O presente trabalho propõe desenvolver um programa metodológico de avaliação e melhoria contínua na qualidade da pós-graduação acadêmica no curso de engenharia mecânica da Escola Politécnica da Universidade de São Paulo (EPUSP). Como caso específico do ensino superior, visando fornecer subsídios para o planejamento do mesmo, a metodologia proposta é baseada numa adaptação do uso do Quality Function Deployment (QFD) – ferramenta de processos e serviços – ao ensino. Pretende também obter valores quantitativos de satisfação, importância e desempenhos (esperados e relativos) para cada processo, e para cada requerimento do cliente. Isso permitirá demonstrar onde o programa estará agindo de forma correta ou onde é preciso melhorar, e quão longe ou perto das metas ele está. A metodologia adaptada ao ensino demonstrará a eficácia da ferramenta para outras classes de serviços, assim paralelamente o ensino será favorecido com mais um modelo eficiente de avaliação e planejamento. Os resultados obtidos na pesquisa dão opção a um retorno , direcionando o planejamento da metodologia de maneira flexível às modificações próprias do ambiente (necessidades dos clientes), sem perder de vista a contínua melhoria e visando satisfazer os requisitos do presente. O trabalho demonstrou a aplicabilidade de uma das ferramentas da engenharia em benefício dela e o ensino em geral, assim como também avaliou os desempenhos atuais e esperados da pós-graduação (PG) em engenharia mecânica da EPUSP; mostrando quais elementos do programa de PG poderiam ser classificados em bons ou deficientes, e saber se os esforços e os recursos direcionados a eles estão sendo bem aproveitados. / This current research proposes the development of methodological program of evaluations and continuous quality improvement in post graduation in mechanical engineering course of the “Escola Politécnica da Universidade de São Paulo" (EPUSP), as a specific study case of the high education, targeting to provide subsidies for its planning. The methodology proposed herein is based on an adaptive use of QFD – a service and process tool – for education. It also intends to get quantitative values of satisfaction, relevance and performance (expected and relative) for each process and for each customer demand. Hence it will be possible to demonstrate where the program is acting in an effective manner and where improvements might be wanted, and how near or far from the objectives it is. The methodology adopted for the education is going to demonstrate the efficiency of the tool for another kind of services, and the education will be favored with an efficient evaluation and planning model. The results obtained in the work gives the option to a feedback, operating the planning of the methodology in a flexible way to the own modifications of the environment (customer’s requirements), The work had shown one of the application in engineering tools in straight benefit for the engineering and, in general, the education as well. As also evaluated the present performances and expectations of the post graduation (PG) in mechanical engineering of the EPUSP, showing which elements of the PG program would be able to be classified in good or deficient and know itself the efforts and resources directed to them are being well used.

Military children have been a population of interest and research speculation for several decades. Despite the research base built studying this population, many questions remain regarding their specific experiences and mental health outcomes. To accommodate the nation's needs when fueling the armed forces by the all volunteer force currently comprising the service branches, many military personnel have found themselves in circumstances including multiple deployments and deployments of lengths approximately equal to one year. With family relationships now a more prominent issue for military members, the necessity of considering the effects of deployment on these family members has become especially pertinent. The purpose of this study was to investigate the way increased exposure to technology affects children’s deployment outcomes in today's military culture, especially in their deployment experiences. Participants included 71 parents and 20 children in military families currently or within the past year experiencing a deployment. Participants were divided into two phases for completion of study tasks. Phase one participants, 20 children and one of their parents, completed interviews, emotional/behavioral measures, and a deployment experiences survey. The 51 parent participants in Phase two completed only the deployment experiences survey. Evaluation of data presented from participants provided insight into the deployment experiences of these families as impacted by the technological advances in communication and media today. Results indicated a range of positive effects related to technologically supported communication between parents and children throughout deployment. Families participating in increased parental communication during deployment showed relationships to decreases in ambiguous loss symptoms, increases in positive attitudes including growth and maturity, and smooth reintegration following deployment. Despite increases in availability, news exposure reported from children occurred at a low incidence rate. Regardless, negative reactions to news viewing was reported.

Computer applications are no longer local installations on our computers. Many modern web applications and services rely on an internet connection to a centralized server to access the full functionality of the application. High availability architectures can be used to provide redundancy in case of failure to ensure customers always have access to the server. Due to the complexity of such systems and the need for stability, deployments are often avoided and new features and bug fixes cannot be delivered to the end user quickly. In this project, an automation system is proposed to allow for deployments to a high availability architecture while ensuring high availability. The purposed automation system is then tested in a controlled experiment to see if it can deliver what it promises. During low amounts of traffic, the deployment system showed it could make a deployment with a statistically insignificant change in error rate when compared to normal operations. Similar results were found during medium to high levels of traffic for successful deployments, but if the system had to recover from a failed deployment there was an increase in errors. However, the response time during the experiment showed that the system had a significant effect on the response time of the web application resulting in the availability being compromised in certain situations.

L'émergence des nouveaux types d'environnements informatiques amplifie le besoin pour des systèmes logiciels d'être capables d'évoluer dynamiquement. Cependant, ces systèmes rendent très difficile le déploiement de logiciels en utilisant des processus humains. Il y a donc un besoin croissant d'outils d'automatisation qui permettent de déployer et reconfigurer des systèmes logiciels sans en interrompre l'exécution. Le processus de déploiement continu et automatisé permet de mettre à jour ou d'adapter un logiciel en exécution en fonction des changements contextuels et des exigences opérationnelles. Les solutions existantes ne permettent pas des déploiements reproductibles et tolérant aux pannes dans des environnements fluctuants, et donc requérant une adaptation continue. Cette thèse se concentre en particulier sur des solutions de déploiement continu pour les plates-formes d'exécution dynamiques, tels que celle utilisé dans les environnements ubiquitaires. Elle adopte une approche basée sur un processus transactionnel et idempotent pour coordonner les actions de déploiement. La thèse propose, également, un ensemble d'outils, y compris un gestionnaire de déploiement capable de mener des déploiements discret, mais également d'adapter les applications continuellement en fonction des changements contextuels. La mise en œuvre de ces outils, permet notamment aux développeurs et aux administrateurs de développer des déploiements d'applications grâce à un langage spécifique suivant les principes de l‘infrastructure-as-code. En utilisant l'implantation de Rondo, les propositions de cette thèse sont validées dans plusieurs projets industriels et académiques à la fois pour l'administration de plates-formes ubiquitaires ainsi que pour l'installation d'applications et leurs reconfigurations continues. / Driven by the emergence of new computing environments, dynamically evolving software systems makes it impossible for developers to deploy software with human-centric processes. Instead, there is an increasing need for automation tools that continuously deploy software into execution, in order to push updates or adapt existing software regarding contextual and business changes. Existing solutions fall short on providing fault-tolerant, reproducible deployments that would scale on heterogeneous environments. This thesis focuses especially on enabling continuous deployment solutions for dynamic execution platforms, such as would be found in Pervasive Computing environments. It adopts an approach based on a transactional, idempotent process for coordinating deployment actions. The thesis proposes a set of deployment tools, including a deployment manager capable of conducting deployments and continuously adapting applications according to the changes in the current state of the target platform. The implementation of these tools, Rondo, also allows developers and administrators to code application deployments thanks to a deployment descriptor DSL. Using the implementation of Rondo, the propositions of this thesis are validated in several industrial and academic projects by provisioning frameworks as well as on installing application and continuous reconfigurations.

O presente trabalho propõe desenvolver um programa metodológico de avaliação e melhoria contínua na qualidade da pós-graduação acadêmica no curso de engenharia mecânica da Escola Politécnica da Universidade de São Paulo (EPUSP). Como caso específico do ensino superior, visando fornecer subsídios para o planejamento do mesmo, a metodologia proposta é baseada numa adaptação do uso do Quality Function Deployment (QFD) – ferramenta de processos e serviços – ao ensino. Pretende também obter valores quantitativos de satisfação, importância e desempenhos (esperados e relativos) para cada processo, e para cada requerimento do cliente. Isso permitirá demonstrar onde o programa estará agindo de forma correta ou onde é preciso melhorar, e quão longe ou perto das metas ele está. A metodologia adaptada ao ensino demonstrará a eficácia da ferramenta para outras classes de serviços, assim paralelamente o ensino será favorecido com mais um modelo eficiente de avaliação e planejamento. Os resultados obtidos na pesquisa dão opção a um retorno , direcionando o planejamento da metodologia de maneira flexível às modificações próprias do ambiente (necessidades dos clientes), sem perder de vista a contínua melhoria e visando satisfazer os requisitos do presente. O trabalho demonstrou a aplicabilidade de uma das ferramentas da engenharia em benefício dela e o ensino em geral, assim como também avaliou os desempenhos atuais e esperados da pós-graduação (PG) em engenharia mecânica da EPUSP; mostrando quais elementos do programa de PG poderiam ser classificados em bons ou deficientes, e saber se os esforços e os recursos direcionados a eles estão sendo bem aproveitados. / This current research proposes the development of methodological program of evaluations and continuous quality improvement in post graduation in mechanical engineering course of the “Escola Politécnica da Universidade de São Paulo” (EPUSP), as a specific study case of the high education, targeting to provide subsidies for its planning. The methodology proposed herein is based on an adaptive use of QFD – a service and process tool – for education. It also intends to get quantitative values of satisfaction, relevance and performance (expected and relative) for each process and for each customer demand. Hence it will be possible to demonstrate where the program is acting in an effective manner and where improvements might be wanted, and how near or far from the objectives it is. The methodology adopted for the education is going to demonstrate the efficiency of the tool for another kind of services, and the education will be favored with an efficient evaluation and planning model. The results obtained in the work gives the option to a feedback, operating the planning of the methodology in a flexible way to the own modifications of the environment (customer’s requirements), The work had shown one of the application in engineering tools in straight benefit for the engineering and, in general, the education as well. As also evaluated the present performances and expectations of the post graduation (PG) in mechanical engineering of the EPUSP, showing which elements of the PG program would be able to be classified in good or deficient and know itself the efforts and resources directed to them are being well used.

Processes to develop and deliver software have been evolved over the years. One of the primary motivations of this evolution, is gaining the benefits of shorter time-to-market. Continuous deployment is a recent trend to deploy software to the customers automatically and in continuous fashion. Organizations adopting this trend could reach the customers faster through quick deliveries and improve the quality and productivity of the delivered product by an early feedback, and hence achieve increased customer satisfaction. Complex software intensive industrial systems are large-scale, distributed over heterogeneous platforms and interact with several sensors and actuators. Enabling continuous deployment for these industrial systems needs a stable deployment process able to cope with domain specific requirements and challenges. Notably, the required quality attributes of the deployed software product as well as the challenges introduced by the customer-specific nature of the domain. In this thesis, we formalize continuous deployment for industrial systems by identifying the main factors of an appropriate deployment process. In particular, we investigate high-level requirements, required quality attributes of the software product, and challenges in the deployment. Based on this, we propose a continuous deployment pipeline and a set of activities incorporated in the stages of the pipeline, in particular deployment and post-deployment stages. Moreover, we suggest automation support for the activities to both shorten the delivery time and to preserve repeatability and reliability of the deployment process. The aim of such a process is to maintain the quality attributes of the deployed software. We perform a case study to validate the proposed model by implementing a prototype in an industrial system

No description available.

Future solar sail and solar power satellite missions require deployment of large and lightweight flexible structures in space. One option is to spin the assembly and use the centrifugal force for deployment, stiffening and stabilization. Some of the main advantages with spin deployment are that the significant forces are in the plane of rotation, a relatively simple control can be used and the tension in the membrane or web can be adjusted by the spin rate to meet the mission requirements. However, a successful deployment requires careful development of new control schemes. The deployment rate can be controlled by a torque, applied either to a satellite in the center or by thrusters in the corners, or by deployment rate control, obtained by tether, spool braking or folding properties. Analytical models with only three degrees of freedom were here used to model the deployment of webs and membranes for various folding patterns and control schemes, with focus on space webs folded in star-like arms coiled around a center hub. The model was used to investigate control requirements and folding patterns and to obtain optimal control laws for centrifugal deployment. New control laws were derived from the optimal control results and previously presented control strategies. Analytical and finite element simulations indicate that the here developed control laws yield less oscillations, and most likely more robustness, than existing controls. Rotation-free (RF) shell elements can be used to model inflation or centrifugal deployment of flexible memebrane structures by the finite element method. RF elements approximate the rotational degrees of freedom from the out-of-plane displacements of a patch of elements, and thus avoid common singularity problems for very thin shells. The performance of RF shell elements on unstructured grids is investigated in the last article of this thesis, and it is shown that a combination of existing RF elements performs well even for unstructured grids. / QC 20100729

Thesis (M.A.(Sociology)) -- University of Limpopo, 2022 / The purpose of the study was to explore the impacts of military deployment on the nuclear families of military members of the South African National Defence Force. Qualitative, exploratory research was conducted to determine the impacts of military deployment on the nuclear families of the SANDF. Data were collected through qualitative interviews. A purposive sampling technique was used wherein six families were sampled to explore the impacts of deployment on families with a member previously deployed to foreign missions by the South African National Defence Force. Inductive qualitative content data analysis was performed to analyse data. The study highlighted the areas of potential effects that deployment had before and after deployment of a service member as well as the daily lived experiences of the family during deployment of a family member. The study found that the increase in the changes in the composition of the family structure during deployment; continuous communication was very vital during deployment and the beneficial impacts of deployment. Most military families did not experience dire challenges during deployment but were normal challenges most civilian families experience. Instead, the military families developed resilience during the deployment period. / National Research Foundation (NRF)

Doctor of Philosophy / Department of Family Studies and Human Services / Briana S. Goff / The purpose of this qualitative study was to gain an in-depth understanding of the systemic effects of trauma, particularly war-related traumatic stress as a result of military deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan, in a sample of recent war veterans and their spouses. With recent military deployments and redeployments of soldiers, empirical and clinical research is needed to eliminate further deterioration and retraumatization caused by personal and interpersonal traumatization that can lead to severe PTSD and other trauma-related symptoms. Much of the research on previous wars focused on the individual trauma survivor overlooking the impact on the couple and family system. This study focused on explaining the systemic effects of trauma as it specifically impacts couple relational systems. By employing qualitative analysis, six couples (12 participants) were selected from the original data set of 45 couples (90 participants). Participants completed questionnaires and separate individual standardized open-ended interviews about their traumatic experiences. The interviews were transcribed, coded, and analyzed producing four themes: positive impact of deployment on the couple’s relationship, the negative impact of deployment on the couple’s relationship, soldiers’ war-related trauma, and issues of secrecy. Two groups were identified (high trauma/high relational satisfaction group and high trauma/low relational satisfaction group), based on the quantitative measures that were completed by all participants. Participants reported both war deployment related and non-deployment related traumatic experiences. Many participants reported feeling as though they restarted their relationship upon returning home, while some described feeling closer to their spouse at redeployment. Participants reported having a common worry of if the soldiers would return home alive, soldiers’ missing many life events (i.e., child birth, etc.), and soldiers’ worry about the safety and health of their spouses. An interesting finding was that some couples with high levels of trauma can maintain high levels of relational satisfaction when they have knowledge and understanding of each other’s trauma history and have open, on-going communication, while some couples with high levels of trauma tend to have low relational satisfaction due to limited communication about their trauma history. Strengths and limitations of the study, research implications, and clinical implications were discussed.