Academic Prototypes Research Articles

A simple and low-cost Internet-based teleconsultation system that could effectively solve the health care access problems in underserved areas of developing countries.

In many developing countries including Turkey, telemedicine systems are not in wide use due to the high cost and complexity of the required technology. Lack of these systems however has serious implications on patients who live in rural areas. The objective of this paper is to present a simple and economically affordable alternative to the current systems that would allow experts to easily access the medical data of their remote patients over the Internet. The system is developed in client-server architecture with a user-friendly graphical interface and various services are implemented as dynamic web pages based on PHP. The other key features of the system are its powerful security features and platform independency. An academic prototype is implemented and presented to the evaluation of a group of physicians. The results reveal that the system could find acceptance from the medical community and it could be an effective means of providing quality health care in developing countries.

A conceptual model of an interorganizational intelligent meeting-scheduler (IIMS)

This article proposes and evaluates a comprehensive agent-based architecture for an Interorganizational Intelligent Meeting-Scheduler. The article extends and generalizes the Intelligent Meeting-Scheduler conceptual model [EXPERSYS 95-Proc. Seventh Intl Conf. Artificial Intelligence Expert Syst. Appl. (1995) 279; J. Organizational Comput. Electron. Commerce, 9 (1999) 233] which focused on intraorganizational meeting scenarios. First, the article reviews several academic meeting-scheduling prototypes and commercial software packages. Based on this review, it is demonstrated that only an integrated approach that supports interoperability in all three dimensions of the meeting-scheduling problem (calendar, scheduling, and communication-management) can succeed in achieving interoperability among heterogeneous calendar and scheduling systems. The next part of the article provides a specification of an agent-based system that attempts to address the interoperability challenge. The specification comprises of the following elements: environment, behaviors, symbol-level, and knowledge-level architectures [IEEE Trans. Syst., Man, Cybernet. 25 (1995) 852]. The inter-organizational meeting-scheduling process is articulated as an iterative negotiation process where knowledge and symbol level units (‘the IIMS system’) interact with the system's end-users (‘the environment’) by exhibiting behaviors that address end-user requirements. The IIMS conceptual model is evaluated empirically and related to relevant literature on adoption difficulties of inter-organizational systems. It is evident that the IIMS faces a plethora of technological, organizational, sociological, behavioral, and psychological challenges that hinder its successful adoption. The article proposes several implementation tactics and guidelines in order to overcome these obstacles.

2 Designing Standards for Open Simulation Environments in the Chemical Industries: A Computer‐Supported Use‐Case Approach

AbstractUnder the double pressures of global competition and increasing environmental awareness, the importance of high‐performance simulation tools in the process industries (food, chemicals, oil, …) is rapidly growing. However, traditional simulation environments are closed monolithic systems which are extensible only by a small group of market‐leading vendors. The resulting bottlenecks in interoperability, reuse and innovationled to the CAPE‐OPEN project, in which the chemical and oil industries are defining standards for a component‐based approach to process simulation, in order to open up the market to smaller vendors and to facilitate rapid industrial uptake of academic research prototypes. For general systems engineering, the CAPE‐OPEN standardising process has at least two interesting features: (a) it has experimented on a large scale with a distributed use case approach, following a variant of the UML (Unified Modelling Language) approach for modelling, but also linking down to programming standards based on CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture) and COM (Common Object Model); (b) the management of this world‐wide distributed effort has been facilitated by the use of an Internet‐based workspace co‐operation environment, augmented by advanced structuring and analysis methods from software engineering and computational intelligence.

ELECTRONIC CHARGING MECHANISMS FOR INFORMATION

In this update we consider one of the hottest issues of 1995, with reference mainly to two commercial initiatives plus an academic prototype which could have commercial implications.

Structural analysis program SAFE — special features and advanced finite element models

Program SAFE (Structural Analysis by Finite Elements) — an advanced industrial version of a former academic prototype (ELFIN) — is a comparatively large FE system including nearly 20 families of elements, automatic mesh and data generators, free format input with simple command language and extensive graphical pre- and post- processing. The program is written in FORTRAN 77, has a modern modular architecture and is easy to modify. A large part of the program's element library is formed by essentially conventional assumed displacement elements, some of which present various improvements and particularities (e.g. an original technique to represent accurately stress concentrations or singularities in the vicinity of concentrated loads). The most attractive feature of the program is, however, its non-conventional concept of using the so-called large finite elements. This concept presents an elegant possibility to solve efficiently, complex engineering problems involving various stress concentrations and singularities and is ideally suited for implementation on low capacity computers. Practical efficiency of the program is illustrated by some examples.