This thesis aims to study the use of Critical System Heuristic (CSH) in the requirements engineering (RE) process of a student software project. We have studied a software project within the framework of the TDDD96 course at Linköping University. The project consisted of a group of computer science students working with a representative from a company. As part of the course, the students had done the sustainability exercise SusAF, in which they evaluated their project based on multiple sustainability metrics. We have conducted one round of interviews with the RE student, the company representative, and an expert in the area. The answers were encoded and mapped to 12 CSH questions before being presented in the Ideal map table. The results produced by CSH show the many benefits of integrating CSH into the course. We have proposed different ways of integrating CSH with the SusAF exercise. From the result, we realized the importance of consulting a third party that could provide an outside perspective on different issues. However, an essential aspect of using CSH is to consult the appropriate party. To this end, we found that CSH could be used internally to point in the right direction.

Again for the past couple of years, e-business has become a hot topic. This same act of reselling items through the internet is known as e-businesses. Many e-business sites aim to build customer loyalty. Various aspects influence the performance of e-business websites, particularly usability or the simplicity by which users may use the website, which has been proven to become a key component in online company success. Maybe this research uses a survey assessment based on Nielsen's usability heuristics to analyze the usability of Myntra and Ajio e-business websites.This also evaluates whether e-business websites, such as Myntra and Ajio, provide more useful features for accomplishing usability procedures in much less time and with ease.

Scheduling large real world problems is a complex process and finding high quality solutions is not a trivial task. In cooperation with Trimble MRM Ltd., who provide scheduling solutions for many large companies, a problem is identified and modelled. It is a general model which encapsulates several important scheduling, routing and resource allocation problems in literature. Many of the state-of-the-art heuristics for solve scheduling problems and indeed other problems require specialised heuristics tailored for the problem they are to solve. While these provide good solutions a lot of expert time is needed to study the problem, and implement solutions. This research investigates methods to enhance existing search based methods. We study hyperheuristic techniques as a general search based heuristic. Hyperheuristics raise the generality of the solution method by using a set of tools (low level heuristics) to work on the solution. These tools are problem specific and usually make small changes to the problem. It is the task of the hyperheuristic to determine which tool to use and when. Low level heuristics using exact/heuristic hybrid method are used in this thesis along with a new Tabu based hyperheuristic which decreases the amount of CPU time required to produce good quality solutions. We also develop and investigate the Variable Fitness Function approach, which provides a new way of enhancing most search-based heuristics in terms of solution quality. If a fitness function is pushing hard in a certain direction, a heuristic may ultimately fail because it cannot escape local minima. The Variable Fitness Function allows the fitness function to change over the search and use objective measures not used in the fitness calculation. The Variable Fitness Function and its ability to generalise are extensively tested in this thesis. The two aims of the thesis are achieved and the methods are analysed in depth. General conclusions and areas of future work are also identified.

This thesis aims to review and analyze the scheduling problem in general and Job Shop Scheduling Problem (JSSP) in particular and the solution techniques applied to these problems. The JSSP is the most general and popular hard combinational optimization problem in manufacturing systems. For the past sixty years, an enormous amount of research has been carried out to solve these problems. The literature review showed the inherent shortcomings of solutions to scheduling problems. This has directed researchers to develop hybrid approaches, as no single technique for scheduling has yet been successful in providing optimal solutions to these difficult problems, with much potential for improvements in the existing techniques. The hybrid approach complements and compensates for the limitations of each individual solution technique for better performance and improves results in solving both static and dynamic production scheduling environments. Over the past years, hybrid approaches have generally outperformed simple Genetic Algorithms (GAs). Therefore, two novel priority heuristic rules are developed: Index Based Heuristic and Hybrid Heuristic. These rules are applied to benchmark JSSP and compared with popular traditional rules. The results show that these new heuristic rules have outperformed the traditional heuristic rules over a wide range of benchmark JSSPs. Furthermore, a hybrid GA is developed as an alternate scheduling approach. The hybrid GA uses the novel heuristic rules in its key steps. The hybrid GA is applied to benchmark JSSPs. The hybrid GA is also tested on benchmark flow shop scheduling problems and industrial case studies. The hybrid GA successfully found solutions to JSSPs and is not problem dependent. The hybrid GA performance across the case studies has proved that the developed scheduling model can be applied to any real-world scheduling problem for achieving optimal or near-optimal solutions. This shows the effectiveness of the hybrid GA in real-world scheduling problems. In conclusion, all the research objectives are achieved. Finaly, the future work for the developed heuristic rules and the hybrid GA are discussed and recommendations are made on the basis of the results. / Board of Trustees, Endowment Fund Project, KPK University of Engineering and Technology (UET), Peshawar and Higher Education Commission (HEC), Pakistan

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