Thesis (M. Phil.)--University of Hong Kong, 2007. / Also available online.

Thesis (M. Phil.)--University of Hong Kong, 2007. / Title proper from title frame. Also available in printed format.

Master’s thesis deals with designing decision making system based on fuzzy logic principles which evaluates suppliers offers. In this Master’s thesis there were created two decision making systems based on the demands of the company. First decision making system was designed within the environment of MS Excel, the second one was designed in MATLAB software. In addition of creating the decision making system the thesis puts emphasis on the analysis of the current decision making model in the company and this section will serve as a springboard to designing a decision making system based on fuzzy logic. At the beginning of the work there are included all the necessary theoretical framework on which I based the writing of this thesis.

No / Synthetic Biology aspires to design, compose and engineer biological systems that implement specified behaviour. When designing such systems, hypothesis testing via computational modelling and simulation is vital in order to reduce the need of costly wet lab experiments. As a case study, we discuss the use of computational modelling and stochastic simulation for engineered genetic circuits that implement Boolean AND and OR gates that have been reported in the literature. We present performance analysis results for nine different state-of-the-art stochastic simulation algorithms and analyse the dynamic behaviour of the proposed gates. Stochastic simulations verify the desired functioning of the proposed gate designs.

Poor cost performance of construction projects has been a major concern for both contractors and clients. The effective management of risk is thus critical to the success of any construction project and the importance of risk management has grown as projects have become more complex and competition has increased. Contractors have traditionally used financial mark-ups to cover the risk associated with construction projects but as competition increases and margins have become tighter they can no longer rely on this strategy and must improve their ability to manage risk. Furthermore, the construction industry has witnessed significant changes particularly in procurement methods with clients allocating greater risks to contractors. Evidence shows that there is a gap between existing risk management techniques and tools, mainly built on normative statistical decision theory, and their practical application by construction contractors. The main reason behind the lack of use is that risk decision making within construction organisations is heavily based upon experience, intuition and judgement and not on mathematical models. This thesis presents a model for managing global risk factors affecting construction cost performance of construction projects. The model has been developed using behavioural decision approach, fuzzy logic technology, and Artificial Intelligence technology. The methodology adopted to conduct the research involved a thorough literature survey on risk management, informal and formal discussions with construction practitioners to assess the extent of the problem, a questionnaire survey to evaluate the importance of global risk factors and, finally, repertory grid interviews aimed at eliciting relevant knowledge. There are several approaches to categorising risks permeating construction projects. This research groups risks into three main categories, namely organisation-specific, global and Acts of God. It focuses on global risk factors because they are ill-defined, less understood by contractors and difficult to model, assess and manage although they have huge impact on cost performance. Generally, contractors, especially in developing countries, have insufficient experience and knowledge to manage them effectively. The research identified the following groups of global risk factors as having significant impact on cost performance: estimator related, project related, fraudulent practices related, competition related, construction related, economy related and political related factors. The model was tested for validity through a panel of validators (experts) and crosssectional cases studies, and the general conclusion was that it could provide valuable assistance in the management of global risk factors since it is effective, efficient, flexible and user-friendly. The findings stress the need to depart from traditional approaches and to explore new directions in order to equip contractors with effective risk management tools.

The main aim of the research work presented in this thesis, is the development of a novel framework with the capability of assessing the impact of implementing lean manufacturing within small-to-medium sized manufacturing firms (SMEs). By assessing the impact of lean implementation, SMEs can make informed decisions on the viability of lean adoption at the conceptual implementation stage. Companies are also able determine their status in terms of lean manufacturing affordability. Thus, in order to achieve the above-stated aim, the following were the main set research objectives; (1) identifying the key drivers for implementing lean manufacturing within SMEs, (2) investigating the operational activities of SMEs in order to understand their manufacturing issues, (3) exploring the current level of lean manufacturing usage within SMEs so as to categorise users based on their levels of involvement, (4) identifying factors that determine the assessment of lean manufacturing, (5) developing an impact assessment framework for justifying lean manufacturing within SMEs, (6) developing a knowledge based advisory system and (7) validating the impact assessment framework and the developed knowledge based advisory system through real-life case studies, workshops, and expert opinions. A combination of research methodology approaches have been employed in this research study. This comprises literature review, observation of companies' practices and personal interview. The data collection process involved ten SMEs that provided consistent information throughout the research project life. Additionally, visitations to three large size manufacturing firms were also conducted. Hence, the framework and system development process passed through several stages. Firstly, the data were collected from companies who had successfully implemented lean manufacturing within their premise. The second development stage included the analysis and validation of the dataset through company practitioners. An impact assessment framework was thus developed with the aid of regression analysis as a predictive model. However, it was realised that there were few correlations between the dataset generated and analysis. The reasons for this were unclear. ,a knowledge based advisory system was adopted to conceptualise, enhance the robustness of the impact assessment framework and address the problem of the imprecise data in the impact assessment process. Three major factors of impact assessment were considered in the framework and the system development process, namely relative cost of lean implementation, a company lean readiness status and the level of value-added to be achieved (impact/benefits). Three knowledge based advisory sub-systems that consisted of the abovementioned factors were built. Results obtained from them were then fed into the final system. The three sub-systems were validated with the original set of data from companies. This enabled the assignment of a number of input variables whose membership functions aided the definition of the fuzzy expert system language (linguistic variables) used. The final system yielded heuristic rules that enable the postulation of scenarios of lean implementation. Results were sought and tested on a number of firms based within the UK, for the purposes validation. These also included expert opinions both in academic and industrial settings. A major contribution of the developed system is its ability to aid decision-making processes for lean implementation at the early implementation stage. The visualisation facility of the developed system is also useful in enabling potential lean users to make forecasts on the relative cost of lean projects upfront, anticipate lean benefits, and realise one' degree of lean readiness.

Étant à la fois acteur de l’enseignement supérieur malgache et chercheur en SIC, nous nous sommes penchée sur le phénomène de faible utilisation des TIC chez les enseignants malgaches, en adoptant trois positionnements successifs.Nous avons débuté la recherche par l’interrogation : « Qu’est- ce qui ne va pas ? ». Elle comporte un postulat important : celui de l’existence d’un problème à résoudre dans le cadre de l’usage des TIC par les enseignants. Elle est également posée par un individu « acteur » de la situation, animé par une forte volonté de changement et non uniquement par un scientifique chercheur, dans une tentative de compréhension d’un phénomène. Au cours de l’étude, nous reformulons notre interrogation en : « comment ça fonctionne ? » puisque nous avons mis à jour le « mécanisme » qui sous-tend la construction des pratiques des technologies (logiques de valorisation et d’opportunisme) au travers de situations de mise en place et d’exploitation de dispositif dans le cadre universitaire. Nous avons adopté notre positionnement de chercheur.Au terme de la recherche, nous répondons à la question « comment composer avec ce fonctionnement ? ». Nous nous adressons à des acteurs du terrain (porteurs de projet et responsables) dans une optique d’accompagnement et de conseil. Nous endossons ici, la casquette d’intervenant. Après une revue du contexte de l’enseignement malgache et des recherches concernant le domaine des TIC en Sociologie et en Sciences de l’Education, nous avons tenté de proposer un modèle de compréhension supplémentaire de l’usage des TIC à travers l’application de l’analyse systémique qualitative des relations et la notion de « logique de jeu ». Nous avons ensuite déconstruit cette réflexion pour proposer des pistes d’actions pour mener les projets technologiques à l’université malgache. / As an actor of malagasy higher education and researcher in Information and Communication Sciences, we analyzed the phenomenon of low usage of ICT among Malagasy teachers, by adopting three successive positionings. We started the research by asking ourselves : « what is wrong ?». This question includes an important postulate: the existence of a problem regarding the use of TIC by the teachers. It is also raised by an individual "actor" of a situation, with a strong will of change and not only by a scientist researcher, in an attempt to understanding a phenomenon. During the study, we reformulate our questioning : «How does it work? » since we have put in day the "mechanism" underlying the construction of practices of technologies (logic of promotion and opportunism) through situations of use of devices within the university. We adopted our positioning of researcher. At the end of research, we answer to the question « How to compose with this functioning? ». This part of the study is addressed to promoters and managers in a perspective of accompaniment and advising. We become an acting researcher . After a review of the context of malagasy education and researches concerning the domain of ICT in Sociology and in Education Sciences, we have attempted to offer an additional model of understanding for the usage of ICT through the application of the qualitative systemic analysis of relations and notion of « logic of the system». We have then proposed global actions for managing technological project among malagasy university.

The eight topological RCC8(or Egenhofer-Franzosa)- relations between spatial regions play a fundamental role in spatial reasoning, spatial and constraint databases, and geographical information systems. In analogy with Halpern and Shoham’s modal logic of time intervals based on the Allen relations, we introduce a family of modal logics equipped with eight modal operators that are interpreted by the RCC8-relations. The semantics is based on region spaces induced by standard topological spaces, in particular the real plane. We investigate the expressive power and computational complexity of the logics obtained in this way. It turns our that, similar to Halpern and Shoham’s logic, the expressive power is rather natural, but the computational behavior is problematic: topological modal logics are usually undecidable and often not even recursively enumerable. This even holds if we restrict ourselves to classes of finite region spaces or to substructures of region spaces induced by topological spaces. We also analyze modal logics based on the set of RCC5relations, with similar results.

Context-aware systems use data about their environment for adaptation at runtime, e.g., for optimization of power consumption or user experience. Ontology-based data access (OBDA) can be used to support the interpretation of the usually large amounts of data. OBDA augments query answering in databases by dropping the closed-world assumption (i.e., the data is not assumed to be complete any more) and by including domain knowledge provided by an ontology. We focus on a recently proposed temporalized query language that allows to combine conjunctive queries with the operators of the well-known propositional temporal logic LTL. In particular, we investigate temporalized OBDA w.r.t. ontologies in the DL EL, which allows for efficient reasoning and has been successfully applied in practice. We study both data and combined complexity of the query entailment problem.

Master’s thesis is focused on marketing research. The goal of this research is to know and describe the prospects and their perception of the product. Beside this goal the thesis demonstrates possible use of general statistical induction in the field of marketing research. The object of the research are social units carrying business in agriculture, forestry, timbering and building industry.