The current practice of construction productivity and emission monitoring is performed by either manual stopwatch studies which are significantly labor intensive and subject to human errors, or by the use of RFID and GPS tracking devices which may be costly and impractical. To address these limitations, a novel computer vision based method for automated 2D tracking, 3D localization, and action recognition of construction equipment from different camera viewpoints is presented. In the proposed method, a new algorithm based on Histograms of Oriented Gradients and hue-saturation Colors (HOG+C) is used for 2D tracking of the earthmoving equipment. Once the equipment is detected, using a Direct Linear Transformation followed by a non-linear optimization, their positions are localized in 3D. In order to automatically analyze the performance of these operations, a new algorithm to recognize actions of the equipment is developed. First, a video is represented as a collection of spatio-temporal features by extracting space-time interest points and describing each with a Histogram of Oriented Gradients (HOG). The algorithm automatically learns the distributions of these features by clustering their HOG descriptors. Equipment action categories are then learned using a multi-class binary Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier. Given a novel video sequence, the proposed method recognizes and localizes equipment actions. The proposed method has been exhaustively tested on 859 videos from earthmoving operations. Experimental results with an average accuracy of 86.33% and 98.33% for excavator and truck action recognition respectively, reflect the promise of the proposed method for automated performance monitoring. / Master of Science

In the late 1980s and early 1990s few transportation agencies around the world considered performance-based specifications as an alternative to improve the efficiency of the services provided to the public. These initiatives are better known as Performance-Based Road Maintenance (PBRM). PBRM calls for performance-based work, in which a desired outcome is specified rather than a material or method. This type of specification promises to be an excellent tool to improve government efficiency in maintaining transportation networks; however, without proper monitoring, it could likely yield adverse outcomes. Since PBRM is relatively new, the availability of reliable and comprehensive sets of guidelines to evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of this type of specifications in the roadway maintenance arena is limited. Transportation agencies currently rely on criteria and procedures they have had developed from their traditional methods used to evaluate performance. Unfortunately, some of these procedures cannot appropriately assess the benefits, if any, accrued by the government as a result of implementing performance-based specifications for the maintenance of the roadway system. This research presents the development of a framework for monitoring PBRM more comprehensively and accurately. The framework considers the assessment of five main areas -- Level of Service Effectiveness, Cost-Efficiency, Timeliness of Response, Safety Procedures, and Quality of Services -- in order to guarantee the comprehensiveness and reliability of the evaluation process. The major contribution of this framework is to provide transportation agencies with guidelines for evaluating the effectiveness and efficiency of PBRM as an alternative delivery method to maintain and preserve the roadway system. / Ph. D.

Performance monitoring counters are implemented in most recent microprocessors. In this thesis, we describe various performance measurement experiments for a program and a system that we conducted on a Linux operating system using the Pentium performance counters. We carried out our performance measurements on a Pentium II microprocessor. The Pentium II performance counters can be configured to count events such as cache misses, TLB misses, instructions executed etc. We used a low intrusive overhead technique to access these performance counters. We used these performance counters to measure the cache miss overheads due to context switches in Linux system. Our methodology involves sampling the hardware counters every 50ps. The sampling was set up using signals related to interval timers. We describe an analytical cache performance model under multiprogrammed condition from the literature and validate it using the performance monitoring counters. We next explores the long term performance of a system under different workload conditions. Various performance monitoring events - data cache h, data TLB misses, data cache reads or writes, branches etc. - are monitored over a 24 hour period. This is useful in identifying activities which cause loss of system performance. We used timer interrupts for sampling the performance counters. We develop a profiling methodology to give a perspective of performance of the different functions of a program, not only on the basis of execution-time but also on the data cache misses. Available tools like prof on Unix can be used to pinpoint the regions of performance loss of programs, but they mainly rely on an execution-time profiles. This does not give insight into problems in cache performance for that program. So we develop this methodology to get the performance of each function of the program not only on the basis of its execution time but also on the basis of its cache behavior.

Citizens of South Africa expect that the policy and regulatory changes introduced by government will be translated into tangible service delivery. Elected representatives, in particular, must demonstrate that national, provincial and local government are capable of managing public resources in a way that deliver benefits to its citizens. The ex- President Thabo Mbeki often used to speak about performance-driven public sector and has referred to the critical role that local government will play in this process. Municipalities which are at the coal-face of service delivery are being challenged to demonstrate their ability to execute both basic as well as enabling services crucial for social and economic growth and development. This challenge finds expression in the requirement that municipalities are expected to report on their performance, from both a civic and policy perspective. The present government is taking performance of government officials and politicians seriously. The Government has created a new ministry in the Presidency called Performance Mortitoring and Evaluation that will assist in ensuring that government performs better. The President of South Africa Mr. Jacob Zuma said that performance management works only if there is a mechartism to hold the people responsible and accountable City of Johannesburg (COJ) therefore looks at the effectiveness of City Scorecard (CS) in terms of performance management at the City of Johannesburg for enhanced performance of employees. The improved performance of employees is imperative for effective service delivery to communities. There were numerous protests all over the country between January and August 2009 including COJ against poor service delivery by different municipalities. It is therefore essential to identify the impact of City Scorecard on performance management of municipal employees. There is a close relationship between performance management and service delivery. The needs and expectations of the community are considered in Integrated Development Plan that assists the top Management of COJ to develop strategic objectives for the City. The priorities are established by the Mayor, commonly known as Mayoral priorities. The needs, priorities and strategies are combined, monitored and measured through City Scorecard (CS). The community is a yard stick of City Scorecard. The satisfaction of the community is a means to ensure that municipal officials are performing and rendering effective and efficient services to communities. / Thesis (M. Development and Management)--North-West University, Vaal Triangle Campus, 2010.

Citizens of South Africa expect that the policy and regulatory changes introduced by government will be translated into tangible service delivery. Elected representatives, in particular, must demonstrate that national, provincial and local government are capable of managing public resources in a way that deliver benefits to its citizens. The ex- President Thabo Mbeki often used to speak about performance-driven public sector and has referred to the critical role that local government will play in this process. Municipalities which are at the coal-face of service delivery are being challenged to demonstrate their ability to execute both basic as well as enabling services crucial for social and economic growth and development. This challenge finds expression in the requirement that municipalities are expected to report on their performance, from both a civic and policy perspective. The present government is taking performance of government officials and politicians seriously. The Government has created a new ministry in the Presidency called Performance Mortitoring and Evaluation that will assist in ensuring that government performs better. The President of South Africa Mr. Jacob Zuma said that performance management works only if there is a mechartism to hold the people responsible and accountable City of Johannesburg (COJ) therefore looks at the effectiveness of City Scorecard (CS) in terms of performance management at the City of Johannesburg for enhanced performance of employees. The improved performance of employees is imperative for effective service delivery to communities. There were numerous protests all over the country between January and August 2009 including COJ against poor service delivery by different municipalities. It is therefore essential to identify the impact of City Scorecard on performance management of municipal employees. There is a close relationship between performance management and service delivery. The needs and expectations of the community are considered in Integrated Development Plan that assists the top Management of COJ to develop strategic objectives for the City. The priorities are established by the Mayor, commonly known as Mayoral priorities. The needs, priorities and strategies are combined, monitored and measured through City Scorecard (CS). The community is a yard stick of City Scorecard. The satisfaction of the community is a means to ensure that municipal officials are performing and rendering effective and efficient services to communities. / Thesis (M. Development and Management)--North-West University, Vaal Triangle Campus, 2010.

Applikationsövervakning är en term för att i realtid övervaka applikationer och kunna upptäcka fel innan slutanvändaren märker av ett problem. Med övervakning av applikationer menas inte bara den enskilda programvaran utan allt som rör applikationen i fråga. Trafikverkets önskemål är att leverera en hög kvalité i sina applikationer. I nuläget har utvecklare ingen eller dålig insyn i hur en applikation levererar i en skarp miljö efter att de lämnat över ansvaret till drift. För att kunna hålla en bra kvalité i sina applikationer så vill de undersöka hur applikationsövervakning kan hjälpa till att se behov av ändringar i applikationer innan större problem uppstår. I en fallstudie bestående av intervjuer och dokumentstudier kommer genom användning av situationsbaserad FA/SIMM nuvarande arbetssätt fångas. Samt fånga mål och problem som uttrycks i verksamheten kring utveckling & förvaltning och drift av applikationer. Dessa kommer sedan analyseras för att undersöka på vilket sätt applikationsövervakning skulle hjälpa utvecklare & förvaltare, men även driftspersonal i deras arbete. Resultatet av detta visar att de problem och mål som tas upp dels är organisatoriska i sin natur och arbetssättet DevOps framhålls som en möjlig lösning. Även att applikationsövervakning de facto skulle kunna bidra till en ökad kvalité i applikationerna genom att tillföra en möjlighet att arbeta mer proaktivt. / Application monitoring is a term for real-time monitoring of applications to be able to discover faults before they reach the end-user. Application monitoring does not only mean the individual software but also everything surrounding it, which can have an impact on the application. Trafikverket wishes to deliver high quality in their applications. At present the developers have no or little insight in how an application delivers in a live environment after they handed over the responsibility to the operations. In order to maintain a good quality of their applications they want to explore how application monitoring may help to see changes in the needs of applications before major problems occur. In a case study consisting of interviews and document studies and through situation based FA/SIMM present ways of working will be produced. It will also identify wishes/concerns expressed by the developers and operations departments in the managing of existent applications. These will then be analyzed to examine in which way application monitoring would help developers, but also operations, in their work. The result shows that the problems which are brought forward are in a sense organizational of nature and that DevOps is a possible way for solution. But also that application monitoring could contribute to the delivery of high quality in applications in a proactive manor.

It is important to develop methods that are capable of successfully determining plant performance. The method used should be based on the ability to determine the performance of each of the various unit operations within the plant. This in turn will assist with the correct decision as to which unit in the plant should be improved first. The performance of the various units can be accumulated to give a representation of the performance of the entire plant. A plant-wide performance monitoring method has been developed to do just this. Originally it was developed for a specific unit operation. It has now been verified that this method is applicable to different unit operations. The method employed to determine this plant-wide performance is by evaluating how close the plant is to its inherent optimum. Where applicable, this inherent optimum can also be replaced with a user specified optimum. When an optimum is specified there is a possibility of oscillations around this “optimum” and the effects of this on the performance number are eliminated to give a more general plant-wide performance number for each unit operation. In addition to the “optimum” value selection the addition of performance weights to specific focus areas (utility usage or product quality) in the performance calculation will also improve the comparative nature of the plant-wide index for different unit operations. The scope of this investigation is limited to the experimental test rigs that were available in the Process Control Laboratory at the University of Pretoria. The methods that were used to determine the single loop performance of each of the different control loops are: <ul> <li>Minimum variance</li> <li>Generalised minimum variance</li> <li>Integral of the Absolute Error (IAE)</li> <li>Integral of the Square Error (ISE)</li> </ul> The single loop performance methods are required to determine how effectively the plant-wide performance index evaluates the plant, since these are existing means of determining how well a plant is operating, but these become impractical due to excessive amounts of information needing evaluation. / Dissertation (MEng)--University of Pretoria, 2008. / Chemical Engineering / unrestricted

In light of the global shift to remote work that was prompted by the Covid-19 pandemic - the relevance and use of Electronic Performance Monitoring (EPM) significantly escalated across all sectors. However, the most recent comprehensive literature review on the topic by Ravid et al. (2020) pointed out significant gaps in how EPM is perceived by knowledge-based employees. In line with those defined gaps, we raised two research questions, regarding what the perceptions of knowledge-based workers are towards the implementation and dissemination of EPM techniques, and whether the workplace context (home/office) has an effect on knowledge-based worker’s perceptions towards it. In this paper, we take a critical approach relying on a theory-based typology of EPM characteristics and build on the organizational control theory by elaborating on the technology-mediated control concept. We follow the constructivist grounded theory approach developed by Charmaz (2008) and the data was collected via 20 semi-structured interviews. The key findings of this research showed similarities as well as differences in how knowledge-based employees perceive EPM in contrast to other types of workforce. While overall the perceptions on EPM are negative, they can to some extent be alleviated by introducing a justifiable purpose, being transparent, allowing control over monitoring, and setting clear limits. Moreover, we provided insights into the perceptions of knowledge-based workers in response to EPM within the context of working from home. In such a context, knowledge-based workers show more resistance to EPM techniques and higher expectations of privacy, transparency, and appropriate data handling. Lastly, the authors provided avenues for further research including cross-cultural perspective, access to data, and ethicality and legality of EPM.

Moderate-to-severe traumatic brain injury (M/S TBI) can affect an individual's ability to perform daily tasks. For example, individuals with M/S TBI are more likely to commit errors on tasks such as making a meal or wrapping a present. The neural processes involved in such errors are poorly understood. Studies suggest that neurophysiologic markers of cognitive control and error processing may be helpful in gaining additional insight into errors on naturalistic action tasks. Unfortunately, previous experimental methods left a methodological gap which limited the use of neurophysiological markers in the study of naturalistic action. Several recent studies in healthy adults have suggested one method of bridging the gap by having individuals observe another person's errors. The current study was the first study to employ the method in a TBI population as a possible means of gaining additional insight into the detrimental effects of M/S TBI on the performance of naturalistic actions. In order to gain additional insight into the effects of M/S TBI on the completion of naturalistic tasks I used two neurophysiologic markers of cognitive control and error processing. They were the observer error related negativity (oERN) and the P300 components of the scalp-recorded event-related potential (ERP). I hypothesized that individuals with M/S TBI would demonstrate error-specific changes in the two oERN and P300 that would correlate with self-reported difficulties in daily functioning. The study consisted of two experiments. One compared 15 individuals with M/S TBI to 17 demographically similar healthy controls on an error related naturalistic action based picture task. The second compared an overlapping sample of 16 individuals with M/S TBI to 16 demographically similar controls as they watched a confederate complete the Erikson flanker task, a commonly used task in the study of electrophysiological markers. Accuracy (error vs. correct) and group (M/S TBI vs. control) effects were analyzed using 2 x 2 repeated measures ANOVAs on ERP amplitude and latency. Pearson product-moment correlations were calculated to evaluate the relationship between the P300 and oERN and measures of self-reported executive functioning (Frontal Systems Behavior Scale, FrSBe) and neuropsychological measures. Findings supported a difference between the control and M/S TBI groups in how errors were processed during the naturalistic actions based picture task. There was an interaction between group membership and response accuracy (error vs. correct) on P300 amplitude and P300 latency. Controls demonstrated reduced P300 amplitude and latency on error trials compared to correct trials. Individuals with M/S TBI did not demonstrate a significant difference between correct trials and error trials on P300 amplitude and latency. The amplitude and latency of the P300 were correlated with self-reported functional difficulties in individuals with M/S TBI but not control participants. A Fisher's r -- z analysis indicated that correlations differed significantly between groups; however, an outlier was identified in the correlational data. Removal of the outlier data led to non-significant results in the Fisher's r -- z analysis. Taken together, results of the picture task supplied evidence that for individuals with M/S TBI differences in neurophysiologic markers between groups could be explained by reduced adaptation to complexity or by possible deficits in a secondary error processing pathway for complex errors. Future research could focus on better defining the functional relationship between P300 amplitude and latency and increased errors in naturalistic actions following M/S TBI. Observation of the flanker task did not elicit oERN waveforms from either healthy controls or from individuals with M/S TBI. The results could be due to problems with the current task, but also raised some concerns about previous studies using the flanker task which employed a slightly different methodology requiring participants to count errors. The current study did not require participant to count errors. As a whole, the study supplied partial support for using electrophysiological markers of error processing to gain additional understanding increased errors in the performance of naturalistic actions following M/S TBI.

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