Relational databases have proved inadequate for supporting new classes of applications, and as a consequence, a number of new approaches have been taken (Blaha 1998), (Harrington 2000). The most salient alternatives are denormalisation and conversion to an object-oriented database (Douglas 1997). Denormalisation can provide better performance but has deficiencies with respect to data modelling. Object-oriented databases can provide increased performance efficiency but without the deficiencies in data modelling (Blaha 2000). Although there have been various benchmark tests reported, none of these tests have compared normalised, object oriented and de-normalised databases. This research shows that a non-normalised database for data containing type code complexity would be normalised in the process of conversion to an objectoriented database. This helps to correct badly organised data and so gives the performance benefits of de-normalisation while improving data modelling. The costs of conversion from relational databases to object oriented databases were also examined. Costs were based on published benchmark tests, a benchmark carried out during this study and case studies. The benchmark tests were based on an engineering database benchmark. Engineering problems such as computer-aided design and manufacturing have much to gain from conversion to object-oriented databases. Costs were calculated for coding and development, and also for operation. It was found that conversion to an object-oriented database was not usually cost effective as many of the performance benefits could be achieved by the far cheaper process of de-normalisation, or by using the performance improving facilities provided by many relational database systems such as indexing or partitioning or by simply upgrading the system hardware. It is concluded therefore that while object oriented databases are a better alternative for databases built from scratch, the conversion of a legacy relational database to an object oriented database is not necessarily cost effective.

This Master's thesis deals with the evaluation of the performance of the company Měšťanský pivovar Polička, a. s. In the first part of this thesis are executed its theoretical resources and subsequently, in the second part, is accomplished an evaluation of the company by using of benchmarking techniques. The company Měšťanský pivovar Polička, a. s. is compared with four competing companies by using of financial analysis methods - method of vertical and horizontal analyses and method of financial ratios. In the concluding part are proposed strategical modifications in the company for its better performance.

In recent years, the application of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) databases has enabled architects/engineers to quantify the environmental impact of building materials for whole building analysis and comparative analyses of design alternatives. The application of building information modeling (BIM) has facilitated this process by providing designers and engineers with the detailed bill of materials required for LCA. However three limitations exist: First, LCA assessments have been limited to the design phase of a project delivery or post completion phase. Consequently, it does not help incentivize the choice of suppliers and delivery strategies that minimize the cradle-to-site impacts. Second, majority LCA tools ignore the impact of construction means and methods during the construction phase. Third, there is a lack of metrics and visualization tools that assess environmental impacts of decisions made during pre-construction and construction phase. As a result, little incentive exists for suppliers to provide embodied carbon footprint rates, and similarly, for contractors to balance project costs, schedule objectives with the corresponding environmental impact. To address these challenges, we propose and develop a new framework that applies BIM for reliable, effective benchmarking, monitoring, and visualization of embodied carbon footprint of construction projects. It comprises of a benchmarking module, and a monitoring and visualization module. In the experiments, this framework is implemented on concrete placement activities during the construction of the Center for the Arts facility at Virginia Tech. The developed framework can revolutionize construction by a) a rapid assessment and visualization of the deviations between expected and released carbon footprint, b) incentivizing contractors to request that manufacturers and suppliers gauge and share their carbon footprints as a part of contractor submittal process and c) incentivizing those construction firms that can complete their project with an overall carbon footprint rate lower than what is budgeted during the pre-construction or compared to the values from the design phase, while documenting and using the performance results as a benchmark for future similar projects. / Master of Science

There exists no predefined framework for aviation policy making and development. While aviation policy planning in most developed countries comes as a result of institutional and industry coordination and is embedded within other national policies addressing the welfare and growth of the country, it is found that in many cases in less developed countries (LDCs), aviation policy planning is often influenced by political pressures and the interests of fund donors. The complexity of this situation in the developing countries results in aviation plans that represent stand alone studies and attempt to find solutions to specific problems rather than comprehensive aviation plans which fit well the country‘s competitiveness profile and are properly coordinated with other national policies for achieving medium and long-term objectives. This study provides a three-stage policy development framework for aviation strategic planning based on situational analysis and performance benchmarking practices in order to assemble policy elements and produce a best-fit aviation strategy. The framework builds on study results that indicate an association between air transport sector performance and aviation policy strategies, arguing that it is not sufficient to simply describe performance but also to be able to assess it and understand how policymakers can use strategic planning tools to affect the air transport industry efficiency levels. This can be achieved by recognizing the level of the country‘s stage of development and working on enhancing the policy elements that produce better output and induce more contributions by aviation to the national economic development and connectivity levels. The proposed aviation policy development framework is systematic and continuous. It helps policymakers in LDC to manage uncertainty in complex situations by allowing them to defend, correct and re-examine the policy actions based on a forward thinking approach which incorporates the contingency elements of the policy and tracks the developments that can affect the odds of its success. The framework‘s elements and its flow of process are explained by providing an illustrative example applied to the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan.

There exists no predefined framework for aviation policy making and development. While aviation policy planning in most developed countries comes as a result of institutional and industry coordination and is embedded within other national policies addressing the welfare and growth of the country, it is found that in many cases in less developed countries (LDCs), aviation policy planning is often influenced by political pressures and the interests of fund donors. The complexity of this situation in the developing countries results in aviation plans that represent stand alone studies and attempt to find solutions to specific problems rather than comprehensive aviation plans which fit well the country‘s competitiveness profile and are properly coordinated with other national policies for achieving medium and long-term objectives. This study provides a three-stage policy development framework for aviation strategic planning based on situational analysis and performance benchmarking practices in order to assemble policy elements and produce a best-fit aviation strategy. The framework builds on study results that indicate an association between air transport sector performance and aviation policy strategies, arguing that it is not sufficient to simply describe performance but also to be able to assess it and understand how policymakers can use strategic planning tools to affect the air transport industry efficiency levels. This can be achieved by recognizing the level of the country‘s stage of development and working on enhancing the policy elements that produce better output and induce more contributions by aviation to the national economic development and connectivity levels. The proposed aviation policy development framework is systematic and continuous. It helps policymakers in LDC to manage uncertainty in complex situations by allowing them to defend, correct and re-examine the policy actions based on a forward thinking approach which incorporates the contingency elements of the policy and tracks the developments that can affect the odds of its success. The framework‘s elements and its flow of process are explained by providing an illustrative example applied to the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan.

Presented diploma thesis compares financial performance of a selected company with the financial performance reached in a given industrial sector. INFA criteria are used for the evaluation of the company and of its performance. INFA is a system of pyramidal decomposition of economic value added. The sector database of the Ministry of Industry and Trade of the Czech Republic was used for the referential analysis. The thesis consists of two parts. The first part defines financial analysis, economic value added and INFA criterion system from a theoretical point of view. The second part applies INFA on the specific company. The values of company indicators determined by this method are then compared with average values in the sector. Discrepancies are discussed and elucidated. The final chapter evaluates advantages and disadvantages of the used benchmarking model.

This master thesis deals with increasing performance using benchmarking in selected engineering company in the Zlín region. The theoretical part introduces the concept of benchmarking in the context of improving business performance. The main part however is in-depth case study on business performance. Based on both secondary and primary data sources are the selected engineering companies in the Zlín region evaluated by the benchmarking. Building on outcomes of this evaluation are presented possible recommendations for the selected company in order to enhance or even eliminate identified weaknesses.

With the current developments in modern web browsers, WebAssembly has been a rising trend over the last four years. Aimed at replacing bits of JavaScript functionality, it attempts to bring extra features to achieve portability and sandboxing through virtualisation. After the release of the WebAssembly System Interface, more and more projects have been working on using it outside web pages and browsers, in scenarios such as embedded, serverless, or distributed computing. This is thus not only relevant to the web and its clients, but also to applications in distributed systems. Considering the novelty of the topic, there is currently very little related scientific literature. With constant changes in development, proposals and goals, there is a large gap in relevant research. We aim to help bridge this gap by focusing on Rust and Arc-Lang, a domain-specific language for data analytics, in order to provide an overview of how far the technology has progressed, in addition to what runtimes there are and how they work. We investigate what kind of use case WebAssembly could have in the context of distributed systems, as well as how it can benefit data processing pipelines. Even though the technology is still immature at first glance, it is worth checking whether its proposals have been implemented, and how its performance compared to that of native Rust can affect data processing in a pipeline. We show this by benchmarking a filter program as part of a distributed container environment, while looking at different WebAssembly compilers such as Cranelift and LLVM. Then, we compare the resulting statistics to native Rust and present a synopsis of the state of WebAssembly in a distributed context. / I takt med den nuvarande utvecklingen av moderna webbläsare har WebAssembly stigit i trend under de senaste fyra åren. WebAssembly har som syfte att ersätta och utöka JavaScript med funktionalitet som är portabel och isolerad från omvärlden genom virtualisering. Efter lanseringen av WebAssembly System Interface har fler och fler projekt börjat applicera WebAssembly utanför webbsidor och webbläsare, i scenarier som inbäddade, serverlösa eller distribuerade beräkningar. Detta har gjort WebAssembly till ett språk som inte bara är relevant för webben och dess användare, utan även för applikationer i distribuerade system. Med tanke på ämnets framkant finns det för närvarande väldigt lite relaterad vetenskaplig litteratur. Ständiga förändringar i utveckling, förslag och mål har resulterat i stort gap i relevant forskning. Vi strävar efter att hjälpa till att överbrygga denna klyfta genom att studera WebAssembly i perspektivet av Rust och Arc-Lang, ett domänspecifikt språk för dataanalys, för att ge en översikt över hur långt tekniken har kommit, och samt utreda vilka exekveringssystem som finns och hur de fungerar. Vi undersöker vilken typ av användning WebAssembly kan ha i samband med distribuerade system, samt hur det kan gynna databehandlingspipelines. Även om tekniken fortfarande är ny vid första anblicken, är det värt att kontrollera om dess förslag har implementerats och hur dess prestanda gentemot Rust kan påverka databehandling i en pipeline. Vi visar detta genom att benchmarka ett filtreringsprogram som en del av en distribuerad containermiljö, samtidigt som vi tittar på olika WebAssembly-kompilatorer som exempelvis Cranelift och LLVM. Vi jämför resultaten med Rust och presenterar en sammanfattning av WebAssemblys tillstånd i sammanhanget av distribuerade system.

New application versions may contain source code changes that decrease the application’s performance. To ensure sufficient performance, it is necessary to identify these code changes. Peass is a performance analysis tool using performance measurements of unit tests to achieve that goal for Java applications. However, it can only be utilized for Java applications that are built using the tools Apache Maven or Gradle. This thesis provides a plugin for Peass that enables it to analyze applications built with Apache Ant. Peass utilizes the frameworks Kieker and KoPeMe to record the execution traces and measure the response times of unit tests. This results in the following tasks for the Peass-Ant plugin: (1) Add Kieker and KoPeMe as dependencies and (2) Execute transformed unit tests. For the first task, our plugin programmatically resolves the transitive dependencies of Kieker and KoPeMe and modifies the XML buildfiles of the application under test. For the second task, the plugin orchestrates the process that surrounds test execution—implementing performance optimizations for the analysis of applications with large codebases—and executes specific Ant commands that prepare and start test execution. To make our plugin work, we additionally improved Peass and Kieker. Therefore, we implemented three enhancements and identified twelve bugs. We evaluated the Peass-Ant plugin by conducting a case study on 200 commits of the open-source project Apache Tomcat. We detected 14 commits with 57 unit tests that contain performance changes. Our subsequent root cause analysis identified nine source code changes that we assigned to three clusters of source code changes known to cause performance changes.:1. Introduction 1.1. Motivation 1.2. Objectives 1.3. Organization 2. Foundations 2.1. Performance Measurement in Java 2.2. Peass 2.3. Apache Ant 2.4. Apache Tomcat 3. Architecture of the Plugin 3.1. Requirements 3.2. Component Structure 3.3. Integrated Class Structure of Peass and the Plugin 3.4. Build Modification Tasks for Tomcat 4. Implementation 4.1. Changes in Peass 4.2. Changes in Kieker and Kieker-Source-Instrumentation 4.3. Buildfile Modification of the Plugin 4.4. Test Execution of the Plugin 5. Evaluative Case Study 5.1. Setup of the Case Study 5.2. Results of the Case Study 5.3. Performance Optimizations for Ant Applications 6. Related Work 6.1. Performance Analysis Tools 6.2. Test Selection and Test Prioritization Tools 6.3. Empirical Studies on Performance Bugs and Regressions 7. Conclusion and Future Work 7.1. Conclusion 7.2. Future Work / Neue Versionen einer Applikation können Quelltextänderungen enthalten, die die Performance der Applikation verschlechtern. Um eine ausreichende Performance sicherzustellen, ist es notwendig, diese Quelltextänderungen zu identifizieren. Peass ist ein Performance-Analyse-Tool, das die Performance von Unit-Tests misst, um dieses Ziel für Java-Applikationen zu erreichen. Allerdings kann es nur für Java-Applikationen verwendet werden, die eines der Build-Tools Apache Maven oder Gradle nutzen. In dieser Arbeit wird ein Plugin für Peass entwickelt, das es ermöglicht, mit Peass Applikationen zu analysieren, die das Build-Tool Apache Ant nutzen. Peass verwendet die Frameworks Kieker und KoPeMe, um Ausführungs-Traces von Unit-Tests aufzuzeichnen und Antwortzeiten von Unit-Tests zu messen. Daraus resultieren folgende Aufgaben für das Peass-Ant-Plugin: (1) Kieker und KoPeMe als Abhängigkeiten hinzufügen und (2) Transformierte Unit-Tests ausführen. Für die erste Aufgabe löst das Plugin programmbasiert die transitiven Abhängigkeiten von Kieker und KoPeMe auf und modifiziert die XML-Build-Dateien der zu testenden Applikation. Für die zweite Aufgabe steuert das Plugin den Prozess, der die Testausführung umgibt, und führt spezielle Ant-Kommandos aus, die die Testausführung vorbereiten und starten. Dabei implementiert es Performanceoptimierungen, um auch Applikationen mit einer großen Codebasis analysieren zu können. Um die Lauffähigkeit des Plugins sicherzustellen, wurden zusätzlich Verbesserungen an Peass und Kieker vorgenommen. Dabei wurden drei Erweiterungen implementiert und zwölf Bugs identifiziert. Um das Peass-Ant-Plugin zu bewerten, wurde eine Fallstudie mit 200 Commits des Open-Source-Projekts Apache Tomcat durchgeführt. Dabei wurden 14 Commits mit 57 Unit-Tests erkannt, die Performanceänderungen enthalten. Unsere anschließende Ursachenanalyse identifizierte neun verursachende Quelltextänderungen. Diese wurden drei Clustern von Quelltextänderungen zugeordnet, von denen bekannt ist, dass sie eine Veränderung der Performance verursachen.:1. Introduction 1.1. Motivation 1.2. Objectives 1.3. Organization 2. Foundations 2.1. Performance Measurement in Java 2.2. Peass 2.3. Apache Ant 2.4. Apache Tomcat 3. Architecture of the Plugin 3.1. Requirements 3.2. Component Structure 3.3. Integrated Class Structure of Peass and the Plugin 3.4. Build Modification Tasks for Tomcat 4. Implementation 4.1. Changes in Peass 4.2. Changes in Kieker and Kieker-Source-Instrumentation 4.3. Buildfile Modification of the Plugin 4.4. Test Execution of the Plugin 5. Evaluative Case Study 5.1. Setup of the Case Study 5.2. Results of the Case Study 5.3. Performance Optimizations for Ant Applications 6. Related Work 6.1. Performance Analysis Tools 6.2. Test Selection and Test Prioritization Tools 6.3. Empirical Studies on Performance Bugs and Regressions 7. Conclusion and Future Work 7.1. Conclusion 7.2. Future Work

Master's thesis deals with the assessment of financial performance of the company ČSAD Kyjov Logistics a.s. The theoretical part explains the theoretical basis of financial analysis, regression analysis, the issue of time series, correlation analysis and benchmarking. In the practical part contains the results of the financial analysis, some of which are subjected to statistical analysis, which analyzes the dependencies between indicators and their development for the next two seasons. The Company is also compared with two competing companies and are given suggestions to improve business performance.