No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

Since the introduction of the Internet and the realisation of its potential companies have either transformed their operation or are in the process of doing so. It has been observed, that developments in I.T., telecommunications and the Internet have boosted the number of enterprises engaging into e-commerce, e-business and virtual enterprising. These trends are accompanied by re-shaping, transformation and changes in an enterprise's boundaries. The thesis gives an account of the research into the area of dynamic enterprise modelling and provides a modelling methodology that allows different roles and business models to be tested and evaluated without the risk associated with committing to a change.

Workflow management systems enable organisations to deal with all aspects of business process management, including analysis, modelling, execution, and administration. Modelling workflow processes involves transformation of the process logic into a formal representation and it always remains a critical success factor for these systems. Workflow modelling languages provide constructs for capturing high-level descriptions of business processes, which are then have to be transformed and encoded into low-level execution semantics with the use of workflow programming languages. However, maintaining these models separately results in a number of issues, particularly when the various interdependencies between them are managed manually. This primarily creates difficulties in adaptation, in terms of identifying changes in high-level descriptions due to modifications of business conditions, and tracing the impact of those changes on the low-level execution semantics. Moreover, certain information included in the high-level descriptions is either partly encoded or omitted from the low-level execution semantics and at the same time, complicated business rules encoded at the execution level are not included in the high-level descriptions, creating major inconsistencies. The above issues result in high maintenance costs, reducing the overall efficiency and performance of workflow management systems. This thesis addresses the aforementioned problems by proposing a framework named SYMEX. SYMEX addresses the issue of integrating high and low-level descriptions in one unified format, from a Systems Theory perspective. SYMEX models have a mathematically defined formalism capable of capturing both high-level descriptions of business processes and low-level workflow execution semantics. Furthermore, SYMEX offers a concise and easy to learn and communicate set of constructs, allowing business analysts, process designers, and programmers to work on the same model, at different levels of abstraction. Apart from the theoretical framework, an XMLbased approach for the application of SYMEX is proposed, along with a constraint- based inference engine. Additionally, SYMEX models are evaluated in terms of their complexity and prove easier to read, understand, and manage than other traditional workflow modelling approaches. However, further research is required to assess the capability of the framework, with respect to modelling workflow processes in a service-oriented environment, where activities of business processes are essentially web-services exposed on the Internet.

Despite impressive advances in technology and a plethora of Information Systems development methods there remain plentiful stories of Information Systems project failure. Risk Management promises a positive impact on Information Systems Development and has raised hopes of alleviating such problems This thesis summarises the earlier literature on the topic of Risk and Risk Management. It reports the results of an empirical study into the Management of Risk in Information Systems Development and provides both a better understanding of Risk Management in Information Systems Development and suggestions for the improvement of the theory and practice of Risk Management in Information System Development. In the review of the relevant literature about Risk, Risk Management, and Information Systems Risk Management, the thesis describes the essential concepts of the notion of Risk The suggested methods and practices of Risk Management in Information Systems Development are reviewed and critiqued and this lays down the basis for an empirical exploration, which includes a questionnaire survey. The empirical study undertaken investigates the nature of risks, current risk management practices, and their effect on Information Systems Development in the UK The study shows that there is a lack of rigorous research into Risk Management. The current literature provides useful knowledge and guidelines on Risk Management, but many of the claims made in the literature have no empirical validation. According to the empirical findings, the application of Risk Management to Information Systems Development is not a common practice. Furthermore, the positive effect of Risk Management on Information Systems Development is not very high and practitioners hold

The World Wide Web as a repository of information has had a great influence on our lives. This influence is increasing as the web introduces applications in addition to information. These applications have several advantages, such as world wide accessibility, distance group learning and collaboration. Furthermore, the web encourages training applications since it offers multi-media that can support all stages of training. On the other hand, the virtual reality technology has been utilised to provide new systematic training methods for surgical procedures. These solutions are usually expensive in terms of cost and computation. In this thesis we propose a novel solution to fulfill the training needs of radiologists performing one type of minimally invasive surgery known as interventional radiology. Our training method combines the capabilities of virtual reality to provide realistic simulation environment together with the web environment to provide platform independent, scalable and accessible system. In this thesis we analyse this type of surgical procedure in order to deduce the training requirements of such an application. Then, we investigate the possibility of fulfilling these requirements within the server-client architecture of the web environment. We study the degree to which current web technologies- such as Java and VRML- can support the development of a three-dimensional virtual environment with complex interactions. Furthermore, we study the plausibility of providing high computational behaviour modelling training environment on the web by utilising physically-based modelling techniques. We also discuss the effect of adopting the web environment on fulfilling the virtual reality and training requirements of our system. Finally, we evaluate the resulting system to find out how useful is the proposed solution from the clinical point of view.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.