Quality inspection, a widely adopted practice in supply chains, measures whether delivered products conform to prespecified quality requirements. Due to potential economic benefits, suppliers may deliberately manipulate products to falsify test results. However, unqualified products could cause severe problems in supply chains or even tragedies, such as China's tainted milk scandal. In this paper, we propose a beliefdesire-intention modeling approach to predict suppliers' behavior and provide inspection suggestions to buyers to overcome the problem. Assuming access to the production process, our approach can represent suppliers' knowledge of production and deception to mimic their reasoning processes and predict their deception intentions. This flexible approach can also adapt to environmental changes and deliver effective results. In this paper, we build a prototype system for supply chain quality inspections based on the proposed method. We conduct laboratory experiments to collect data for computational assessments of the performance of the prototype. It is shown that our proposed approach is more accurate than classic machine learning methods in detecting suppliers' deceptions.

Multiagent-based system has been widely used in hotel reservations. However, they mainly use one-way negotiation for decisions that agents only represent travelers selecting from a list of hotels, while hotel providers cannot communicate with travelers. To address such problems, this paper proposes a Multiagent-Based Two-Way Negotiation for Hotel Reservation (MAB-TNHR) with three kinds of agents. Traditional tenant-dominant reservation is converted into a form of tendering to implement this two-way negotiation, which means that Landlord Agents can actively respond to the selection by sending their tenders to suitable tenants and bargain on the price with the Tenant Agent to pursue their interests. In this paper, rules used in the application and a case study are presented to illustrate the implementation of MAB-TNHR. Verification shows that the MAB-TNHR can meet intricate and dynamic reservation demands automatically without the participations of tenants and landlords.

Having a system to stratify individuals according to risk is key to clinical disease prevention. This allows individuals identified at different risk tiers to benefit from further investigation and intervention. But the same risk score estimated for two different persons does not mean they need the same further investigation or represent the similarity health condition between two persons. Meanwhile, users still do not know a prior what most of the risk tiers are, and how many tiers should be found in risk stratification. In this paper, the proposed pairwise and size constrained Kmeans (PSCKmeans) method simultaneously integrates the limited supervised information and the size constraints to screen the high-risk population based on similarity measurement, and gets a feasible and balanced stratification solution to avoid cluster with few points. Results on China Health and Nutrition Survey public dataset and follow-up dataset show that the proposed PSCKmeans method can naturally grade the risk of diabetes into four tiers, and achieve 73.8%, 85.1%, and 0.95% sensitivity, specificity, and ratio of minimum to expected on testing data. The proposed method compares favorably with eight previous semisupervised clustering methods; it demonstrates that semisupervised clustering by unifying multiple forms of constraints can guide a good partition that is more relevant for the domain and find new categories through prior knowledge. Finally, this risk stratification model can provide a tool for risk stratification of clinical disease and be used for further intervention for people with similar health condition.

Market surveillance systems (MSSs) are increasingly used to monitor trading activities in financial markets to maintain market integrity. Existing MSSs primarily focus on statistical analysis of market activity data and largely ignore textual market information, including, but not limited to, news reports and various social media. As suggested by both theoretical explorations in finance and prevailing market surveillance practice, unstructured market information holds major yet underexplored opportunities for surveillance. In this paper, we propose a news analysis approach with the help of commonsense knowledge to assess the risk of suspicious transactions identified in market activity analysis. Our approach explicitly models semantic relations between transactions and news articles and provides semantic references to words in news articles. We conducted experiments using data collected from a real-world market and found that our proposed approach significantly outperforms the existing methods, which are based on transaction characteristics or traditional textual analysis methods. Experiments also show that the performance advantage of the proposed approach mainly comes from the modeling of news-transaction relationships. The research contributes to the market surveillance literature and has significant practical implications.

In contrast with the existing approaches to exact bisimulation for fuzzy systems, we introduce a robust notion of behavioral distance to measure the behavioral similarity of nondeterministic fuzzy-transition systems which are a generalization of fuzzy automata. This behavioral distance provides a quantitative analogue of bisimilarity and is defined as the greatest fixed point of a suitable monotonic function. The behavioral distance has the important property that two systems are at zero distance if and only if they are bisimilar. Moreover, for any given threshold, we find that systems with behavioral distances bounded by the threshold are equivalent. In addition, we show that two system combinators-parallel composition and product-are nonexpansive with respect to our behavioral distance, which makes compositional verification possible. The theory developed here is applicable to the quantitative verification, approximate reduction, and reliability analysis of fuzzy-transition systems.

A complex workflow is often executed by geographically dispersed partners or different organizations. As a solution for dealing with the decentralized nature of workflow applications, a workflow can be fragmented into small pieces and scheduled to different servers for its execution. An important challenge in distributed workflows is to optimize the fragmentation and distribution to achieve efficiency with respect to time and server resources. To tackle this challenge, we propose the application of process mining to the fragmentation of a workflow for distributed execution. The workflow model discovered through process mining records the actual execution of a workflow and allows in-depth analysis of its temporal behavior. Based on examination of the model resulting from process mining, we demonstrate how to determine the minimum time to finish a workflow and how to partition the workflow in order to achieve efficient server usage.

Detecting changes in stock prices is a well known problem in finance with important implications for monitoring and business intelligence. Forewarning of changes in stock price, can be made by the early detection of changes in the distributions of stock order numbers. In this paper, we address the change detection problem for streams of stock order numbers and propose a novel incremental detection algorithm. Our algorithm gains high accuracy and low delay by employing a natural Poisson distribution assumption about the nature of stock order streams. We establish that our algorithm is highly scalable and has linear complexity. We also experimentally demonstrate its effectiveness for detecting change points, via experiments using both synthetic and real-world datasets.

To efficiently and effectively mine massive amounts of data in the time series, approximate representation of the data is one of the most commonly used strategies. Piecewise Linear Approximation is such an approach, which represents a time series by dividing it into segments and approximating each segment with a straight line. In this paper, we first propose a new segmentation criterion that improves computing efficiency. Based on this criterion, two novel online piecewise linear segmentation methods are developed, the feasible space window method and the stepwise feasible space window method. The former usually produces much fewer segments and is faster and more reliable in the running time than other methods. The latter can reduce the representation error with fewer segments. It achieves the best overall performance on the segmentation results compared with other methods. Extensive experiments on a variety of real-world time series have been conducted to demonstrate the advantages of our methods.

Time and resource management and verification are two important aspects of workflow management systems. In this paper, we present a modeling and analysis approach for a kind of workflow constrained by resources and nondetermined time based on Petri nets. Different from previous modeling approaches, there are two kinds of places in our model to represent the activities and resources of a workflow, respectively. For each activity place, its input and output transitions represent the start and termination of the activity, respectively, and there are two timing functions in it to define the minimum and maximum duration times of the corresponding activity. Using the constructed Petri net model, the earliest and latest times to start each activity can be calculated. With the reachability graph of the Petri net model, the timing factors influencing the implementation of the workflow can be calculated and verified. In this paper, the sufficient conditions for the existence of the best implementation case of a workflow are proved, and the method for obtaining such an implementation case is presented. The obtained results will benefit the evaluation and verification of the implementation of a workflow constrained by resources and nondetermined time.

This paper presents a new method for learning Bayesian networks from functional dependencies (FD) and third normal form (3NF) tables in relational databases. The method sets up a linkage between the theory of relational databases and probabilistic reasoning models, which is interesting and useful especially when data are incomplete and inaccurate. The effectiveness and practicability of the proposed method is demonstrated by its implementation in a mobile commerce system.

Discretization, as a preprocessing step for data mining, is a process of converting the continuous attributes of a data set into discrete ones so that they can be treated as the nominal features by machine learning algorithms. Those various discretization methods, that use entropy-based criteria, form a large class of algorithm. However, as a measure of class homogeneity, entropy cannot always accurately reflect the degree of class homogeneity of an interval. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a new measure of class heterogeneity of intervals from the viewpoint of class probability itself. Based on the definition of heterogeneity, we present a new criterion to evaluate a discretization scheme and analyze its property theoretically. Also, a heuristic method is proposed to find the approximate optimal discretization scheme. Finally, our method is compared, in terms of predictive error rate and tree size, with Ent-MDLC, a representative entropy-based discretization method well-known for its good performance. Our method is shown to produce better results than those of Ent-MDLC, although the improvement is not significant. It can be a good alternative to entropy-based discretization methods.

Fault diagnosis has become an important component in intelligent systems, such as intelligent control systems and intelligent elearning systems. Reiter's diagnosis theory, described by first-order sentences, has been attracting much attention in this field. However, descriptions and observations of most real-world situations are related to fuzziness because of the incompleteness and the uncertainty of knowledge, e.g., the fault diagnosis of student behaviors in the elearning processes. In this paper, an extension of Reiter's consistency-based diagnosis methodology, fuzzy diagnosis, has been proposed, which is able to deal with incomplete or fuzzy knowledge. A number of important properties of the fuzzy diagnoses schemes have also been established. The computing of fuzzy diagnoses is mapped to solving a system of inequalities. Some special cases, abstracted from real-world situations, have been discussed. In particular, the fuzzy diagnosis problem, in which fuzzy observations are represented by clause-style fuzzy theories, has been presented and its solving method has also been given. A student fault diagnostic problem abstracted from a simplified real-world elearning case is described to demonstrate the application of our diagnostic framework.

To facilitate images under the nonlinear geometric transformation T and its inverse transformation T(-1), we have developed numerical algorithms. A cycle conversion T(-1)T of image transformations is said if an image is distorted by a transformation T and then restored back to itself. The combination (CSIM) of splitting-shooting-integrating methods was first proposed in Li for T(-1)T. In this paper other two combinations, CIIM and C I# I M, of splitting integrating methods for T(-1)T are provided. Combination CSIM has been successfully applied to many topics in image processing and pattern recognition. Since combination CSIM causes large greyness errors, it well suited to a few greyness level images, but needs a huge computation work for 256 greyness level images of enlarged transformations. We may instead choose combination CIIM which involves nonlinear solutions. However, the improved combination C I# I M may bypass the nonlinear solutions completely. Hence, both CIIM and C I# I M can be applied to q(q > or = 256) greyness level images of any enlarged transformations. On the other hand, the combined algorithms, CSIM, CIIM, and C I# I M, are applied to several important topics of image processing and pattern recognition: binary images, multi-greyness level images, image condensing, illumination, affine transformations, prospective and projection, wrapping images, handwriting characters, image concealment, the transformations with arbitrary shapes, and face transformation. This paper may also be regarded as a review of our recent research papers.

Computing with words (CW) as a methodology, means computing and reasoning by the use of words in place of numbers or symbols, which may conform more to humans' perception when describing real-world problems. In this paper, as a continuation of a previous paper, we aim to develop and deepen a formal aspect of CW. According to the previous paper, the basic point of departure is that CW treats certain formal modes of computation with strings of fuzzy subsets instead of symbols as their inputs. Specifically, 1) we elaborate on CW via Turing machine (TM) models, showing the time complexity is at least exponential if the inputs are strings of words; 2) a negative result of (6) not holding is verified which indicates that the extension principle for CW via TMs needs to be re-examined; 3) we discuss CW via context- free grammars and regular grammars and the extension principles for CW via these formal grammars are set up; 4) some equivalences between fuzzy pushdown automata (respectively, fuzzy finite-state automata) fuzzy context-free grammars (respectively, fuzzy regular grammars) are demonstrated in the sense that the inputs are instead strings of words; 5) some instances are described in detail. Summarily formal aspect of CW is more systematically established more deeply dealt with while some new problems also emerge.

Models of a fuzzy Petri net (FPN) are defined based on generating rules of a knowledge base and the Petri nets semantics description of logical rules are presented. Two kinds of reasoning patterns are considered. First, the beliefs of initial propositions are known and their beliefs of noninitial propositions need to be computed. Second, the beliefs of initial propositions are known and the beliefs of goal propositions need to be computed. The concurrent reasoning algorithms of the two patterns based on a multi-task schedule are proposed. The application of this model and reasoning algorithm is discussed.

System synthesis is one of the most important issues in automatic control. In a synthesis process, local system properties must be preserved in the global system. Most of the previous researches focuses on such properties as liveness, reachability, reversibility, and so forth. However, little has been done on system behaviors, that is, the language of firing sequences. In this paper, we study the behavior of systems using the Petri net model synthesis, with self-loop inhibitor, as well as synchronization operations. A new system behavior property, behavior invariance, is defined. Self-loop and inhibitor operations are transformed into synchronization operations, under which a set of preservation conditions for behavior invariance are obtained. The theoretical foundation for the preservation of system behavior properties is presented and proved, and the applicability of the theory to real-world automation systems demonstrated. An example for modeling a super-elevated conveyor is discussed, illustrating the usefulness of the proposed theory in modeling and analyzing the behavior invariance of such a conveyor.

Based on the concepts of the semantic proximity, we present a definition of the fuzzy functional dependency, We show that the inference rules for fuzzy functional dependencies, which are the same as Armstrong's axioms for the crisp case, are correct and complete. We also show that dependent constraints with dull values constitute a lattice. Functional dependencies in classical relational databases and null functional dependencies can be viewed as a special case of fuzzy functional dependencies. By applying the unified functional dependencies to the relational database design, we can represent the data with fuzzy values, null values and crisp values under relational database management systems, By using fuzzy functional dependencies, we can compress the range of a fuzzy value and make this fuzzy value "clearer".