Case-Based Support for Collaborative Business

Abstract

This paper describes the development of the generic collaboration support architecture CAKE incorporating case-based reasoning (CBR). CAKE provides unified access to knowledge available within an organization, and CBR technology is used throughout the system to distribute this knowledge to agents as required. Adaptive workflows and collaboration patterns selected by a CBR process are introduced for explicitly describing collaboration among agents. In order to guide the technical design of the architecture, a systematic analysis of the requirements for collaboration support has been performed in various application domains.

eXiT*CBR.v2: Distributed case-based reasoning tool for medical prognosis

“…An example of where case-based reasoning has been applied in MASs for agent coordination can be seen with CAKE (Collaborative Agent-based Knowledge Engine [47]). CAKE supports collaborative business by integrating workflow technology, agents and humans.…”

Retrieval of Semantic Workflows with Knowledge Intensive Similarity Measures

“…Typical control flow patterns are sequence, and-split, and-join, xor-split, xor-join, and possibly loops. Figure 1a shows an example of a business workflow within a University administration, according the representation used in the CAKE project [3,16] at the University of Trier. On the other hand, scientific workflows have a strong focus on the dataflow, typically restricting the control flow to a partial ordering of the tasks.…”

“…The workflow representation in the CAKE system [3] uses an object-oriented representation (originally developed for cases) for ontology representation and metadata annotation. Tasks can be organized in a hierarchy of classes, each of which contains certain properties of a task, which can be inherited from the super class.…”

“…This is what we call semantic workflow reasoning. Also case-based reasoning (CBR) has already demonstrated its high potential in semantic workflow applications [19,15,3,14,9,7,17]. Repositories of workflows can be used as case bases, enabling the application of case retrieval and adaptation methods.…”

“…A particular challenge is the similaritybased retrieval of semantic workflow descriptions, as workflow similarity enables to retrieve workflows that do not match the query exactly, but that are a good starting point for adaptation. However, previous work on workflow retrieval either ignores the graph structure but uses a simple flat case representation [3], use (parts of) the graph structure, but only uses textual labels instead of semantic descriptions [16,14,11,8,7], or uses semantically annotated graph structures, but a crisp matching approach rather than similarity [9].…”