In recent years, the popularity of wind energy has grown. It is starting to play a large role in generating renewable, clean energy around the world. In New Zealand, there is increasing recognition and awareness of global warming and the pollution caused by burning fossil fuels, as well as the increased difficulty of obtaining oil from foreign sources, and the fluctuating price of non-renewable energy products. This makes wind energy a very attractive alternative to keep New Zealand clean and green. There are many issues involved in wind farm development. These issues can be grouped into two categories - economic issues and environmental issues. Wind farm developers often use site selection process to minimise the impact of these issues. This thesis aims to develop GIS based models that provide effective decision support tool for evaluating, at a regional scale, potential wind farm locations. This thesis firstly identifies common issues involved in wind farm development. Then, by reviewing previous research on wind farm site selection, methods and models used by academic and corporate sector to solve issues are listed. Criteria for an effective decision support tool are also discussed. In this case, an effective decision support tool needs to be flexible, easy to implement and easy to use. More specifically, an effective decision support tool needs to provide users the ability to identify areas that are suitable for wind farm development based on different criteria. Having established the structure and criteria for a wind farm analysis model, a GIS based tool was implemented using AML code using a Boolean logic model approach. This method uses binary maps for the final analysis. There are a total of 3645 output maps produced based on different combination of criteria. These maps can be used to conduct sensitivity analysis. This research concludes that an effective GIS analysis tool can be developed for provide effective decision support for evaluating wind farm sites.

In the era of "big data revolution," marked by an exponential growth of information, extracting value from data enables analysts and businesses to address challenging problems such as drug discovery, fraud detection, and earthquake predictions. Multi-Criteria Decision Support (MCDS) queries are at the core of big-data analytics resulting in several classes of MCDS queries such as OLAP, Top-K, Pareto-optimal, and nearest neighbor queries. The intuitive nature of specifying multi-dimensional preferences has made Pareto-optimal queries, also known as skyline queries, popular. Existing skyline algorithms however do not address several crucial issues such as performing skyline evaluation over disparate sources, progressively generating skyline results, or robustly handling workload with multiple skyline over join queries. In this dissertation we thoroughly investigate topics in the area of skyline-aware query evaluation. In this dissertation, we first propose a novel execution framework called SKIN that treats skyline over joins as first class citizens during query processing. This is in contrast to existing techniques that treat skylines as an "add-on," loosely integrated with query processing by being placed on top of the query plan. SKIN is effective in exploiting the skyline characteristics of the tuples within individual data sources as well as across disparate sources. This enables SKIN to significantly reduce two primary costs, namely the cost of generating the join results and the cost of skyline comparisons to compute the final results. Second, we address the crucial business need to report results early; as soon as they are being generated so that users can formulate competitive decisions in near real-time. On top of SKIN, we built a progressive query evaluation framework ProgXe to transform the execution of queries involving skyline over joins to become non-blocking, i.e., to be progressively generating results early and often. By exploiting SKIN's principle of processing query at multiple levels of abstraction, ProgXe is able to: (1) extract the output dependencies in the output spaces by analyzing both the input and output space, and (2) exploit this knowledge of abstract-level relationships to guarantee correctness of early output. Third, real-world applications handle query workloads with diverse Quality of Service (QoS) requirements also referred to as contracts. Time sensitive queries, such as fraud detection, require results to progressively output with minimal delay, while ad-hoc and reporting queries can tolerate delay. In this dissertation, by building on the principles of ProgXe we propose the Contract-Aware Query Execution (CAQE) framework to support the open problem of contract driven multi-query processing. CAQE employs an adaptive execution strategy to continuously monitor the run-time satisfaction of queries and aggressively take corrective steps whenever the contracts are not being met. Lastly, to elucidate the portability of the core principle of this dissertation, the reasoning and query processing at different levels of data abstraction, we apply them to solve an orthogonal research question to auto-generate recommendation queries that facilitate users in exploring a complex database system. User queries are often too strict or too broad requiring a frustrating trial-and-error refinement process to meet the desired result cardinality while preserving original query semantics. Based on the principles of SKIN, we propose CAPRI to automatically generate refined queries that: (1) attain the desired cardinality and (2) minimize changes to the original query intentions. In our comprehensive experimental study of each part of this dissertation, we demonstrate the superiority of the proposed strategies over state-of-the-art techniques in both efficiency, as well as resource consumption.

Le domaine abordé dans notre travail se situe autour de l'aide à la décision multi-critère. Nous avons tout d'abord étudié les risques bancaires au travers d'une revue de la littérature très large. Nous avons ensuite élaboré un modèle théorique regroupant quatre catégories différentes composées de dix-neuf cas de risques financiers. Au travers de ce modèle théorique, nous avons mené une validation expérimentale avec un cas réel : La caisse d'épargne du Midi-Pyrénées. Cette validation expérimentale nous a permis un approfondissement des analyses des pratiques pour la gestion des risques financières. Dans cette thèse, nous cherchons à apporter une contribution à la gestion des risques dans le domaine du secteur financier et plus particulièrement pour la sécurité de système d'information et plus précisément au niveau de la caisse d'épargne. Ces analyses s'appuient donc sur des faits observés, recueillis et mesurés, des expérimentations réelles, résultant de la politique de sécurité des systèmes d'information et voulant offrir une approche pragmatique de la présentation de l'analyse de risques financiers grâce à des méthodes d'aide multicritère à la décision. L'élaboration de ce modèle permet de représenter certains aspects spécifiques des risques financiers. Nos recherches ont donné lieu à la réalisation d'un résultat concret : un système d'aide à la décision pour les besoins du responsable du système d'information de la caisse d'épargne. Il s'agit d'un système efficace présentant les résultats sous forme de figures relatives pour les valeurs des critères attribués par le responsable de système de sécurité d'informations (RSSI). / We are working on multicriteria decision analysis. We started with the study of risk typology through a huge review of literature. We have developed a theoretical model grouping four different categories of nineteen financial risk cases. Through this theoretical model, we have applied them to the "Caisse d'Epargne Midi-Pyrénées". In this thesis, we seek to make a contribution to the security management of information systems at the level of the savings bank. These analyzes are based on facts observed, collected and measured with real experiments resulting in its information system security policy and want to offer a pragmatic approach to the presentation of financial risk analysis through methods supporting. multicriteria decision analysis. The development of this model makes it possible to represent certain specific aspects of the financial risks that have often occurred in their activities. Our research led to the achievement of a concrete result in relation to the needs of the information system manager of the savings bank. It is an effective decision support system by constructing relative figures for the values of the criteria assigned by the RSSI.

Στη βιομηχανία, το σημερινό παγκόσμιο επιχειρησιακό περιβάλλον, χαρακτηρίζεται από πρωτοφανή ανταγωνισμό και απαιτητικούς πελάτες, οι οποίοι επιζητούν καινοτόμες και ταχείες λύσεις. Η κατανόηση και η βελτιστοποίηση των διαδικασιών σχεδιασμού θεωρείται ακρογωνιαίος λίθος επιτυχίας σε ένα τόσο γρήγορα εξελισσόμενο περιβάλλον. Η ελαχιστοποίηση του χρόνου εισαγωγής ενός προϊόντος στην αγορά και η διατήρηση της ποιότητας του, σε υψηλά επίπεδα, έχουν γίνει οι κύριοι παράγοντες της επιτυχίας του. Για αυτό το λόγο, κρίθηκε επιτακτική η ανάγκη ύπαρξης ενός συνεργατικού διαδικτυακού εργαλείου για το σχεδιασμό των εκάστοτε προϊόντων. Στη παρούσα εργασία, σχεδιάστηκε και υλοποιήθηκε μια Διαδικτυακή Πλατφόρμα Συνεργασίας (ΔΠΣ), η οποία παρέχει τη δυνατότητα συνεργασίας μεταξύ πολλών απομακρυσμένων χρηστών, σε πραγματικό χρόνο, πάνω στο σχεδιασμό και την αξιολόγηση ενός προϊόντος. Σκοπός της εργασίας ήταν να δημιουργηθεί μια αποδοτική, αξιόπιστη και εύκολη στο χειρισμό της Διαδικτυακή Πλατφόρμα, για την εποπτεία, αξιολόγηση και επικύρωση του σχεδιασμού ενός προϊόντος, σε όλες τις φάσεις της ανάπτυξης του. Λειτουργίες, όπως η διαχείριση χρηστών, έργων, ρόλων και αρχείων, αναπτύχθηκαν και ενσωματώθηκαν σε μια ολοκληρωμένη πλατφόρμα, που επιτρέπει στους χρήστες να εργάζονται κατά τρόπο συνεργατικό και κατανεμημένο, μειώνοντας έτσι αρκετά το χρόνο που απαιτείται για την ολοκλήρωση της φάσης σχεδιασμού των προϊόντων. Στην εργασία αυτή, παρουσιάστηκαν και εκτιμήθηκαν οι δυνατότητες που παρέχει η συνδυασμένη χρήση της Java, των σχεσιακών συστημάτων βάσεων δεδομένων, σε ένα περιβάλλον τριών επιπέδων (3-tier), για την υλοποίηση ολοκληρωμένων πληροφοριακών συστημάτων. Η τεχνολογία που χρησιμοποιήθηκε για την κατασκευή του συστήματος είναι η Java σαν γλώσσα προγραμματισμού, η οποία επιτρέπει στο σύστημα να εγκαθίσταται σε πολλά διαφορετικά περιβάλλοντα, η Oracle για την αποθήκευση των δεδομένων, η JSP για την ανάπτυξη δυναμικών ιστοσελίδων, ο Tomcat ως web server καθώς και η XML για την επικοινωνία και την ανταλλαγή δεδομένων στα υπάρχοντα συστήματα. Οι μέθοδοι και οι προσεγγίσεις που χρησιμοποιήθηκαν είναι γενικές και έτσι υπάρχει η δυνατότητα να εφαρμοστούν σε πολλούς και διαφορετικούς μεταξύ τους οργανισμούς. / In industry, the current world operational environment, is characterized by unprecedented competition and demanding customers, who seek innovative and rapid solutions. The comprehension and optimization of the design processes are considered the corner stone of success in such a rapidly evolving environment. Minimizing the time that a product enters into the market and the maintenance of its quality at high levels, have become the main factors of its success. For this reason, there was an imperative need for the existence of a collaborative web tool for the designing of each product. In the present work, a Collaborative Web Platform (CWP), which enables the collaboration among several users, in real time, on the design and the evaluation of a product or production procedure, has been designed and implemented for remote users. The aim of this work was that an efficient, reliable and easy to use system for collaborative design be created, for the monitoring, evaluation and ratification of designing, in all of the stages of a product’s development. Operations of web collaboration, as is the management of users, roles, tasks and files, were developed and they were incorporated into an integrated platform that allowed the users to work in a collaborative and distributed way, thus decreasing considerably the time, required for the completion of the design stage. In this work, the possibilities provided by the combined use of Java and the relational data bases systems, in a three-level environment for the implementation of integrated informative systems, have been evaluated. The technologies used for the implementation of the system was Java, as a programming language, which allows for the system to be installed in a lot of different environments, Oracle for the storage of data, the JSP for the development of dynamic web pages, the Apache Tomcat, as a web server, as well as the XML language for the communication and the exchange of data in the existing systems. The methods and approaches used are general and thus, there exists the possibility that they be applied to several organizations that are different from each other.

Os Sistemas Integrados de Gestão, também conhecidos como ERP (Enterprise Re-source Planning), vem tendo ampla utilização nas organizações a partir dos anos 90. Por exigir um investimento de elevado valor financeiro para a sua implantação, os responsáveis pela sua aquisição devem tomar cuidados especiais, uma vez que os seus resultados positivos ou negativos somente surgem após longo período de im-plantação, às vezes após muitos anos. Sendo um problema complexo, repleto de incertezas e riscos, os decisores tomam muito de seu tempo para analisar os diver-sos critérios e funcionalidades das ofertas de sistemas recebidas. A tese objetiva apresentar um procedimento que possibilite às empresas, em particular as de pe-queno e médio porte, um procedimento que as permita analisar quando do interesse da aquisição de um ERP, qual das ofertas disponíveis estará mais adequada às su-as necessidades de negócio, baseado em um método multicritérios de apoio à deci-são. A revisão da literatura analisa os Sistemas de Informação (SI) informatizados e os principais papéis desempenhados por eles: apoio às operações, apoio à vanta-gem competitiva e apoio à decisão. A seleção das ofertas propostas foi efetuada uti-lizando o método de Estudo de Casos múltiplos em empresas que adquiriram esses sistemas,ghy utilizando o ANP (Analytic Network Process) como instrumento de pesquisa. Para se estabelecer uma classificação dos critérios utilizados na análise foi utilizada a Técnica Delphi, a qual foi realizada junto a especialistas em Tecnologia de Informação. O resultado obtido pelo Estudo de Casos mostrou que o procedimen-to proposto é válido e pode ser utilizado por empresas de todos os portes. / The use of Integrated Management Systems, also known as ERP (Enterprise Re-source Planning), are widely accepted by organizations since beginning of the ni-neties. As its implementation means a high financial value investment, the respon-sible team for its acquisition has to take special cares, once their positive or nega-tive results will appear only after long implementation period, often after many years. As it is a complex decision problem, evolving uncertainties and risks, the decision agents spend a lot of time to analyze the several criteria and functional-ities from received offers. This thesis presents a proposal which makes possible the companies, particularly those of small or medium sizes, which allows to analyze during the ERP acquisition phase, the available offers more adapted to their business requirements, based on a multi-criteria support decision method. The literature revision analyzes the computerized Information Systems (IS) and the main roles carried out by them: operations support, competitive advantage support and decision support. In order to define the criteria set used in the multi-criteria analysis, the Delphi Method was used and it was answered by Information Technology experts. These criteria was used to classify the ERP\'s offers using the multiple cases study using ANP (Analytic Network Process) as research tool.. The results obtained by case study in four companies were used to validate several propositions.

Submitted by Izabel Franco (izabel-franco@ufscar.br) on 2016-09-06T20:33:16Z No. of bitstreams: 1 DissFJJS.pdf: 1581721 bytes, checksum: f878dcc392455f0f3956326282aabe6a (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Marina Freitas (marinapf@ufscar.br) on 2016-09-12T14:27:05Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 DissFJJS.pdf: 1581721 bytes, checksum: f878dcc392455f0f3956326282aabe6a (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Marina Freitas (marinapf@ufscar.br) on 2016-09-12T14:27:10Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 DissFJJS.pdf: 1581721 bytes, checksum: f878dcc392455f0f3956326282aabe6a (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2016-09-12T14:27:36Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 DissFJJS.pdf: 1581721 bytes, checksum: f878dcc392455f0f3956326282aabe6a (MD5) Previous issue date: 2009-11-30 / Não recebi financiamento / The use of fuzzy logic and fuzzy sets theory applied to decision making process was initially proposed by Bellman and Zadeh (1970). Since then, the arisen of unstructured problems associated with multi-criteria characteristics and group decision making changed the way of dealing with these problems. The evolution of Decision Support Systems (DSS) allowed them, not only to provide data and information, but also to propose solutions to these problems. The goal of this work is to present a framework for the development of DSS that deal with Multi-Criteria Group Decision Making (MCGDM) problems through fuzzy rules. In this approach, we propose a method capable of automatically generating a Fuzzy Rule Base with multi-criteria characteristics for group decision making, that is, different influence degrees for each decider and different importance degrees assigned to each variable are considered in the model. This framework also contains a structural model of a Fuzzy System for Group Decision Support aiming at adding DSS characteristics found in literature to Fuzzy Systems. These characteristics include user/system interactivity and Model Management Subsystem (MMS) described in this work. Finally, a case study designed to validate the model is presented. / O uso da lógica fuzzy e da teoria de conjuntos fuzzy aplicadas ao processo de tomada de decisão foi proposto inicialmente por Bellman e Zadeh (1970). Desde então, os problemas não estruturados associados às características multicritério e de tomada de decisão em grupo alteraram sua forma de tratamento. A evolução presente nos Sistemas de Apoio à Decisão (SAD) fez com que estes sistemas deixassem de fornecer somente dados e informações e passassem também a propor soluções aos problemas analisados. O objetivo deste trabalho é apresentar um framework para o desenvolvimento de SAD que tratem problemas classificados como Multi-Criteria Group Decision Making (MCGDM) com o uso de regras fuzzy. Dentro desta abordagem é apresentado um método capaz de gerar automaticamente uma Base de Regras Fuzzy com características multicritério para tomada de decisão em grupo, ou seja, os diferentes graus de influência de cada decisor e os diferentes graus de importância atribuídos por eles a cada variável são considerados no modelo. Este framework ainda contempla um modelo estrutural de um Sistema Fuzzy para Apoio à Decisão em Grupo com o objetivo de agregar aos sistemas fuzzy as características dos SAD descritas na literatura como, por exemplo, a capacidade de interatividade usuário/sistema e a presença do Subsistema de Gestão de Modelos (SGM), descritos neste trabalho. Por fim, um estudo de caso é realizado para validar o modelo apresentado.

Os Sistemas Integrados de Gestão, também conhecidos como ERP (Enterprise Re-source Planning), vem tendo ampla utilização nas organizações a partir dos anos 90. Por exigir um investimento de elevado valor financeiro para a sua implantação, os responsáveis pela sua aquisição devem tomar cuidados especiais, uma vez que os seus resultados positivos ou negativos somente surgem após longo período de im-plantação, às vezes após muitos anos. Sendo um problema complexo, repleto de incertezas e riscos, os decisores tomam muito de seu tempo para analisar os diver-sos critérios e funcionalidades das ofertas de sistemas recebidas. A tese objetiva apresentar um procedimento que possibilite às empresas, em particular as de pe-queno e médio porte, um procedimento que as permita analisar quando do interesse da aquisição de um ERP, qual das ofertas disponíveis estará mais adequada às su-as necessidades de negócio, baseado em um método multicritérios de apoio à deci-são. A revisão da literatura analisa os Sistemas de Informação (SI) informatizados e os principais papéis desempenhados por eles: apoio às operações, apoio à vanta-gem competitiva e apoio à decisão. A seleção das ofertas propostas foi efetuada uti-lizando o método de Estudo de Casos múltiplos em empresas que adquiriram esses sistemas,ghy utilizando o ANP (Analytic Network Process) como instrumento de pesquisa. Para se estabelecer uma classificação dos critérios utilizados na análise foi utilizada a Técnica Delphi, a qual foi realizada junto a especialistas em Tecnologia de Informação. O resultado obtido pelo Estudo de Casos mostrou que o procedimen-to proposto é válido e pode ser utilizado por empresas de todos os portes. / The use of Integrated Management Systems, also known as ERP (Enterprise Re-source Planning), are widely accepted by organizations since beginning of the ni-neties. As its implementation means a high financial value investment, the respon-sible team for its acquisition has to take special cares, once their positive or nega-tive results will appear only after long implementation period, often after many years. As it is a complex decision problem, evolving uncertainties and risks, the decision agents spend a lot of time to analyze the several criteria and functional-ities from received offers. This thesis presents a proposal which makes possible the companies, particularly those of small or medium sizes, which allows to analyze during the ERP acquisition phase, the available offers more adapted to their business requirements, based on a multi-criteria support decision method. The literature revision analyzes the computerized Information Systems (IS) and the main roles carried out by them: operations support, competitive advantage support and decision support. In order to define the criteria set used in the multi-criteria analysis, the Delphi Method was used and it was answered by Information Technology experts. These criteria was used to classify the ERP\'s offers using the multiple cases study using ANP (Analytic Network Process) as research tool.. The results obtained by case study in four companies were used to validate several propositions.

During the manufacturing planning, multiple variants of process chains for the manufacturing of a product to be developed are generated by engineers. In order to select an optimal variant, multiple decision criteria specifying technical, ecological and economical properties of the process chains as well as multiple assessments of different domain experts have to be taken into account. The contribution of this article is a two-step approach that provides a multi-criteria multi-expert assessment of manufacturing process chains supporting the selection of an optimal process chain. A web-based software tool that implements the multi-criteria assessment of process chains is also presented.

During the manufacturing planning, multiple variants of process chains for the manufacturing of a product to be developed are generated by engineers. In order to select an optimal variant, multiple decision criteria specifying technical, ecological and economical properties of the process chains as well as multiple assessments of different domain experts have to be taken into account. The contribution of this article is a two-step approach that provides a multi-criteria multi-expert assessment of manufacturing process chains supporting the selection of an optimal process chain. A web-based software tool that implements the multi-criteria assessment of process chains is also presented.

No description available.