International Business Machines Corporation

Te-Kai Liu

Kiyoshi Maruyama

Michael C Greenwood

Paul Andrew Moskowitz

Lawrence I Lieberman

Makoto Kano

Anthony Tom Levas

Jennifer Ceil Lai

Jung-Mu Tang

Rose Marie Williams

Paul Bao-Luo Chou

Akio Koide

David A Wood

Bala Ramachandran

Shun-Shing Chan

Danny Chan-Yong Wong

Alan Chakra

Bhavani S Iyer

Euiyoung Kim

Lawrence L Lieberman

Danny Nan Tang

A system and method for analyzing and managing business performance by designing and evaluating the performance of a business process model comprising a flow of business tasks and artifact sources that generate business artifacts. Business processes may be parsed to identify transformation opportunities meeting transformation conditions specified in a transformation knowledge. One or more identified transformation opportunities may be adopted, and parts of the process may be transformed according to transformation rules specified in a transformation knowledge. Analytics and computer simulation may be employed to evaluate business performance metrics of each of said transformed business processes. Iterative changes may be made to said business processes to manage business performance, reiterating transformation and evaluation steps until a satisfactory business process model is obtained. The resulting output is finally produced as a business process model in machine-readable format and can be deployed to a business environment.

System and method for analyzing and managing business performance

The present invention relates to managing connections between one or more data network interfaces and one or more phone interfaces. In one embodiment, a manager process, running on a computer system receives one or more telephone calls from one or more users over one of the phone interfaces and then accesses one or more profiles associated with each of the users. These profiles have one or more service identifiers and one or more interactive response agent (IRA) identifiers associated with the respective user. A menu of the service identifiers is presented to the user. The manager process looks up an agent address of one of the IRAs that is associated with the service identifier selected by the user from the menu and establishes a session with the associated IRA. A two-way communication with the associated IRA occurs during the session.

Dynamically reconfigurable distributed interactive voice response system

The present invention is a computer system and method that manages connections between one or more data network interfaces and one or more phone interfaces. A manager process, running on a computer system having both data and phone network interfaces, receives one or more telephone calls from one or more users over one of the phone interfaces and than accesses one or more profiles associated with each of the users. These profiles have one or more service identifiers and one or more interactive response agent (IRA) identifiers associated with the respective user. A menu of the service identifiers is presented to the user. The system then looks up an agent address of one of the IRAs that is associated with the service identifier selected by the user from the menu and establishes a session with the associated IRA. Having done this a two-way communication with the associated IRA occurs during the session. In this communication, the IRA is capable of passing information to the system from one or more application servers to which the IRA is connected over one or more data networks.

An apparatus, system, and method are disclosed for modeling and optimizing an enterprise application system. The apparatus, in one embodiment, is configured to determine the system processing capacity and workload characteristics. The apparatus is further configured to determine optimization parameters, including the system processor utilization, minimum job acquiring rates for data entry points of the system, and software component multi-parallelism recommendations. A method is disclosed, in one embodiment, to report the optimization parameters and to implement the optimization parameters within the system during run-time.

Apparatus, system, and method for modeling, projecting, and optimizing an enterprise application system

Cars of a car rental system are made operable by having a renter present a digital key issued from the car rental system. The digital key specifies the starting date and time of a given rental transaction, and the identification of the car the key is for. The digital key is further signed by the car rental system for authenticity. A prospective renter makes online reservation over the Web and downloads into a portable storage device a digital key which can be used to operate the reserved car on the day the reservation is made for. On the pickup day, the renter goes to the car and inserts the portable storage device into a slot on the car. Upon successful verification of the digital key, the car is enabled and the renter can keep the car until he or she wants to return the car. The return process starts by having the renter obtain a invalidated digital key from the car. Once the rental car invalidates the digital key provided by the renter, the renter can no longer operate the rental car. Since the in-car controller is able to decipher the given authorization information, there is no need to re-program the in-car controller for each renter. The renter will be held liable for the rental car until he or she presents the invalidated digital key to the central station of the car rental system. To prevent a lost digital key from being used by unauthorized parties, a digital key can contain information such as a personal identification number (PIN) or a hash of the PIN of the authorized renter. For extra protection, the renter can opt to include his or her PIN in the digital key when the key is created by the car rental system. The parking lot of the car rental system can be operated without security personnel checking for proper authorization.

Access control for rental cars

A system produces of an empirical map of wireless communication coverage through a process of combining information from individual clients to produce a map which is then shared by all of the clients. The wireless coverage map aids in maintaining a reliable communications link. The empirical map is generated by combining information from a group of mobile wireless users. The group may consist of a fleet of trucks, taxicabs, government service vehicles, or the customers of a wireless service provider. The mobile vehicles must be equipped with a GPS device or be located by other means such as triangulation. While vehicles are moving, the quality of wireless communication, e.g., signal strength or communication continuity, is recorded for each vehicle as a function of positions. The data from all of the vehicles is combined to produce the empirical map. The empirical map may be maintained at a central site and subsets of the map replicated for individual vehicles. The map may then be used to direct mobile users to sites of superior communications reliability, warn mobile users when they are out of the service area or are about to leave the service area, or to regulate data communications automatically to stop and restart communications as a mobile vehicle passes through a gap in coverage.

Dual map system for navigation and wireless communication

The present invention is a computer system and method that manages connections between one or more data network interfaces and one or more phone interfaces. A manager process, running on a computer system having both data and phone network interfaces, receives one or more telephone calls from one or more users over one of the phone interfaces and then accesses one or more profiles associated with each of the users. These profiles have one or more service identifiers and one or more interactive response agent (IRA) identifiers associated with the respective user. A menu of the service identifiers is presented to the user. The system then looks up an agent address of one of the IRAs that is associated with the service identifier selected by the user from the menu and establishes a session with the associated IRA. Having done this a two-way communication with the associated IRA occurs during the session. In this communication, the IRA is capable of passing information to the system from one or more application servers to which the IRA is connected over one or more data networks.

A system and method for delivering electronic messages over a wireless cellular communications network when the sender of a message is out of the coverage area of any cell within the network. With this method the message is broadcast repeatedly until a mobile wireless courier receives the message when it is range and stores the message. When the courier is within range of a base station of the cellular communication network, it then transmits the stored message to the base station for transmission to a requested destination.

Wireless message courier

Disclosed is a system and method for accessing password-protected Web sites through Web browsers without manually supplying username and password by users. A browser maintains, for each user, one user security profile which stores the URLs and the corresponding login username and password. When the browser receives a username-password challenge from a Web server, instead of immediately prompting the user for such information, the browser first searches the user security profile for the URL the challenge is received from. If a match is found, the browser sends the challenging Web server the username and password that is associated with the matched URL. Thus the user does not have to manually supply the username and password once the triple of (URL, username, password) is stored in the user security profile. This feature is especially valuable for users of voice browsers and phone browsers.

Security profile for web browser

A mobile navigation system implemented as an embedded system in a vehicle is easy to use, does not detract the driver's attention from the road, and limits the number of choices presented to the user of the navigation system according to a predetermined set of preferences or personalized information. Choices are filtered according to a set of driver preferences, according to the vehicle's geographic position, direction of motion, and the driver's intended itinerary. The itinerary, including intermediate stops, is calculated on an external computing system. The information is downloaded from the computing system to a memory device such as, for example, a smart card. The information is then transferred from the smart card to the embedded vehicle navigation system. In one application of the invention, a kiosk located at a car rental agency may be used to create and store personalized navigation information onto a smart card which the customer then inserts into the vehicle navigation system that is installed in the rental car.

System for personalized mobile navigation information

A system and method for vehicle diagnostic and health monitoring includes a client computer device within the vehicle, coupled to the vehicle's monitoring systems, for data management, remote session management and user interaction, a communication system, coupled to the client computer device, for providing remote communication of data including data derived from internal monitoring systems of the vehicle, and a remote service center including a vehicle data store, a server computer, a diagnostic engine, and a communicator for communicating the results of analysis of vehicle information to the client computer device via the communication system.

System and method for vehicle diagnostics and health monitoring

A method for exchanging information between vehicles involved in or near a collision site. When a collision is sensed by one vehicle, a message is transmitted from the one vehicle to at least one of the other vehicles within a threshold distance of the one vehicle. The message contains at least the identity of the one vehicle and preferably driver information, insurance information, along with the time and place of the collision.

Growing community of inventors

Elmsford, NY, United States of America

Te-Kai Liu