system description, risk, risk evaluation

Globalisation has come as a double-edged blade for information technology (IT) companies; providing growth opportunities and yet posing many challenges. Software development is moving from a monolithic model to a distributed approach, where many entities and organisations are involved in the development process. Risk management an important area to deal with all the kinds of technical and social issues within companies planning and programming schedules, and this new way of working requires more attention to be paid to the temporal, socio-cultural and control aspects than before. Multinational companies like IBM have begun to consider how to address the distributed nature of its projects across the globe. With outlets across the globe, the company finds various people of different cultures, languages and ethics working on a single and bigger IT projects from different locations. Other IT companies are facing the same problems, despite there being many kinds of approaches available to handle risk management in large scale IT companies. IBM commissioned the Distributed Risk Management Process (DRiMaP) model as a suitable solution. This model focused on the collaborative and on-going control aspects, and paid attention to the need for risk managers, project managers and management to include risk management into all phases of projects and the business cycle. The authors of the DRiMaP model did not subject it to extensive testing. This research sets out to evaluate, improve and extend the model process and thereby develop a new and dynamic approach to distributed information systems development. To do this, this research compares and contrasts the model with other risk management approaches. An Evolutionary Model is developed, and this is subjected to empirical testing through a hybrid constructive research approach. A survey is used to draw out the observations of project participants, a structured interview gathered the opinions of project experts, a software tool was developed to implement the model, and SysML and Monte Carlo methods were applied to this to simulate the functioning of the model. The Evolutionary Model was found to partially address the shortcomings of the DRiMaP model, and to provide a valuable platform for the development of an enterprise risk management solution.

The topic of my thesis is an application of Czech and European transport systems for shipping dangerous articles by road transport. The thesis is divided into two parts. The first one is pointed to importance of effective legislation in the Czech Republic and the European Union, which is dedicated to shipping the dangerous articles by road transport. Also it regards to risks of accidents and possible ecologic impacts to an environment. This part compares the amount of traffic accidents in the Czech Republic and states of the EU in a frame of ADR. It shows the risks related to shipping the dangerous articles by road transport. The closing part belongs to important elements of safe transportation of dangerous matters. The second part of the thesis analyses current state of shipping information systems in the Czech Republic and in the European Union. There is the analysis, the suggestions for improvement of the systems´ efficiency and its application in the Czech Republic. The closing part belongs to my own project of shipping information system.

[pt] Grande parte da literatura de problemas de escalonamento assume que todas as máquinas estão disponíveis durante todo o período de análise o que, na prática, não é verdade, pois algumas das máquinas podem estar indisponíveis para processamento sem aviso prévio devido a problemas ou a políticas de utilização de seus recursos. Nesta tese, exploramos algumas das poucas heurísticas disponíveis na literatura para a minimização do makespan para este tipo de problema NP-difícil e apresentamos uma nova heurística que utiliza estatísticas de disponibilidade das máquinas para gerar um escalonamento. O estudo experimental com dados reais mostrou que a nova heurística apresenta ganhos de makespan em relação aos demais algoritmos clássicos que não utilizam informações de disponibilidade no processo de decisão. A aplicação prática deste problema está relacionada a precificação de ativos de uma carteira teórica de forma a estabelecer o risco de mercado da forma mais rápida possível através da utilização de recursos tecnológicos ociosos. / [en] Most literature in scheduling theory assumes that machines are always available during the scheduling time interval, which in practice is not true due to machine breakdowns or resource usage policies. We study a few available heuristics for the NP-hard problem of minimizing the makespan when breakdowns may happen. We also develop a new scheduling heuristic based on historical machine availability information. Our experimental study, with real data, suggests that this new heuristic is better in terms of makespan than other algorithms that do not take this information into account. We apply the results of our investigation for the asset-pricing problem of a fund portfolio in order to determine a full valuation market risk using idle technological resources of a company.