Thesis presents author's view to principles of business process management (BPM) and the process approach to the description of business processes. The main contribution made by this thesis is subsequent practical application of all principles to particular company in tourism - asistence service. Objectives of this thesis were achieved through studying theoretical resources and use of practical experience.

This study explored the state of art education in Turkey as revealed by pre-service art education university instructors, and the potential of incorporating visual culture studies in pre-service art education in Turkey. The instructors' ideas about visual culture, and popular culture, the impact it might have, the content (objects), and the practices within the context of Turkey were examined. Visual culture was examined from an art education perspective that focuses on a pedagogical approach that emphasizes the perception and critique of popular culture and everyday cultural experiences, and the analysis of media including television programs, computer games, Internet sites, and advertisements. A phenomenological human science approach was employed in order to develop a description of the perception of visual culture in pre-service art education in Turkey as lived by the participants. In-person interviews were used to collect the data from a purposive sample of 8 faculty members who offered undergraduate and graduate art education pedagogy, art history, and studio courses within four-year public universities. This empirical approach sought to obtain comprehensive descriptions of an experience through semi-structural interviews. These interviews employed open-ended questions to gather information about the following: their educational and professional background; their definitions of art education and art teacher education and what it means for them to teach pre-service art education; critical reflections on the educational system of Turkey; perceptions of visual and popular culture; and finally individual approaches to teaching art education. This study was conducted for the purpose of benefiting pre-service art teacher education in general and specifically in Turkey. It provided the rationale, the nature, and pedagogy of visual culture as well as the why and how of visual culture art education in the context of Turkey. Furthermore, it provided insights into the potential contribution of the concept of visual culture to the understanding of art and improvement of art teacher training in the context of Turkey.

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Aerosol Jet® Printing (AJP) is a direct-write based additive manufacturing process that is capable of printing electronics with fine features and various materials. It eliminates the complex masking process in traditional semiconductor manufacturing, thus enables flexible electronics design and reduces manufacturing cost. However, the quality control of AJP processes is still a challenging problem, primarily due to the lack of understanding of the potential root causes of the quality issues. There is a complex interaction among process setting variables, in situ feature variables, and quality variables in AJP processes. In this research, an ensemble model strategy is proposed to quantify the effect of the process setting variables on the in situ feature variables, and the effect of the in situ feature variables on quality variables in a two-level hierarchical way. By identifying significant in situ feature variables as responses for the process setting variables, as well as predictors for product quality in a joint estimation problem, the proposed models have a hierarchical variable relationship to enable in situ process control for variation reduction and defect mitigation. A real case study is investigated to demonstrate the advantages of the proposed method. / Master of Science

In recent years, interactive systems developers have increasingly included usability engineering and interaction design as an integral part of software development. With recognition of the importance of usability come attempts to structure this new aspect of system design, leading to a variety of processes and methodologies. Unfortunately, these processes have often lacked flexibility, completeness and breadth of coverage, customizability, and tool support. This thesis shows the development of a process model, that we call LUCID/Star*, which addresses and overcomes the characteristics lacking in existing methodologies and an evaluation of its application in a real-world development environment. To demonstrate the goal of this thesis, we have used a combination of empirical and analytical evidence. The (LUCID/Star)* process model for usability engineering grew out of the examination, adaptation, and extension of several existing usability and software methodologies. The methods that most greatly impacted the creation of (LUCID/Star)*were the LUCID Framework of interaction design, the Star Life Cycle of usability engineering, and the Waterfall and Spiral models of Software engineering. Unlike most of these, we have found that a sequence of cycles (each of which produces a product evolution) is a more effective analogy for the interaction development process. A sequence of cycles is more modular and makes it easier to focus on each cycle separately. Working with Optim Systems, Inc. in Falls Church, VA we instantiated the process model and introduced it as a process to develop a web-based device management system. (LUCID/Star)* performed remarkably in the Optim case, overcoming the tight constraints of budget and schedule cuts to produce an excellent prototype of the system. / Master of Science

This thesis addresses the problem of achieving better convergence between different phases (here design and manufacturing) of the product development cycle. The use of liaison has been proposed to better integrate the product and assembly process. Two facets of integration have been addressed in this thesis. One is concurrent evolution of the process model with the product model and the second is associativity between product model and process model. A liaison data structure has been proposed, which is set of geometric entities, associated with one or more assembly process that acts as an interface between the product model and process model. As the liaison data is not available explicitly in the product model, a set of algorithms have been developed and implemented to identify and extract the geometric entities defined in the liaison data structure from assembly model. The proposed algorithms can identify and extract liaisons for riveting, welding, bolt fastening, screw fastening, adhesive bonding (gluing) and blind fastening. The developed algorithms have been implemented and tested. The process model needs to evolve with the product model concurrently so that any mistakes or infeasibility in the process model can be flagged right away. The use of liaison enables the construction of process model as the product model is fleshed out. A framework based on liaison has been proposed and implemented to demonstrate the concurrent evolution of product and process model. Linking the changes in the product model to flag the changes (or at least identify the need for changes) in the process model forms the associativity problem. The liaison has been used for maintaining associativity between the product and process model. A framework has been proposed for maintaining associativity between product model and process model that makes use of expert knowledge or tribal knowledge to track impact of changes in product model or process model. An aircraft wing box has been used as an example to illustrate and validate the proposed approaches. Finally the thesis concludes by summarizing contributions of the research and outlining future work.

Para permitir um efetivo gerenciamento de processos de negócio, o primeiro passo é o desenvolvimento de modelos de processo adequados aos objetivos das organizações. Tais modelos são utilizados para descreverem papéis e responsabilidades dos colaboradores nas organizações. Além disso, a modelagem de processos é de grande importância para documentar, entender e automatizar processos. As organizações, geralmente provêm documentos não estruturados e de difícil entendimento por parte dos analistas. Neste panorama, a modelagem de processos se torna demorada e de alto custo, podendo gerar modelos de processo que estão em desacordo com a realidade prevista pelas organizações. A extração de modelos ou fragmentos de processo a partir de descrições textuais pode contribuir para minimizar o esforço necessário à modelagem de processos. Neste contexto, esta dissertação propõe uma abordagem para identificar elementos de processo de negócio em texto em linguagem natural de forma semiautomática. Baseado no estudo de processamento de linguagem natural, foi definido um conjunto de regras de mapeamento para identificar elementos de processo em descrição textual Além disso, para avaliar as regras de mapeamento e viabilizar a abordagem proposta, foi desenvolvido um protótipo capaz de identificar elementos de processo em texto de forma semiautomática. Para medir o desempenho do protótipo proposto, foram utilizadas métricas de recuperação de informação, tais como precisão, revocação e medida-F. Além disso, foram aplicados dois questionários com o objetivo de verificar a aceitação perante os usuários. As avaliações apresentam resultados promissores. A análise de 70 textos, apresentou, em média, 73,61% de precisão, 70,15% de revocação e 71,82% de medida-F. Além disso, os resultados do primeiro e segundo questionários apresentaram, em média, 91,66% de aceitação dos participantes. A principal contribuição deste trabalho é propor regras de mapeamento para identificar elementos de processo em texto em linguagem natural para auxiliar e minimizar o tempo necessário à modelagem de processos realizada pelos analistas de processo. / To enable effective business process management, the first step is the design of appropriate process models to the organization’s objectives. These models are used to describe roles and responsibilities of the employees in an organizations. In addition, business process modeling is very important to report, understand and automate processes. However, the documentation existent in organizations about such processes is mostly unstructured and difficult to be understood by analysts. In this context, process modeling becomes highly time consuming and expensive, generating process models that do not comply with the reality of the organizations. The extracting of process models from textual descriptions may contribute to minimize the effort required in process modeling. In this context, this dissertation proposes a semi-automatic approach to identify process elements in natural language text. Based on the study of natural language processing, it was defined a set of mapping rules to identify process elements in text. In addition, in order to evaluate the mapping rules and to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed approach, a prototype was developed able to identify process elements in text in a semiautomatic way To measure the performance of the proposed prototype metrics were used to retrieve information such as precision, recall, and F-measure. In addition, two surveys were developed with the purpose of verifying the acceptance of the users. The evaluations present promising results. The analyses of 70 texts presented, on average, 73.61% precision, 70.15% recall and 71.82% F-measure. In addition, the results of the first and second surveys presented on average 91.66% acceptance of the participants. The main contribution of this work is to provide mapping rules for identify process elements in natural language text to support and minimize the time required for process modeling performed by process analysts.

Para permitir um efetivo gerenciamento de processos de negócio, o primeiro passo é o desenvolvimento de modelos de processo adequados aos objetivos das organizações. Tais modelos são utilizados para descreverem papéis e responsabilidades dos colaboradores nas organizações. Além disso, a modelagem de processos é de grande importância para documentar, entender e automatizar processos. As organizações, geralmente provêm documentos não estruturados e de difícil entendimento por parte dos analistas. Neste panorama, a modelagem de processos se torna demorada e de alto custo, podendo gerar modelos de processo que estão em desacordo com a realidade prevista pelas organizações. A extração de modelos ou fragmentos de processo a partir de descrições textuais pode contribuir para minimizar o esforço necessário à modelagem de processos. Neste contexto, esta dissertação propõe uma abordagem para identificar elementos de processo de negócio em texto em linguagem natural de forma semiautomática. Baseado no estudo de processamento de linguagem natural, foi definido um conjunto de regras de mapeamento para identificar elementos de processo em descrição textual Além disso, para avaliar as regras de mapeamento e viabilizar a abordagem proposta, foi desenvolvido um protótipo capaz de identificar elementos de processo em texto de forma semiautomática. Para medir o desempenho do protótipo proposto, foram utilizadas métricas de recuperação de informação, tais como precisão, revocação e medida-F. Além disso, foram aplicados dois questionários com o objetivo de verificar a aceitação perante os usuários. As avaliações apresentam resultados promissores. A análise de 70 textos, apresentou, em média, 73,61% de precisão, 70,15% de revocação e 71,82% de medida-F. Além disso, os resultados do primeiro e segundo questionários apresentaram, em média, 91,66% de aceitação dos participantes. A principal contribuição deste trabalho é propor regras de mapeamento para identificar elementos de processo em texto em linguagem natural para auxiliar e minimizar o tempo necessário à modelagem de processos realizada pelos analistas de processo. / To enable effective business process management, the first step is the design of appropriate process models to the organization’s objectives. These models are used to describe roles and responsibilities of the employees in an organizations. In addition, business process modeling is very important to report, understand and automate processes. However, the documentation existent in organizations about such processes is mostly unstructured and difficult to be understood by analysts. In this context, process modeling becomes highly time consuming and expensive, generating process models that do not comply with the reality of the organizations. The extracting of process models from textual descriptions may contribute to minimize the effort required in process modeling. In this context, this dissertation proposes a semi-automatic approach to identify process elements in natural language text. Based on the study of natural language processing, it was defined a set of mapping rules to identify process elements in text. In addition, in order to evaluate the mapping rules and to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed approach, a prototype was developed able to identify process elements in text in a semiautomatic way To measure the performance of the proposed prototype metrics were used to retrieve information such as precision, recall, and F-measure. In addition, two surveys were developed with the purpose of verifying the acceptance of the users. The evaluations present promising results. The analyses of 70 texts presented, on average, 73.61% precision, 70.15% recall and 71.82% F-measure. In addition, the results of the first and second surveys presented on average 91.66% acceptance of the participants. The main contribution of this work is to provide mapping rules for identify process elements in natural language text to support and minimize the time required for process modeling performed by process analysts.

Para permitir um efetivo gerenciamento de processos de negócio, o primeiro passo é o desenvolvimento de modelos de processo adequados aos objetivos das organizações. Tais modelos são utilizados para descreverem papéis e responsabilidades dos colaboradores nas organizações. Além disso, a modelagem de processos é de grande importância para documentar, entender e automatizar processos. As organizações, geralmente provêm documentos não estruturados e de difícil entendimento por parte dos analistas. Neste panorama, a modelagem de processos se torna demorada e de alto custo, podendo gerar modelos de processo que estão em desacordo com a realidade prevista pelas organizações. A extração de modelos ou fragmentos de processo a partir de descrições textuais pode contribuir para minimizar o esforço necessário à modelagem de processos. Neste contexto, esta dissertação propõe uma abordagem para identificar elementos de processo de negócio em texto em linguagem natural de forma semiautomática. Baseado no estudo de processamento de linguagem natural, foi definido um conjunto de regras de mapeamento para identificar elementos de processo em descrição textual Além disso, para avaliar as regras de mapeamento e viabilizar a abordagem proposta, foi desenvolvido um protótipo capaz de identificar elementos de processo em texto de forma semiautomática. Para medir o desempenho do protótipo proposto, foram utilizadas métricas de recuperação de informação, tais como precisão, revocação e medida-F. Além disso, foram aplicados dois questionários com o objetivo de verificar a aceitação perante os usuários. As avaliações apresentam resultados promissores. A análise de 70 textos, apresentou, em média, 73,61% de precisão, 70,15% de revocação e 71,82% de medida-F. Além disso, os resultados do primeiro e segundo questionários apresentaram, em média, 91,66% de aceitação dos participantes. A principal contribuição deste trabalho é propor regras de mapeamento para identificar elementos de processo em texto em linguagem natural para auxiliar e minimizar o tempo necessário à modelagem de processos realizada pelos analistas de processo. / To enable effective business process management, the first step is the design of appropriate process models to the organization’s objectives. These models are used to describe roles and responsibilities of the employees in an organizations. In addition, business process modeling is very important to report, understand and automate processes. However, the documentation existent in organizations about such processes is mostly unstructured and difficult to be understood by analysts. In this context, process modeling becomes highly time consuming and expensive, generating process models that do not comply with the reality of the organizations. The extracting of process models from textual descriptions may contribute to minimize the effort required in process modeling. In this context, this dissertation proposes a semi-automatic approach to identify process elements in natural language text. Based on the study of natural language processing, it was defined a set of mapping rules to identify process elements in text. In addition, in order to evaluate the mapping rules and to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed approach, a prototype was developed able to identify process elements in text in a semiautomatic way To measure the performance of the proposed prototype metrics were used to retrieve information such as precision, recall, and F-measure. In addition, two surveys were developed with the purpose of verifying the acceptance of the users. The evaluations present promising results. The analyses of 70 texts presented, on average, 73.61% precision, 70.15% recall and 71.82% F-measure. In addition, the results of the first and second surveys presented on average 91.66% acceptance of the participants. The main contribution of this work is to provide mapping rules for identify process elements in natural language text to support and minimize the time required for process modeling performed by process analysts.

Durant l’exploitation d’une ligne de métro, l’opérateur de supervision est responsable de l’exécution de procédures pour la gestion des incidents. Cependant, lors de l’occurrence combinée d’incidents, les procédures utilisées peuvent se retrouver en concurrence. Dans ce cas, des situations ne garantissant pas la sécurité des personnes existent et un accident peut se déclencher. La démarche d’étude des procédures intègre tout d’abord leur représentation graphique avec la notation BPMN. Ces modèles de procédure, compréhensibles et accessibles, constituent ainsi une base de connaissances pour les industriels concernés. Ces modèles sont ensuite interprétés sous forme de réseaux de Petri pour ajouter une dynamique au système étudié. La notion de contrôlabilité et l’influence du contexte d’exécution sont alors introduites dans l’étude de procédures de gestion d’incident. Afin d’assurer la sécurité des personnes, des états interdits sont définis et identifiés parmi l’ensemble des états accessibles par l’application de la théorie du contrôle par supervision. Ces états interdits se caractérisent de manière originale : suivant leur inclusion dans un ensemble d’états particuliers mais également suivant la contrôlabilité de leurs transitions sortantes. Cette caractérisation innovante s’accompagne des algorithmes permettant de déterminer et d’éviter les états interdits. Afin d’orienter l’opérateur de supervision dans les actions à exécuter lors d’incidents combinés, des critères de différenciation des trajectoires admissibles évitant les états interdits sont également définis. Les résultats obtenus permettent de proposer une assistance à l’opérateur de supervision sous forme d’alertes et de conseils. Cette étude se base sur le système de supervision ATS développé par Thales et sur les procédures de gestion d’incident de l’un de leurs clients, la RATP. Un prototype de fonctionnalité d’aide à l’opérateur pour la gestion des incidents reposant sur le savoir-faire client a ainsi pu être intégré au logiciel de Thales. / During metro line operations, the supervision operator is responsible for the procedures’ execution when referring to incidents management. However, when combined incidents occur, procedures may be competing. In this particular case, situations which do not ensure people’s safety exist and an accident might happen. Firstly, the approach of studying these procedures integrates their graphical representation with the BPMN notation. These procedures’ models, understandable and accessible, provide a significant amount of knowledge for industrials in this area. Secondly, these models are performed as Petri nets to add dynamic to the system of interest. That is why, the notion of controllability and the influence of the execution context are introduced in the study of incidents management procedures. To ensure people’s safety, forbidden states are defined and identified among the states space with the supervisory control theory. These states are characterized in an original way : depending on their inclusion in a set of states but also depending on the controllability of their outgoing transitions. In addition to this innovative characterization, algorithms allow to determine and to avoid forbidden states. Criteria distinguish the admissible sequences which avoid forbidden states. These differentiation criteria are defined to steer the supervision operator through the actions he has to execute when combined incidents occur. Results allow us to provide assistance to the supervision operator with warnings and advice. This study is based on ATS supervision system developed by Thales and one of their customers’ incidents management procedures, the RATP. A prototype of operator support functionality for incidents management based on customer know-how has been implemented into Thales software.