John M. Edwards

Personalised online sales using web usage data mining

Practically every major company with a retail operation has its own web site and online sales facilities. This paper describes a toolset that exploits web usage data mining techniques to identify customer Internet browsing patterns. These patterns are then used to underpin a personalised product recommendation system for online sales. Within the architecture, a Kohonen neural network or self-organizing map (SOM) has been trained for use both offline, to discover user group profiles, and in real-time to examine active user click stream data, make a match to a specific user group, and recommend a unique set of product browsing options appropriate to an individual user. Our work demonstrates that this approach can overcome the scalability problem that is common among these types of system. Our results also show that a personalised recommender system powered by the SOM predictive model is able to produce consistent recommendations.

Using mobile agents to improve the alignment between manufacturing and its IT support systems

Abstract This paper proposes the notion that mobile agent technology can improve the alignment between IT systems and the real world processes they support. This can aid enterprise agility, particularly where distributed information is a feature, as in the virtual enterprise. A model of the manufacturing sales/order process is proposed. The sales order is shown to be a naturally mobile element of the model. The subsequent decomposition of the agent types during detailed design and implementation reveals an abstract pattern for database query using agent technology. Finally, an overview of the security issues associated with mobile agents is discussed.

Object-oriented resource models : their role in specifying components of integrated manufacturing systems

Abstract In response to the need to identify improved operating strategies within manufacturing enterprises, a number of formal methods for enterprise engineering have been defined. Predominantly, these methodologies take a ‘top down’ approach based on an analysis of business requirements. Top down design must be tempered by an understanding that manufacturing processes are implemented using what are often inflexible hardware and software resources. This paper describes a CASE environment which provides structured support for resource modelling based on object orientation, and demonstrates the necessary integration with a top down enterprise engineering workbench based on the CIM-OSA reference architecture. The paper concludes by identifying requirements for future resource reference models that will be required to support enterprise engineering and that should be supplied by resource vendors.

Mobile agent technology in support of sales order processing in the virtual enterprise

The flexible integration of a range of disparate IT applications is a key requirement for today’s global enterprises. The virtual enterprise, formed by a collection of collaborating companies for short term, high return, one off projects provides perhaps the most extreme example of this need. It is unlikely that any collaborators in a virtual enterprise will have similar networks or software, but the requirement exists for them to inter-operate.

A top down and bottom manufacturing enterprise function view up approach to engineering using the

In the contemporary global marketplace, manufacturing enterprises are increasingly required to be highly optimized. In order to re-engineer manufacturing systems to achieve this goal, enterprise engineering methods together with advanced support tools are required. In developing such methods it has often been suggested that a formal top down approach is difficult to map onto manufacturing resources, and that a bottom up approach will fail to accurately reflect the business needs of the enterprise. This paper describes and compares two enterprise engineering workbenches which are related, but take these two opposing approaches to system modelling: (1) A top down approach based on the CIM-OSA Reference Architecture which in its purest form prescribes that the modelling process begins with the identification of high level business goals, and; (2) A bottom up approach based on the creation of integrated systems through the coordination of manufacturing functional entities. The workbenches described primarily ...

Support for component based systems: can contemporary technology cope?

Information Technology (IT) systems can generally be described through subdivision into components whose level of abstraction allows the people who are involved with their creation and maintenance to better understand the system. However, this component sub division seldom exists beyond the conceptual system description. Implementation of the system based on this component level decomposition offers many advantages in terms of re-use, system maintenance and general support for change.

Cheating death: better software evolution

The legacy problem has manifested itself early in the financial domain. Work at Loughborough University has sought to understand the problem and offer a general approach to building real software systems capable of evolving indefinitely. There are useful parallels between natural and software evolution. The field of evolutionary computation has successfully adopted the natural metaphor to solve certain classes of problem. However, the field of software evolution considers systems change in a much wider context. A more abstract view of evolution admits both models in order to better understand their differences and exploit their similarities. The evolutionary mechanism of software development and evolution relies upon weak feedback from program behaviour to program code. It is suggested that by increasing the naturalness of software encoding, the evolutionary process is improved. Implementation issues are separated from application domain issues by use of a conceptual fixed point of evolution: the least dynamic abstractions of a given domain. Instances of the proposed conceptual architecture already exist. One such instance is the word processor. This example is discussed in the context of its evolutionary properties, subsequently applied to a second, less familiar example, a banking domain machine.

Building Agile Systems with Mobile Code

Mobile code has been championed as a solution to a plethora of software problems. This paper describes investigative work undertaken in order to evaluate the mobile code abstractions of Mobile Agents and Mobile Objects, and to understand the implications of using these abstractions to build distributed systems.We describe two systems built to support the Sales Order Process of a distributed manufacturing enterprise, using IBMs Aglets Software Development Kit. The Sales Order Process model and the requirements for agility used as the basis for these implementations are derived from data collected in an industrial case study.Both systems are evaluated using the Goal/Question/Metric methodology. Two new metrics for Semantic Alignment and Change Capability are presented and used to evaluate each system with respect to the degree of system agility supported. The systems are evaluated through a set of scenarios generated during the case study in an attempt to see if they support system integration and agility in the manufacturing domain. Further we examine the implications of using a mobile code abstraction when compared with the abstraction offered by traditional distribution technology.The work described provides evidence that both Mobile Agent and Mobile Object systems have inherent properties that can be used to build agile distributed systems. Further, Mobile Agents with their additional autonomy provide marginally greater support.

An evolutionary systems model

Current problems associated with mature computer systems have provided new insight into the software crisis. Lack of flexibility and structural decay of software may be associated with the semantic and dynamic misalignment between software systems and the organisations they are intended to support. This paper introduces a layered model for evolutionary systems which embodies several proposed solutions to correct this misalignment. The fixed point of evolutionary change is taken to be the atomic constants of the domain, rather than an underlying software architecture. The technology beneath, and the business processes above are assumed to be subject to change. Preservation of correctness is supported through domain-oriented changes occurring at the level of specification. Proof of concept research is underway at a leading City of London financial institution.

A model based approach to enterprise wide information support

This paper demonstrates an ability to bridge between conceptual information models representing a manufacturing enterprise and the realisation of these models within a relational database management system. The information architecture defined within the paper is based on the ANSI Three-Schema approach to database management which splits the data management issues into three separate parts and thereby realises important benefits in complex systems where information sharing needs change frequently.