Shouju Ren

Customer churn prediction using improved one-class support vector machine

Customer Churn Prediction is an increasingly pressing issue in todays ever-competitive commercial arena. Although there are several researches in churn prediction, but the accuracy rate, which is very important to business, is not high enough. Recently, Support Vector Machines (SVMs), based on statistical learning theory, are gaining applications in the areas of data mining, machine learning, computer vision and pattern recognition because of high accuracy and good generalization capability. But there has no report about using SVM to Customer Churn Prediction. According to churn data set characteristic, the number of negative examples is very small, we introduce an improved one-class SVM. And we have tested our method on the wireless industry customer churn data set. Our method has been shown to perform very well compared with other traditional methods, ANN, Decision Tree, and Naive Bays.

Petri-net-based business process modeling for virtual enterprises

The paper presents our studies on Petri net based business process modeling for virtual enterprises. A virtual enterprise (VE) is a temporary alliance of member enterprises. Generally, a business process consists of a series of logically interrelated activities, to which appropriate resources will be assigned. In the virtual enterprise, both the activities and the resources are in multiple member enterprises, while collaborations exist among these distributed activities and resource sharing is often required. Thus, the modeling of business processes in virtual enterprises is challenging work. Based on Petri nets, the paper proposes a business process modeling method for virtual enterprises, which focuses on the two basic elements of the business process: activities and resources, while addressing their properties of distribution and collaboration particular to virtual enterprises.

Artificial immune system for fraud detection

Credit card transactions continue to grow in number with the rapid growth of the electronic commerce, leading to a higher rate of stolen account numbers and subsequent losses by banks. Improved fraud detection thus has become essential to maintain the viability of the payment system. In this paper, we propose a case-based genetic artificial immune system for fraud detection (AISFD). It is a self-adapted system designed for credit card fraud detection. With the case-based learning model and genetic algorithm, the system can perform online learning with limited time and cost, and update the capability of fraud detection in the rapid growth of transactions and commerce activities.

Agent-based virtual enterprise modeling and operation control

We propose an agent-based virtual enterprise model and provide the agent collaboration mechanisms under the model, thereby achieving agent-based virtual enterprise modeling and operation control. We establish a network of distributed activity agents and resource agents for each member enterprise, collaborations among which can deal with activity precedence arrangements and activity-resource assignments in each sub-business-process. Then, we model each member enterprise in the virtual enterprise as an agent. Collaborations among member enterprise agents can deal with activity coordination and resource sharing among various sub-business-processes. Thus, our agent-based approach achieves distributed control over the whole business process execution of the virtual enterprise.

An agent-based approach for workflow management

The authors propose an agent based approach for workflow management, aiming at achieving flexible and dynamic workflow management in the distributed environment. We treat agents as autonomous entities with abilities to solve problems independently and propose an agent hierarchy as well as an agent model. The agent hierarchy consists of three kinds of agents at three neighboring levels: activity agents, role agents and actor agents. With our agent hierarchy, the gap between the dynamic workflow enactment and the static business process model can be bridged. The three levels of agents collaborate with each other through the contract-net approach and the feedback mechanism. Through such collaboration, activity-actor assignments can be achieved flexibly and dynamically; and the workflow execution can be monitored and managed in a real time fashion. The agent model consists of three sub-agents: a message-receiving one, a decision-making one and a message-sending one. Connected by two message queues, these three collaboratively operating sub-agents can complete functions of an agent effectively. Through message transfers of the message-receiving/sending sub-agents and the message based behavior-performing of the decision-making subagent, individual agents as well as the agent hierarchy can operate effectively and efficiently.

Performance management in supply chain

Appropriate performance management system is essential to the collaborative operation of the supply chain. This paper presents a quantitative performance measurement system for the supply chain. From time, quality, cost, and flexibility perspective, performance measures at department, enterprise and supply chain level are proposed. The comprehensive evaluation model is selected in Cobb-Douglas form to reflect the indispensability of each perspective. The key features in human evaluation are uncertainty, inconsistency and dependency, thus a modified fuzzy analytic network process is adopted as the comprehensive method.

Modeling distributed business processes of virtual enterprises based on the object-oriented approach and Petri nets

Based on the object-oriented approach and Interval Timed Coloured Petri nets (ITCPNs), we study the modeling of distributed business processes in virtual enterprises. We model each member enterprise in a virtual enterprise as an object, and define both the internal model of the member enterprise object and the interaction model among the member enterprise objects based on ITCPNs. These two kinds of models are two views of the system and when combined, a complete model for the whole business process of the virtual enterprise is achieved.

Supply chain management mode based on coordination

As the advanced management technology of manufacturing systems, supply chain management has made great progress. At present, the centralized hierarchical control mode is adopted by many supply chain management systems. In such systems, entities are serially linked by orders. Each entity obtains the relevant order from its upper entity, and provides the input requirements information with the lower entity. Such a system has a slow response to environments since information is transmitted and fed back according to the strict multi-layer hierarchical structure. With the global market competition, it is much more necessary to put forward a new and efficient control method based on the existing supply chain management systems. In the paper, the supply chain management mode based on coordination is proposed and discussed in detail.

A solution of job-shop scheduling problems based on genetic algorithms

Based on the analysis of various ways of solving job-shop scheduling problems, the mathematical model of job-shop problem is introduced. A kind of genetic algorithm is used to solve it in this paper. Firstly, the chromosomes are encoded, and the population size is premised for the optimized goal of job-shop problem, which are the keys of the method. Secondly, the fitness function is designed. After using selection, crossover and mutation operator, and then elitist strategy to prevent the premature convergence, a best or satisfactory scheduling path can be found. The executing results using the presented algorithms in certain project case are shown in the paper.

A paradigm for engineering business process and its information system

In this paper, a paradigm for engineering business process and its information system is proposed, which consists of agile oriented engineering and lean oriented engineering. And, based on systems thinking, especially, chaotic systems theory, we proposed a re-configurable information organization scheme comprising of self-managed, intelligent agents and infrastructural information network, so as to enable reengineering business process with aims at minimizing risks and side-effects.