats the customers according to their real value in order to maximize its profit.

Improving product configurators by means of a collaborative recommender system

More and more companies are starting to offer individualised products and services to their customers. A customer can create his own product by choosing different product options. This process is, however, often problematic and confusing for new customers, as they typically need in-depth knowledge of the product they want to buy. This paper proposes the use of a collaborative recommender system to calculate the most common product options and recommend these options to a customer during the design process. The presented approach can be integrated into the existing product configurators.

An Agent-Based Framework for Monitoring Service Contracts

Within the past few years, the variety of real-time multimedia streaming services on the Internet has grown steadily. Performance of streaming services is very sensitive to traffic congestion and results very often in poor service quality on todays best effort Internet. Reasons include the lack of any traffic prioritization mechanisms on the network level and its dependence on the cooperation of several Internet Service Providers and their reliable transmission of data packets. Therefore, service differentiation and its reliable delivery must be enforced on a business level through the introduction of service contracts between service providers and their customers. However, compliance with such service contracts is the crucial point that decides about successful improvement of the service delivery process. For that reason, an agent-based monitoring framework has been developed and introduced enabling the use of mobile agents to monitor compliance with contractual agreements between service providers and service customers. This framework describes the setup and the functionality of different kinds of mobile agents that allow monitoring of service contracts across domains of multiple service providers.

AWA — Eine Architektur eines agentenbasierten Workflow-Systems

Workflow-Systeme bieten die Moglichkeit Geschaftsprozesse zu automatisieren. Allerdings leiden heutige Systeme unter mangelnder Skalierbarkeit und unzureichender Flexibilitat. Seit kurzem wird versucht Agenten in Workflow-Umgebungen einzusetzen. Besonders Mobilitat und Autonomie sind dabei erfolgversprechende Eigenschaften von Agenten. Der vorliegende Artikel gibt zunachst eine Einfuhrung in die Workflow-und Agententechnologie und stellt dann eine neuartige Architektur eines agentenbasierten Workflow-Systems aufbauend auf vier Agententypen vor. Ein Beispiel eines Geschaftsprozesses illustriert die unterschiedlichen Agententypen.

Aktuelle Entwicklungen elektronischer Shopsysteme

ZusammenfassungenSeit mehr als 10 Jahren werden elektronische Shopsysteme im Markt erfolgreich eingesetzt. Die grundlegenden Prozesse sind heute bei fast allen Systemen einheitlich integriert. Dazu zählt der Ansatz des virtuellen Warenkorbs, der mit den zu kaufenden Produkten gefüllt wird, sowie der Checkout-Prozess, in dem die notwendigen Daten zur Bearbeitung des Auftrags angegeben werden.Einige Shopanbieter haben ihren Auftritt in den letzten Jahren jedoch enorm ergänzt und bieten mittlerweile eine Vielzahl von weiteren Funktionen an, die dem Kunden den Einkaufsprozess erleichtern sollen. Dieser Artikel stellt eine Reihe von aktuellen Funktionen im Onlineshop-Bereich vor, die bereits von einigen ausgewählten Anbietern eingesetzt werden und von denen angenommen werden kann, dass sie in der Zukunft viele weitere Interessenten finden werden.