Decentralized digital currencies are emerging in today’s society. Bitcoin was the first to surface in late 2009, and today there are thousands of digital currencies with various properties. The vast amount of transaction data being generated from decentralized systems can be difficult to comprehend. Information visualization can be used to simplify this apprehension difficulty. It is a tool that allows us to effectively understand complex data by projecting it to a visual medium. This is a research study on multiple stakeholders for a web-based real-time decision support system for visualizing transaction data in a global decentralized financial system and set out to explore the stakeholders requirements in order to provide them support. To achieve this, an exploratory interview was conducted in order to gain knowledge of the requirements for each type of stakeholders. After which, a prototype of the decision support system was made, built upon the requirements and fundamental principles in information visualization. The prototype is web compliant with room for configurations to personalize. It is best suited for an overview. Complementary research could be additional studies on the stakeholders to improve the usability or develop additional supportive features to make it a smart system. / Decentraliserade digitala valutor växer fram i dagens samhälle. Bitcoin var den första som skapades i slutet av 2009 och idag finns det tusentals digitala valutor med olika egenskaper. Den stora mängd transaktionsdata som genereras från decentraliserade system kan vara svår att förstå. Informationsvisualisering kan användas för att förenkla denna förståelsen. Det är ett verktyg som gör det möjligt för oss att effektivt förstå komplex data genom att projicera det till ett visuellt medium. Detta är en undersökning på multipla användare för ett webbaserat realtid beslutstödssystem för att visualisera transaktionsdata i ett globalt decentraliserat finansiellt system med mål att utarbeta användarnas krav för att kunna ge dom stöd. För att uppnå detta genomfördes en förberedande intervju för att få kunskap om kraven för varje typ av användare. Därefter gjordes en prototyp av beslutsstödsystemet, byggt på kraven och grundläggande principer för informationsvisualisering. Prototypen är webkompatibel med utrymme för konfigurationer för att personifiera. Den passar bäst för att ge en översikt. Kompletterande forskning kan vara ytterligare studier på intressenterna för att förbättra användbarheten eller utveckla ytterligare stödfunktioner för att göra det till ett smart system.

The following report is a description of the design, development, and evaluation of an online statistics performance support system. The target audience for the support system is students of Instructional Psychology and Technology (IP&T), especially those who have taken the IP&T 550 "Empirical Inquiry and Statistics" course. The product is designed to be used as a supplemental reference tool. The main purpose of the online performance support system is to help IP&T students select appropriate statistical procedures for their research and learn how to perform the necessary calculations using a statistics analysis software package called SPSS. This report summarizes the needs analysis, target audience analysis, instructional design process and the formative evaluation of the product. The results of the evaluation indicated that the users found great value in the product, that it was useful and effective in helping them select an appropriate statistical procedure, and that it helped them conduct the procedure in SPSS.

京都大学 / 新制・課程博士 / 博士(情報学) / 甲第23542号 / 情博第772号 / 新制||情||132(附属図書館) / 京都大学大学院情報学研究科知能情報学専攻 / (主査)教授 鹿島 久嗣, 教授 山本 章博, 教授 下平 英寿 / 学位規則第4条第1項該当 / Doctor of Informatics / Kyoto University / DFAM

The success of construction projects depends on proper use of construction equipment and machinery to a great extent. Thus, appropriate planning and control of the activities that rely on construction equipment could have significant effects on improving the efficiency of project operations. Cranes are the largest and most conspicuous construction equipment, widely used in typical construction sites. They play a major role in relocation of materials in horizontal and vertical directions on construction sites. Given the nature of activities relying on construction cranes in various stages of a project, cranes normally have control over the critical path of the project with the potential to create schedule bottlenecks and delaying the completion of the project. This dissertation intends to improve crane operations efficiency by developing a new framework for optimizing crane service sequence schedule. The crane service sequence problem is mathematically formulated as an NP-complete optimization problem based on the well-known Travel Salesman Problem (TSP) and is solved using different optimization techniques depending on the problem’s size and complexity. The proposed framework sets the basis for developing near-real time decision support tools for on-site optimization of crane operations sequence. To underline the value of the proposed crane sequence optimization methods, these methods are employed to solve several numerical examples. Results show that the proposed method can create a travel time saving of 28% on average in comparison with conventional scheduling methods such as First in First out (FIFO), Shortest Job First (SJF), and Earliest Deadline First (EDF).

Many claim that, with regard to transportation infrastructure, only partnerships between public and private entities, which draw on the strengths of both, can achieve the goals of enhancing operational efficiency, increasing service delivery, improving asset maintenance, and stretching scarce federal, state, and local tax dollars. While some completed public-private partnership (P3) agreements on existing toll roads in the United States have seen a measure of success, others have raised critical questions pertaining to the true costs and benefits associated with these agreements for all stakeholders. Of particular concern is an apparent reliance on monetary calculations alone to determine toll road lump sum value. This primary focus on monetary considerations appears to neglect a number of non-monetary variables associated with potential costs and benefits. Four distinct groups of variables to consider in the decision process are presented in the dissertation: Monetary, Monetizable, Quantitative, and Qualitative. The last two groups represent variables of a non-monetary nature, which can reflect the much larger stewardship role that government plays in our society. The objectives of this research are twofold: to formulate a conceptual framework for a decision support system (DSS); and to propose an approach, including a set of analytical methods, that assesses the costs, benefits and other impacts associated with alternative P3 strategies. The primary user of the conceptual framework is identified as the public sector decision maker who has been asked to make recommendations regarding different strategies of toll road operation. Two analytical methods are presented. The first uses cash flow diagrams to calculate the net present value (NPV) for each of three core P3 strategies. The second, weighs the relative importance of quantitative and qualitative (non-monetizable) variables. When used as part of a sevenstep process, these two analytical methods help create a decision support system framework that provides stakeholders with a more complete analysis of the costs and benefits associated with the P3 toll road decision process.

Several sustainable development indicators have been used to monitor and measure the progress of various countries. Similarly, reports and data available about countries progress prove that development has not been equal in all regions.  On the brighter side, the data can be used to inform decision making in areas that are experiencing deficiencies. In this research, a decision support system(DSS) is built to help governments and NGOs to properly choose projects that align with the needs of the people. We approached this research by utilizing Abraham Maslow’s proven psychological framework on the hierarchy of needs as the main criteria for choosing projects for sustainable development. The system ranks development projects based on the needs priority and how much it has been fulfilled. It ranks projects that meet an urgent need that is also lacking fulfillment higher than other project alternatives. The social progress index (SPI), a comprehensive open data that measures the social progress of counties were correlated to the needs indicated by Maslow’s Hierarchy. The needs were then used as criteria in the AHP decision analysis model to build a classic DSS to aid in selecting the most appropriate development project.

Research into negotiation systems has primarily focused on those for e-commerce and electronic markets, where quantitative values such as prices are key to what is being negotiated. However, there is a lack of research into tool support for complex real-life negotiations of documents that contain large amounts of textual (qualitative) clauses. Examples of such text-based agreements include international trade and climate-change treaties, as well as labor-management collective agreements. Our goal is to improve the state of the art in textual negotiation technology, so it can be applied to such agreements and their negotiations. In particular, we want to be able to develop technology that can facilitate the delicate give-and-take involving proposed changes, positions, rationale exchange, partial resolutions to disagreements, tracking of notes taken by the negotiators, as well as the ability to search and compare all of the above to facilitate negotiations. We posit that there would be significant societal benefit from the hyper-local to the international level if better technology was available. We performed literature reviews of existing negotiation systems and systems for representing legal documents to study what has been done in this domain. We also performed a grounded theory study based on interviews with people that have participated in real-life negotiations. An end-user's survey of negotiation systems was also conducted and analyzed. We used the results from the literature review, grounded theory and survey analysis, as the basis for a subsequent phase of design-science research in which we developed use cases, requirements and a comprehensive metamodel for qualitative negotiation tools, as well as a prototype negotiation tool.

This thesis deals with the energy saving in smart building with focus on the impact of the user behaviour on the energy consumption. The problem of human behaviour modelling has been widely studied in the state of the art, but it is still an open problem in the field of smart building since the stochastic nature of the behaviour is difficult to be accurately represented by numerical tools. An interdisciplinary approach is proposed in order to identify the suitable user features from the psychological and social point of view and to integrate such a representation into a DSS for appliance scheduling and energy cost reduction. The proposed method has exploited location-based features of the users in order to represent their habits and needs and to compute the schedules that maximize the user acceptance toward an “energy-aware” behaviour. The obtained results point out a reduction of the peak-to-average ratio higher than 40% also considering the user constraints imposed by their presence into the building.

Weeds typically grow in patches across agricultural landscapes. Because of this characteristic growth pattern, it seems logical to apply herbicides site-specifically to control them. To do this effectively, methods must be identified to accurately map weed presence and make cost effective herbicide application decisions to control them. The primary objective of this research was to develop a site-specific herbicide decision support system. Additional objectives include evaluating the effects of sampling patterns and interpolation techniques for weed mapping accuracy and evaluating texture analysis for weed patch detection in row-crops. A geographic information system (GIS) extension was developed to work in conjunction with a commercial software component for calculating site-specific herbicide applications based on user input weed maps. Results of the extension were compared to that of the commercial software. The GIS extension was able to accurately develop herbicide options based on the given weed densities and potential net return for treatment of the weeds in any specific area of the field. Sampling techniques and interpolation methods were compared to assess the accuracy of each pattern/method combination. The patterns used in this study were the W- and Z-shaped pattern, and the interpolation methods used were kriging and inverse distance weighted. Neither the pattern nor method impacted the results of the predicted average values for a given weed species. The last objective addressed was texture analysis? ability to distinguish weed patches in row-crops. Texture analysis was also tested to determine its ability to distinguish between areas requiring a herbicide application and areas not requiring a herbicide application. The analysis was performed on 3 vegetative indices and the NIR band of multispectral imagery at three different spatial resolutions (0.14 m, 0.5 m, and 1 m), and for two dates in the growing season. Texture analysis performed better on late season for both scenarios, with the highest classification accuracies (45 to 75%) coming from distinguishing areas that were below a given weed threshold from those that were above.

With increased degradation of natural resources due to land use decisions and the subsequent loss of biodiversity across large spatial scales, there is a need for a Spatial Decision Support System (SDSS) which showcases the impacts of developments on terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems. The Gap Analysis Program (GAP) and a Bayesian Belief Network (BBN) were used to assess the impacts of an impoundment in the Bienville National Forest, Smith County, Mississippi on landcovers, threatened and endangered species, species richness and fish populations. A test impoundment site was chosen on Ichusa Creek and using GAP data, landcovers, species and species richness were compared with those of Bienville National Forest, Smith County, Mississippi. For the aquatic analysis, a BBN model was developed for each fish so that population probabilities could be calculated using a given configuration of available habitats and compared to current fish population.