Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2005. / Supervisor: J. Wesley Barnes. Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

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Wireless sensor and robot networks (WSRNs) are an integration of wireless sensor network (WSNs) and multi-robot systems. They comprise of networked sensor and mobile robots that communicate via wireless links to perform distributed sensing and actuation tasks in a region of interest (ROI). In addition to gathering and reporting data from the environment, sensors may also report failures of neighboring sensors or lack of coverage in certain neighborhood to nearby mobile robot. Once an event has been detected, robots coordinate with each other to make a decision on the most appropriate way to perform the action. Coverage can be established and improved in different ways in wireless sensor and robot networks. Initial random sensor placement, if applied, may be improved via robot-assisted sensor relocation or additional placement. One or more robots may carry sensors and move within the ROI; while traveling, they drop sensors at proper positions to construct desired coverage. Robots may relocate and place spare sensors according to certain energy optimality criteria. This thesis proposes a solution, which we call Election-Based Deployment (EBD), for simultaneous sensor deployment and coverage maintenance in multi-robot scenario in failure-prone environment. To our knowledge, it is the first carrier-based localized algorithm that is able to achieve 100% coverage of the ROI with multiple robots in failure-prone environment since it combines both sensor deployment and coverage maintenance process. We can observe from the simulation results that EBD outperforms the existing algorithms and balances the workload of robots while reducing the communication overhead to a great extent.

A Mobile Sensor Networks (MSNs) is normally made up of a number of mobile sensors which can be placed in a region of interest (ROI) by people. Sensors communicate with each other through wireless links to perform the distributed sensing ability for covering a region. Through a specific algorithm, the sensors move automatically, and finally the sensor network achieves a large sensing coverage. Sensing coverage can be established and promoted by different algorithms, and a good algorithm can lead sensors to form the largest possible sensing area without any sensing holes (areas that cannot be detected or monitored). The coverage of a sensor network is defined as the total area of interest covered, minus the area of the sensing holes. We introduce a novel algorithm called the Spanning Tree-based Greedy-Rotation-Back (STGRB). The traditional Greedy-Rotation-Greedy (GRG) algorithm uses a point as a specific start so it's not appropriate for practical circumstances. So in the STGRB, we first use a spanning tree algorithm to get the gravity center (the sensor that connects the most sensors or is physically close to most of the other sensors) of the network. In this way we eliminate the first condition of selecting a sensor as a start point and also we conserve the energy of the sensors via letting them move a shorter distance.

The Ottawa Police Service (OPS) deploys its resources based on the needs of predefined zones. However, the current zoning approach has been acknowledged as inefficient due to negative impacts on costs, proficiency, quality of services and time management. The zoning approach has also been acknowledged as inefficient due to its static nature, its inflexibility and its inability to adjust systematically according to the number of currently available police vehicles. It also cannot assist in addressing demand changes throughout the day in order to reduce call responses in neighbouring zones. Therefore, the demand variation could lead to a significant decrease in police efficiency, since those officers who have been allocated to other zones are not able to participate in events outside their zones without permission. It may cause a high volume of waiting calls and increased response time depending on the time of day, shifts, seasons, etc. Hence, the OPS needs to find a new model for resource deployment that can provide the same coverage but with better service quality. Resource allocation has always been a challenge for emergency services like police, fire emergency, and ambulance services since it has a direct impact on the efficiency and effectiveness of the service activities. The ambulance and fire emergency services have received research attention while the optimization of police resources remains largely ignored. While there are many similarities between ambulance and police deployment there are also significant differences that mean the direct transfer of ambulance models to police deployment is not feasible. This research addresses the lack of an effective tool for the deployment of police resources. We develop a simulation model that analyzes potential deployment plans in order to determine their effect on response times. The model has been developed in partnership with the Ottawa Police Service (OPS) and will address the obstacles, disadvantages, and geographical constraints of the existing allocation model. The OPS needs to align deployment with the service demand and their operational goals (response times, visibility, workload, compliance, etc.). Repositioning police vehicles in real time, helps in responding to future calls more effectively without adding more officers.

Joint Logistics Over-the-Shore (JLOTS) is the method the United States (US) Army and Navy use to discharge cargo from large seafaring vessels onto a bare beach when an enemy force has denied access to a deep-water port or the ports have been damaged by natural disasters, terrorist actions, sabotaged by military forces, etc. The last large scale, published analytic study on JLOTS was conducted in 1993 during the Ocean Venture 93 exercise at Camp Lejeune, NC; since that time, nearly the entire US Army inventory of wheeled vehicles have been replaced and tracked systems have increased in size and weight with the additions of reactive armor tiles and urban survival kits. The current estimation method for determining how long a JLOTS operation will take relies on the median duration values in order to determine total operational length. This research shows that the JLOTS activity duration medians published in current military doctrine are no longer representative of the current inventory of US Army vehicles. New planning factors are defined based on JLOTS subject matter expert opinions as well as a new method of JLOTS duration estimation is described through the use of discrete-event simulation. The results of the proposed duration estimation method were compared to both the existing methodology using both the published planning factors and the new planning factors defined through subject matter expert opinion. In both comparisons the current estimation method was found to consistently overestimate operational throughput while underestimating duration since it fails to capture the queuing actions that occur in a resource constrained environment such as JLOTS. It is the recommendation of this research that a time and motion study be conducted on JLOTS operations in order to more accurately define the probability distributions associated with JLOTS activities. These distributions would replace the triangular distributions defined by subject matter experts in this research in order to generate a more accurate estimate of JLOTS duration and throughput. More accurate estimates for JLOTS operations will enable cost savings by providing maritime transportation providers with greater fidelity on scheduling while reducing the time these ships are vulnerable to enemy actions.

This work deals with automated deployment of web appliactions in PHP. There is not any wide used standard tool for deploying of web application wrote in PHP. That is way the main objective of work is to create automated and universal solution which can be used for application with various database systems or frameworks. For purpose of design this tool I describe at the beginning of this work individual components of web application. It is source code of application, HTML templates and CSS, grafic files, data and database schema. Next I write about posibilities of uploading application to server. This chapter is based on Sharar Evron's talk at conference ZendCon 2010 named Best Practices in PHP deployment. For individual components of application I try to find specific steps which are necessary or usefull to do during application deployment. It is e.g. JavaScript and CSS files minification, database schema modification or secure data injecting in application's configuration files. In fourth and fifth chapter I write about implementation of these steps and connection them in process of application deployment and rollback. For this implementation I use tool Phing.

Energy consumption of large commercial buildings has become higher than before, and a major part of the energy is on their lighting systems. This thesis aims at reducing the energy consumption of a building's lighting system. Our solution is to minimize the total number of necessary light fixtures in a commercial building, and thus we formulate the Constrained Light Deployment Problem (CLDP). The CLDP problem is tightly related to the Art Gallery Problem (AGP), a classical problem in computational geometry that finds the minimum number of guards to monitor a polygon area. Unlike the traditional AGP, however, our problem poses a new challenge that the illuminance of any spot in the building must be higher than a required threshold. To address the new challenge, we first propose an algorithm based on polygon partition and iteratively remove redundant light fixtures to obtain a tighter upper bound on the necessary number of light fixtures. We further improve the algorithm with clustering and binary search to reduce the number of light fixtures. Our algorithm can return the locations of resulted light fixtures, which are not necessarily the vertices of the orthogonal polygon. Simulation results demonstrate that our algorithm is fast and effective. / Graduate

Handover of software systems is a critical stage in the system lifecycle. Despite this, it is still an under researched area. In this paper, we have developed an initial taxonomy of activities for software handover. Our taxonomy consists of seven process components where each component clusters logically coherent activities. The process components are Management and Administration, Maintenance Environment, Version and Configuration Management, Deployment, Training, Documentation and, Maintainability Management. / Qc 20120223

In this thesis, we propose an optimization model to assist the Region of Waterloo Emergency Medical Services (EMS) to meet the new provincial land ambulance response time standard. The new land standard requires multiple response time thresholds which are based on the acuity of the patient determined at the time the 911 call is made. The performance of an EMS system is affected by many factors, including the number of ambulances deployed, their locations, and the dispatching strategy that is employed. The number of ambulances available over the course of the day varies when ambulance crews start and end their shifts, and when ambulance crews are called out or return from a call. In order to maintain coverage, it is therefore desirable to locate ambulances in stations as a function of how many are available, and the geography and frequency of potential calls. This may result in relocation of ambulances whenever there is a change in the number of available vehicles. This research provides a compliance table indicating how many ambulances to locate at each station when the number of available ambulances is given. We explore two main objectives: 1) maximizing the expected coverage for all patients, and 2) maximizing the coverage for the most acutely ill patients. Constraints include the number of available ambulances, the response time requirements, and service level constraints for each acuity level. In this study, we conducted an empirical analysis of ambulance response times, travel times to a hospital, and time spend at the hospital. We used two years of EMS data from July 2006 to June 2008 for the Region of Waterloo (ROWEMS). Based on this study, we show that using the binomial distribution to represent the number of busy ambulances suggested by Gendreau et al. (2006) is only valid for low utilization rates. The problem of allocating available ambulances among candidate stations is formulated as a Mixed Integer Non-linear Problem (MINLP) model that includes the priority of calls and multiple daytime periods. Computational results using the ROWEMS data will be presented. A detailed comparison shows that the predictions obtained from our model are often as good as the Approximate Hypercube (AH) model, but with a simpler and quicker procedure. The model proposed in this thesis can also be used as a planning tool to find promising candidate locations for new ambulance stations.