Les technologies RFID présentent des avantages non négligeables en comparaison aux technologies d'identification actuelles. Cependant, l'intégration de ces technologies dans les chaînes logistiques implique souvent des coûts élevés. Ainsi, les entreprises doivent conduire des analyses poussées pour évaluer l'impact des RFID sur le fonctionnement et l'économie des chaînes logistiques et décider de l'intégration ou non de ces technologies.Dans cette thèse nous nous concentrons sur la modélisation et l'analyse de l'introduction des technologies RFID dans les chaînes logistiques. Nous présentons d'abord une information générale sur les technologies RFID. Nous analysons ensuite la littérature sur l'intégration des RFID dans les chaînes logistiques en focalisant sur les défis et les avantages liés à l'intégration de ces technologies. Nous développons deux approches (analytique et par simulation) afin d'évaluer les impacts qualitatifs et quantitatifs des technologies RFID sur le fonctionnement et le profit des chaînes logistiques. Nous développons aussi une analyse du retour sur investissement (ROI), pour comparer les revenus obtenus à l'aide des technologies RFID avec les coûts associés à leur intégration. D'autre part, nous nous intéressons à l'amélioration des avantages de RFID dans les chaînes logistiques. Nous comparons les impacts de l'intégration de différentes RFID dans les chaînes logistiques par un remplacement simple des technologies d'identification actuelles et par la réorganisation des chaînes logistiques utilisant les nouvelles possibilités des technologies RFID. Les résultats obtenus dans ce travail mettent en évidence des perspectives intéressantes pour des études futures. L'originalité de cette étude est que nous comparons les impacts de plusieurs technologies RFID en les intégrant aux systèmes actuels et en reconstruisant des chaînes logistique grâce aux possibilités offertes par des technologies RFID. Notre modèle de simulation à événements discrets peut être utilisé comme un outil d'aide à la décision pour les sociétés qui visent à intégrer des technologies RFID.L'originalité de cette étude est que nous comparons les impacts de plusieurs technologies RFID en les intégrant aux systèmes actuels et en reconstruisant des chaînes logistique par les possibilités offertes par des technologies RFID. Notre simulation peut être utilisée comme un outil d'aide à la décision pour les sociétés qui considèrent l'intégration de technologies RFID. / In the last few years, RFID technologies have drawn considerable interests as one of the possible solutions to overcome these supply chain problems. However, integrating these technologies in supply chains induces large costs. Thus, companies must evaluate the impacts of RFID technologies on supply chain performances and economics, in order to decide whether these technologies should be integrated or not.In this thesis we focus on modeling and analyzing the impacts of introducing RFID technologies in supply chain. We first provided a basic knowledge of RFID technologies that includes the working process, the challenges and the obstacles of applying RFID technologies in supply chains. We then reviewed the literature and discussed the challenges and benefits related to integrating RFID in supply chains. Finally, we developed analytical and simulation approaches to evaluate qualitative and quantitative impacts of RFID technologies on supply chain performances and profits. We also developed ROI (Return On Investment) analysis, to compare the benefits obtained by RFID technologies with the costs associated to the integration of these technologies. Furthermore, we focused on how the benefits of RFID technologies can be improved by re-engineering supply chains using the characteristics of RFID technologies. Results obtained in this thesis highlight interesting perspectives for future studies. The main originality of this study is to compare the impacts of integrating different RFID technologies to supply chains by just replacing current identification technologies and by re-engineering supply chains using the new possibilities provided by RFID technologies. Our simulation can also be used as a decision support tool by companies that integrate RFID technologies.

Masters in Public Administration - MPA / Historically, the poor have always been socially, politically and economically marginalized in society. The South African Government’s Cooperative Act 2005 presents a promising step in the right direction towards addressing poverty and unemployment in rural areas. The research looks at two case studies and site relevant findings. This study gives a brief introductory account of cooperatives with regard to their history and existence, particularly in South Africa. The research report focuses on two case studies, where the organisational structures and business operations will be examined and compared. Finally the report will draw lessons to indicate the possible social and economic viability of these cooperatives and their place in rural development. Based on the findings and conclusions, a number of recommendations are made on cooperatives in the rural sector. The research utilizes secondary data, such as documents, records, the internet, books and literature on the subject of cooperatives and related aspects of unemployment and poverty, forming a background of cooperatives in the South African rural sector. Primary data takes the form of structured (personal one on one) and semi-structured (group discussion) interviews. The primary and secondary data present the basis for the report findings and conclusions. Where possible, the relevant recommendations are made.

There exists a large amount of old software that are still used by organizations and companies, despite their defects and expensive maintenance costs. This is because of their value to the businesses. To solve the issues with the old software, re-engineering can be used as a way to reuse and maintain these software. Through re-engineering code is modified or created with the purpose of solving the defects of the older systems and satisfy any new needs. The problem is that there are few investigations about how the effort (cost in time) that is required for re-engineering can be distributed through the phases that are part of re-engineering. The purpose of this thesis is to help organizations and companies plan their re-engineering, with the goal of giving quantitative data that shows how the effort required for re-engineering can be distributed between its different phases. This thesis has used qualitative research. In a literature study, knowledge was gathered about software development costs, re-engineering in general, and a process model for re-engineering. Action research was used to perform re-engineering, and to measure the efforts required for it and how the effort was distributed among the phases that are part of re-engineering. A number of criteria were created to contribute to the fullflling of the purpose and goal of the thesis. The result of the thesis is a compilation of the effort required. The compilation shows that two thirds of the total effort was spent on designing and implementing the new system. One quarter of the effort was spent on the analysis and planning phase. The remainder of the time, approximately one tenth of the total effort, was spent on the phases testing, documentation, acceptance and system transition and other tasks. The result shows that reengineering can be affected the most by influencing the phases where analysis and planning as well as design and implementation are performed. / Det finns i dagsläget en stor mängd äldre mjukvara som fortfarande används av organisationer och företag, trots deras brister och dyra underhållskostnader. Detta är på grund av deras värde för verksamheterna. För att hantera bristerna med äldre mjukvara kan omkonstruktion användas, som ett sätt att återanvända och underhålla äldre system. Genom en omkonstruktion modifieras eller skapas ny kod som försöker lösa systemets brister och eventuellt uppfylla nya behov. Problemet är att det finns få mätningsundersökningar kring hur insatsen (tidsåtgången) som krävs kan fördelas bland de moment som är del av omkonstruktion. Syftet med arbetet är att hjälpa organisationer och företag planera deras omkonstruktioner, med malet att ge kvantitativa data som visar hur insatsen för en omkonstruktion kan fördelas mellan omkonstruktionens moment. Denna studie har använt sig av kvalitativ forskning. I en litteraturstudie samlades kunskap om kostnad inom mjukvaruutveckling, omkonstruktion generellt, och en processmodell som användes för omkonstruktionsarbetet. Aktionsforskning användes för att genomföra omkonstruktion, för att mäta den insats som krävdes och hur insatsen fördelats bland de faser som ingår i omkonstruktion. Ett antal kriterier togs fram för att kvantifiera insatsen och bedöma att den data som togs fram bidrar till att uppfylla studiens syfte och mål. Resultatet av studien blev en kostnadssammanställning. Sammanställningen visar att två tredjedelar av den totala insatsen spenderades med design och implementation av det nya systemet. En fjärdedel av tiden spenderades på fasen analys och planering. Den resterande tiden, motsvarande en tiondel av totala insatsen, spenderades på faserna testning, dokumentation, acceptans och systemövergång och övriga uppgifter. Resultatet visar alltså att omkonstruktioner kan påverkas störst genom att påverka de faser där analys och planering respektive design och implementation av systemet utförs.

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Businesses do evolve. Their evolution necessitates the re-engineering of their existing "business processes”, with the objectives of reducing costs, delivering services on time, and enhancing their profitability in a competitive market. This is generally true and particularly in domains such as manufacturing, pharmaceuticals and education). The central objective of workflow technologies is to separate business policies (which normally are encoded in business logics) from the underlying business applications. Such a separation is desirable as it improves the evolution of business processes and, more often than not, facilitates the re-engineering at the organisation level without the need to detail knowledge or analyses of the application themselves. Workflow systems are currently used by many organisations with a wide range of interests and specialisations in many domains. These include, but not limited to, office automation, finance and banking sector, health-care, art, telecommunications, manufacturing and education. We take the view that a workflow is a set of "activities”, each performs a piece of functionality within a given "context” and may be constrained by some security requirements. These activities are coordinated to collectively achieve a required business objective. The specification of such coordination is presented as a set of "execution constraints” which include parallelisation (concurrency/distribution), serialisation, restriction, alternation, compensation and so on. Activities within workflows could be carried out by humans, various software based application programs, or processing entities according to the organisational rules, such as meeting deadlines or performance improvement. Workflow execution can involve a large number of different participants, services and devices which may cross the boundaries of various organisations and accessing variety of data. This raises the importance of _ context variations and context-awareness and _ security (e.g. access control and privacy). The specification of precise rules, which prevent unauthorised participants from executing sensitive tasks and also to prevent tasks from accessing unauthorised services or (commercially) sensitive information, are crucially important. For example, medical scenarios will require that: _ only authorised doctors are permitted to perform certain tasks, _ a patient medical records are not allowed to be accessed by anyone without the patient consent and _ that only specific machines are used to perform given tasks at a given time. If a workflow execution cannot guarantee these requirements, then the flow will be rejected. Furthermore, features/characteristics of security requirement are both temporal- and/or event-related. However, most of the existing models are of a static nature – for example, it is hard, if not impossible, to express security requirements which are: _ time-dependent (e.g. A customer is allowed to be overdrawn by 100 pounds only up-to the first week of every month. _ event-dependent (e.g. A bank account can only be manipulated by its owner unless there is a change in the law or after six months of his/her death). Currently, there is no commonly accepted model for secure and context-aware workflows or even a common agreement on which features a workflow security model should support. We have developed a novel approach to design, analyse and validate workflows. The approach has the following components: = A modelling/design language (known as CS-Flow). The language has the following features: – support concurrency; – context and context awareness are first-class citizens; – supports mobility as activities can move from one context to another; – has the ability to express timing constrains: delay, deadlines, priority and schedulability; – allows the expressibility of security policies (e.g. access control and privacy) without the need for extra linguistic complexities; and – enjoy sound formal semantics that allows us to animate designs and compare various designs. = An approach known as communication-closed layer is developed, that allows us to serialise a highly distributed workflow to produce a semantically equivalent quasi-sequential flow which is easier to understand and analyse. Such re-structuring, gives us a mechanism to design fault-tolerant workflows as layers are atomic activities and various existing forward and backward error recovery techniques can be deployed. = Provide a reduction semantics to CS-Flow that allows us to build a tool support to animate a specifications and designs. This has been evaluated on a Health care scenario, namely the Context Aware Ward (CAW) system. Health care provides huge amounts of business workflows, which will benefit from workflow adaptation and support through pervasive computing systems. The evaluation takes two complementary strands: – provide CS-Flow’s models and specifications and – formal verification of time-critical component of a workflow.

Les lignes de produits logicielles constituent une approche permettant de construire et de maintenir une famille de produits logiciels similaires mettant en œuvre des principes de réutilisation. Ces principes favorisent la réduction de l'effort de développement et de maintenance, raccourcissent le temps de mise sur le marché et améliorent la qualité globale du logiciel. La migration de produits logiciels similaires vers une ligne de produits demande de comprendre leurs similitudes et leurs différences qui s'expriment sous forme de caractéristiques (features) offertes. Dans cette thèse, nous nous intéressons au problème de la construction d'une ligne de produits à partir du code source de ses produits et de certains artefacts complémentaires comme les diagrammes de cas d'utilisation, quand ils existent. Nous proposons des contributions sur l'une des étapes principales dans cette construction, qui consiste à extraire et à organiser un modèle de caractéristiques (feature model) dans un mode automatisé. La première contribution consiste à extraire des caractéristiques dans le code source de variantes de logiciels écrits dans le paradigme objet. Trois techniques sont mises en œuvre pour parvenir à cet objectif : l'Analyse Formelle de Concepts, l'Indexation Sémantique Latente et l'analyse des dépendances structurelles dans le code. Elles exploitent les parties communes et variables au niveau du code source. La seconde contribution s'attache à documenter une caractéristique extraite par un nom et une description. Elle exploite le code source mais également les diagrammes de cas d'utilisation, qui contiennent, en plus de l'organisation logique des fonctionnalités externes, des descriptions textuelles de ces mêmes fonctionnalités. En plus des techniques précédentes, elle s'appuie sur l'Analyse Relationnelle de Concepts afin de former des groupes d'entités d'après leurs relations. Dans la troisième contribution, nous proposons une approche visant à organiser les caractéristiques, une fois documentées, dans un modèle de caractéristiques. Ce modèle de caractéristiques est un arbre étiqueté par des opérations et muni d'expressions logiques qui met en valeur les caractéristiques obligatoires, les caractéristiques optionnelles, des groupes de caractéristiques (groupes ET, OU, OU exclusif), et des contraintes complémentaires textuelles sous forme d'implication ou d'exclusion mutuelle. Ce modèle est obtenu par analyse d'une structure obtenue par Analyse Formelle de Concepts appliquée à la description des variantes par les caractéristiques. L'approche est validée sur trois cas d'étude principaux : ArgoUML-SPL, Health complaint-SPL et Mobile media. Ces cas d'études sont déjà des lignes de produits constituées. Nous considérons plusieurs produits issus de ces lignes comme s'ils étaient des variantes de logiciels, nous appliquons notre approche, puis nous évaluons son efficacité par comparaison entre les modèles de caractéristiques extraits automatiquement et les modèles de caractéristiques initiaux (conçus par les développeurs des lignes de produits analysées). / The idea of Software Product Line (SPL) approach is to manage a family of similar software products in a reuse-based way. Reuse avoids repetitions, which helps reduce development/maintenance effort, shorten time-to-market and improve overall quality of software. To migrate from existing software product variants into SPL, one has to understand how they are similar and how they differ one from another. Companies often develop a set of software variants that share some features and differ in other ones to meet specific requirements. To exploit existing software variants and build a software product line, a feature model must be built as a first step. To do so, it is necessary to extract mandatory and optional features in addition to associate each feature with its name. Then, it is important to organize the mined and documented features into a feature model. In this context, our thesis proposes three contributions.Thus, we propose, in this dissertation as a first contribution a new approach to mine features from the object-oriented source code of a set of software variants based on Formal Concept Analysis, code dependency and Latent Semantic Indexing. The novelty of our approach is that it exploits commonality and variability across software variants, at source code level, to run Information Retrieval methods in an efficient way. The second contribution consists in documenting the mined feature implementations based on Formal Concept Analysis, Latent Semantic Indexing and Relational Concept Analysis. We propose a complementary approach, which aims to document the mined feature implementations by giving names and descriptions, based on the feature implementations and use-case diagrams of software variants. The novelty of our approach is that it exploits commonality and variability across software variants, at feature implementations and use-cases levels, to run Information Retrieval methods in an efficient way. In the third contribution, we propose an automatic approach to organize the mined documented features into a feature model. Features are organized in a tree which highlights mandatory features, optional features and feature groups (and, or, xor groups). The feature model is completed with requirement and mutual exclusion constraints. We rely on Formal Concept Analysis and software configurations to mine a unique and consistent feature model. To validate our approach, we applied it on three case studies: ArgoUML-SPL, Health complaint-SPL, Mobile media software product variants. The results of this evaluation validate the relevance and the performance of our proposal as most of the features and its constraints were correctly identified.

L'Orienté Service (SOA) est un paradigme de conception qui facilite la construction d’applications extensibles et reconfigurables basées sur des artefacts réutilisables qui sont les services. Ceux-ci sont structurés via des interfaces bien définies et publiables et qui peuvent être dynamiquement découvertes.Beaucoup d’approches ont été proposées dans la littérature pour la réingénierie d’applications existantes développées dans des paradigmes pré-services, principalement l’orienté objet, vers SOA. L’objectif est de permettre de sauvegarder la valeur métier de ces d’applications tout en leur permettant de bénéficier des avantages de SOA. Le problème est que ces approches s'appuient sur des critères ad-hoc pour identifier correctement des services dans le code source des applications existantes.Par ailleurs, l'une des caractéristiques les plus distinctives d'une application orientée service est sa capacité de se reconfigurer dynamiquement et d'adapter son comportement en fonction de son contexte d'exécution. Cependant, dans les langages de description d'architecture (ADL) existants dont l’aspect de reconfiguration et pris en compte, les règles de reconfiguration sont représentées d'une manière ad-hoc; en général, elles ne sont pas modélisées d'une manière explicite mais enfouillées dans la description de l'architecture. D'une part, ceci engendre une difficulté de la gestion de la reconfiguration dynamique au niveau de l'architecture et d’autre part, la traçabilité de la description de la reconfiguration dynamique à travers les différents niveaux d'abstraction est difficile à représenter et à gérer.Afin de surmonter les problèmes précédents, nous proposons dans le cadre de cette thèse deux contributions. D'abord, nous proposons une approche d'identification de services basée sur un modèle de qualité où les caractéristiques des services sont étudiées, raffinées et réifiées en une fonction que nous utilisons pour mesurer la validité sémantique de ces services. La deuxième contribution consiste en une proposition d'un langage de description d'architecture orientée service (ADL) qui intègre la description de la variabilité architecturale. Dans cette ADL les services qui peuvent constituer l’architecture, les éléments de contexte dont les changements d’état sont à l’origine des changements architecturaux, les variantes des éléments architecturaux sélectionnées en fonction des états des éléments de contexte et le comportement architectural dynamique sont ainsi spécifiés de façon modulaire. / Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is an architectural design paradigm which facilitates building and composing flexible, extensible and reusable service-oriented assets. These latter are encapsulated behind well-defined and published interfaces that can be dynamically discovered by third-party services. Before the advent of SOA, several software systems were developed using older technologies. Many of these systems still afford a business value, however they suffer from evolution and maintenance problems. It is advantageous to modernize those software systems towards service-based ones. In this sense, several re-engineering techniques propose migrating object-oriented applications towards SOA. Nonetheless, these approaches rely on ad-hoc criteria to correctly identify services in object-oriented legacy source code.Besides, one of the most distinguishing features of a service-oriented application is the ability to dynamically reconfigure and adjust its behavior to cope with changing environment during execution. However, in existing architecture description languages handling this aspect, reconfiguration rules are represented in an ad-hoc manner; reconfiguration scenarios are often implicit. This fact hinders a full management of dynamic reconfiguration at architecture level. Moreover, it constitutes a challenge to trace dynamic reconfiguration description/management at different levels of abstraction.In order to overcome the aforementioned problems, our contributions are presented in two axes: First, in the context of migrating legacy software towards SOA, we propose a service identification approach based on a quality measurement model, where service characteristics are considered, refined to measurable metrics in order to measure the semantic correctness of identified services. The second axis is dedicated to an Architecture Description Language (ADL) proposition that describes a variant-rich service-based architecture. In this modular ADL, dynamic reconfigurations are specified at architecture level. Moreover, the description is enriched with context and variability information, in order to enable a variability-based self-reconfiguration of architecture in response to context changes at runtime.

<p>This study gives a brief introductory account of cooperatives with regard to their <font size="3" face="Times New Roman"><font size="3" face="Times New Roman">history and existence, particularly in South Africa. The research report focuses on <font size="3" face="Times New Roman"><font size="3" face="Times New Roman">two case studies, where the organisational structures and business operations will <font size="3" face="Times New Roman"><font size="3" face="Times New Roman">be examined and compared. Finally the report will draw lessons to indicate the <font size="3" face="Times New Roman"><font size="3" face="Times New Roman">possible social and economic viability of these cooperatives and their place in rural development. Based on the findings and conclusions, a number of r<font size="3" face="Times New Roman"><font size="3" face="Times New Roman">ecommendations are made on cooperatives in the rural sector.</font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></p> <p>&nbsp / </p>

<p>This study gives a brief introductory account of cooperatives with regard to their <font size="3" face="Times New Roman"><font size="3" face="Times New Roman">history and existence, particularly in South Africa. The research report focuses on <font size="3" face="Times New Roman"><font size="3" face="Times New Roman">two case studies, where the organisational structures and business operations will <font size="3" face="Times New Roman"><font size="3" face="Times New Roman">be examined and compared. Finally the report will draw lessons to indicate the <font size="3" face="Times New Roman"><font size="3" face="Times New Roman">possible social and economic viability of these cooperatives and their place in rural development. Based on the findings and conclusions, a number of r<font size="3" face="Times New Roman"><font size="3" face="Times New Roman">ecommendations are made on cooperatives in the rural sector.</font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></font></p> <p>&nbsp / </p>

Requirements Engineering (RE) approaches are widely used in several domains such as telecommunications systems, information systems, and even regulatory compliance. However, they are rarely applied in healthcare beyond requirements elicitation. Healthcare is a multidisciplinary environment in which clinical processes are often performed across multiple units. Introducing a new Information Technology (IT) system or a new process in such an environment is a very challenging task, especially in the absence of recognized RE practices. Currently, many IT systems are not welcomed by caregivers and are considered to be failures because they change what caregivers are familiar with and bring new tasks that often consume additional time. This thesis introduces a new RE-based approach aiming to evaluate and estimate the potential impact of new system integrations on current practices, organizational goals,and user satisfaction using goal modelling and process modelling techniques. This approach is validated with two case studies conducted in real hospitals and a usability study involving healthcare practitioners. The contributions of the thesis are: • Major: a novel Activity-based Process Integration (AbPI) framework that enables the integration of a new process into existing practices incrementally, in a way that permits continuous analysis and evaluation. AbPI also provides several alternatives to a given integration to ensure effective flowing and minimal disturbance to current practices. AbPI has a Goal Integration Method to integrate new goals, an Integration Method to integrate new processes, and an Alternative Evaluation Method exploiting multi-criteria decision-making algorithms to select among strategies. The modelling concepts of AbPI are supported by a profile of the User Requirements Notation augmented with a new distance-based goal-oriented approach to alternative selection and a new data-quality-driven algorithm for the propagation of confidence levels in goal models. • Minor: a usability study of AbPI to investigate the usefulness of the framework in a healthcare context. This usability study is part of the validation and is also a minor contribution due to: 1) the lack of usability studies when proposing requirements engineering frameworks, and 2) an intent to discover the potential usefulness of the framework in a context where recognized RE practices are seldom used.