<p>This thesis documents research encompassing the design of dynamic electronic performance support systems. Essentially, an Electronic Performance Support System (EPSS) is complex distributed software that provides on-the-job support in order to facilitate task performance within some particular target application domain. In view of the rapid pace of change in current business and industrial environments, the conventional practice of issuing a new release of Electronic Performance Support System (EPSS) every few years to incorporate changes, is no longer practical. An EPSS is required to adapt to the changes as soon as possible and without the need for major code modification. This is accomplished by creating a design in which task specific knowledge is not hard coded in the software but is extracted on the fly. The design also enables a loose coupling among different modules of the system so that functionalities may be added, removed, modified or extended with minimum disruption. In this thesis we show how to combine service-oriented architecture with the concepts of software agents to achieve a software architecture that provides the required agility. Traditionally Unified Modeling Language (UML), which lacks formal semantics, has been the tool of choice for design and analysis of such systems and that means formal analysis techniques cannot be used for verification of UML models, whereas Software Engineering practices require analysis and verification at an early stage in the software development process. In this thesis we present an algorithm to transform UML state chart models to Object Coloured Petri (OCP) nets that have a strong mathematical foundation and can be implemented by standard tools such as Design/CPN for simulation and dynamic analysis in order to verify behavioural properties of the model. We show how to apply this technique to verify some of the desirable behavioural properties of the proposed EPSS architecture. To demonstrate the feasibility of our approach we have successfully implemented a prototype of an EPSS based on the proposed design.</p> <p>The main contributions of this research are: 1. Proposed an anthropomorphic architecture for a dynamic PSS. 2. Combined the concepts of services oriented architecture and software agents to achieve dynamic updating of task specific knowledge and minimal coupling between different modules of complex software to allow painless evolution. 3. Brought formal methods to the design phase in the development of agent based software systems by proposing an algorithm to transform UML state diagrams to OCP nets for dynamic analysis. 4. Modelled the dynamic creation and deletion of objects/agents using OCP net concepts and Design/CPN. 5. Proposed an architecture that can be used for creating families of agile PSS.</p> / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

This study explored the design and development of an electronic performance enhancement tool that can assist a person with limited programming skills to create a variety of simple customized information management websites. In particular, this study was modeled after needs within an Instruction Technology department in which individuals were able to create pre-functional web pages with various elements such as textboxes and dropdown menus but lacked the programming skills necessary to add functionality to these web forms. Skilled programmers could add functionality to these pre-functioning web forms or create customized information management websites from scratch. However, programmers are not always available when needed. At the time of this study, there was no readily available way for persons to create customized information management websites without the services of a programmer or without needing to learn programming skills themselves. This study sought to determine what functionalities, characteristics and capabilities could be included in an electronic performance enhancement tool to assist non-programmers to create simple customized information management websites and how a tool with such functionalities, characteristics and capabilities could be designed and developed. A prototype version of such tool (named the Form And DataBase Interaction Tool or "FADBIT") was designed and developed in this study. This tool asks users who have created simple pre-functional web forms to answer a series of questions related to those webforms. Given the user's responses to these questions, this tool is able to form a metalanguage representation of the user's intentions for the web form and can translate this representation into useful programming code to add the desired functionality. The tool was successfully designed and developed using a generalized modular framework, and a Create-Adapt-Generalize model, with each module addressing one or more patterns common to web programming. The prototype tool successfully allowed non-programmers to create functional information websites for two structured evaluation projects, and achieved some level of success and encountered some difficulties with an unstructured project. Proposed modifications and extensions to the tool to address the difficulties encountered are presented. / Ph. D.