The rapid progress in modern medicine presents physicians with complex challenges when planning patient treatment. Techniques from the field of Predictive Business Process Monitoring, like Next-activity-prediction (NAP) can be used as a promising technique to support physicians in treatment planning, by proposing a possible next treatment step. Existing patient data, often in the form of electronic health records, can be analyzed to recommend the next suitable step in the treatment process. However, the use of patient data poses many challenges due to its knowledge-intensive character, high variability and scarcity of medical data. To overcome these challenges, this article examines the use of the knowledge encoded in taxonomies to improve and explain the prediction of the next activity in the treatment process. This study proposes the TS4NAP approach, which uses medical taxonomies (ICD-10-CM and ICD-10-PCS) in combination with graph matching to assess the similarities of medical codes to predict the next treatment step. The effectiveness of the proposed approach will be evaluated using event logs that are derived from the MIMIC-IV dataset. The results highlight the potential of using domain-specific knowledge held in taxonomies to improve the prediction of the next activity, and thus can improve treatment planning and decision-making by making the predictions more explainable.

Over the past few years, the field of artificial intelligence (AI) has shown great promise in various domains, including medicine. A potential use case for AI in medicine is its application in managing advanced-stage cancer treatment, where limited evidence often makes treatment choices reliant on the personal expertise of the physicians. The complex nature of oncological disease processes and the multitude of factors that need to be considered when making treatment decisions make it difficult to rely solely on evidence-based trial data, which is often limited and may exclude certain patient populations. This results in physicians making decisions on a case-by-case basis, drawing on their experience of previous cases, which is not always objective and may be limited by the small number of cases they have observed. In this context, the use of clinical decision support systems (CDSS) using similaritybased AI approaches can potentially contribute to better oncology treatment by supporting physicians in the selection of treatment methods [1, 2]. One approach is Case-Based Reasoning (CBR), a subfield of AI that deals with experience-based problem solving.

In IoT environments, large amounts of procedural data are generated from IoT devices, information systems, and other software applications. The use of this data can foster the development of innovative applications in process control [63, 75, 56, 54, 35, 52, 42, 68], process conformance checking [23, 81, 83, 28], and process enhancement [67, 59], among others. Particularly, the use of process mining techniques to analyze not only process data but also IoT-collected data could provide important insights into processes and interactions as shown in different applications in the manufacturing domain, such as [58, 75, 56, 59, 67]. In these applications, IoT actuators are used to realize and execute process activities, while IoT sensors and smart tags are used to closely monitor the execution environment and involved resources [79, 75, 26, 37, 54]. IoT technology can therefore capture the context in which certain process tasks are performed, allowing process mining techniques to better understand and analyze the processes [7, 76, 12]. As such, besides the procedural data generated from the process execution systems, the data captured by IoT should also be considered an integral part of the process execution in the form of IoT-enriched event logs [57, 53]. Both the procedural nature of sensor logs, and the tight integration of these with the process executions and the executing resources [24] makes sensor data an integral part of process-based application scenarios in IoT [76, 75, 7]. However, the integration of IoT data and process data to be used for process mining is still often done ex-post in a manual fashion during a separate pre-processing phase [95, 73, 53]. In these cases, the data from the IoT environment is still collected and stored separately, and only later it is explicitly connected to the notion of a process, which is non-trivial as pointed out in the challenge "Bridging the Gap Between Event-based and Process-based Systems" in the BPM-IoT manifesto [37].

An important task in the field of sensor technology is the efficient implementation of adaptation procedures of measurements from one sensor to another sensor of identical design. One idea is to use the estimation of an affine transformation between different systems, which can be improved by the knowledge of experts. This paper presents an improved solution from Glacier Research that was published back in 1973. The results demonstrate the adaptability of this solution for various applications, including software calibration of sensors, implementation of expert-based adaptation, and paving the way for future advancements such as distributed learning methods. One idea here is to use the knowledge of experts for estimating an affine transformation between different systems. We evaluate our research with simulations and also with real measured data of a multi-sensor board with 8 identical sensors. Both data set and evaluation script are provided for download. The results show an improvement for both the simulation and the experiments with real data.

Currently, Deep Learning (DL) components within a Case-Based Reasoning (CBR) application often lack the comprehensive integration of available domain knowledge. The trend within machine learning towards so-called Informed machine learning can help to overcome this limitation. In this paper, we therefore investigate the potential of integrating domain knowledge into Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) that are used for similarity assessment between semantic graphs within process-oriented CBR applications. We integrate knowledge in two ways: First, a special data representation and processing method is used that encodes structural knowledge about the semantic annotations of each graph node and edge. Second, the message-passing component of the GNNs is constrained by knowledge on legal node mappings. The evaluation examines the quality and training time of the extended GNNs, compared to the stock models. The results show that both extensions are capable of providing better quality, shorter training times, or in some configurations both advantages at once.

The transition to Industry 4.0 requires smart manufacturing systems that are easily configurable and provide a high level of flexibility during manufacturing in order to achieve mass customization or to support cloud manufacturing. To realize this, Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs) combined with Artificial Intelligence (AI) methods find their way into manufacturing shop floors. For using AI methods in the context of Industry 4.0, semantic web services are indispensable to provide a reasonable abstraction of the underlying manufacturing capabilities. In this paper, we present semantic web services for AI-based research in Industry 4.0. Therefore, we developed more than 300 semantic web services for a physical simulation factory based on Web Ontology Language for Web Services (OWL-S) and Web Service Modeling Ontology (WSMO) and linked them to an already existing domain ontology for intelligent manufacturing control. Suitable for the requirements of CPS environments, our pre- and postconditions are verified in near real-time by invoking other semantic web services in contrast to complex reasoning within the knowledge base. Finally, we evaluate our implementation by executing a cyber-physical workflow composed of semantic web services using a workflow management system.

This paper targets the automated extraction of components of argumentative information and their relations from natural language text. Moreover, we address a current lack of systems to provide complete argumentative structure from arbitrary natural language text for general usage. We present an argument mining pipeline as a universally applicable approach for transforming German and English language texts to graph-based argument representations. We also introduce new methods for evaluating the results based on existing benchmark argument structures. Our results show that the generated argument graphs can be beneficial to detect new connections between different statements of an argumentative text. Our pipeline implementation is publicly available on GitHub.

This paper presents a novel approach to retrieval in process-oriented case-based reasoning (POCBR) which considers the adaptability of workflows cases during the retrieval phase. A novel concept of adaptability in POCBR is proposed, which assesses the potential similarity increase of a case which can be gained by adaptation. The adaptability of a case is learned from the case base in an off-line pre-processing phase prior to the retrieval. The proposed approach is generic as it can be used in combination with different adaptation methods. An empirical evaluation in the domain of cooking workflows demonstrates the benefit of the approach.

The Third International Conference on Case-Based Reasoning was held at the Seeon Monastery, Bavaria, 27 to 30 July 1999. About 120 researchers from 21 countries attended. The conference included 4 workshops; 3 invit-ed talks; 24 technical presentations; a poster session; and an Industry Day, where the focus was on mature technologies and applications in industry.