<p>Agent oriented approaches are introduced with intention to facilitate software development in situations where other methods have shortcomings. Agents offer new possibilities and solutions to problems due to their properties and characteristics. Agent technology offer a high abstraction level and is therefore a more appropriate tool for making intelligent systems. Multi-agent systems are well suited in application areas with dynamic and challenging environments, and is advantageous in support for decision making and automation of tasks. Reduced coupling, encapsulation of functionality and a high abstraction level are some of the claimed benefits related to agent technology. Empirical studies are needed to investigate if agent technology is as good as asserted. This master thesis will give a deeper understanding of agent technology and benefits related to it. To investigate different aspects, an experiment was designed to reveal the applicability and the benefits. Two multi-agent systems were implemented and used as objects to be studied in the empirical study. As part of the investigation, a proper application area were chosen. The application area can be characterized as a scheduling problem with a dynamic and complex environment. Prometheus and JACK were used as development and modeling tools. Achieved experiences related to the development process will be presented in this report. The findings of the empirical study indicate reduced coupling and increased encapsulation of functionality. To achieve these benefits, the number of entities and functions had to be increased, and thus the number of code-lines. Further, the results indicate that more entities and lines of code will not have a significant influence on the development effort, due to the high abstraction level of agent technology.</p>

<p>In recent years, the World Wide Web (WWW) has become a popular platform for system development. There are several factors that make Web-development special. There is a large number of quality requirements in the Web-based system. Web projects involve people with a diverse background, such as technical people with background in programming and non-technical people with background in graphical design. In addition, the Web-based system are often not developed separately, but is integrating existing subsystems. The time-to-marked requirement is strong. Web-based system must tolerate errors and abnormal situations caused by internal component failure or user mistakes. Therefore, robustness is considered to be a critical factor for Web-based systems. Building a robust Web-based system is never an easy task. Furthermore, the end users of Web-based systems have different backgounds. Many have knowledge of the Web, others have little or no knowledge of the Web. Since Web-systems are used by people with a rather diverse background, it is important that the Web-based systems must have error tolerance and ability to survive due to user mistake. The main focus of this project is analyzing robustness of Web-based system. In order to analyze robustness of Web-based system, it is necessary to carry out a robustness assessment. Assessment methods are used to evaluate the robustness and give an estimating of the system's robustness. Further, robustness testing of a Web-based system has to be performed to get an idea of the system's current robustness. The result of estimating and test result will also be discussed, compared and evaluated. An Automatic Acceptance Testing of Web Applications (AutAT) will be used to test the robustness of a Web-based system. DAIM (Norwegian: Digtal Arkivering og Innlevering av Masteroppgaver) is the target system that will be tested the robustness of. Keywords: Robustness, testing, robustness assessment, robustness estimating, Web-based system, AutAT, DAIM.</p>

<p>In modern society, we rely on safely working software systems. This is the final report in a masters degree project to reveal key issues in the science field of computer software architecture and design of safety-critical software systems. A pre-study of a navigation system implied that functionality related problems and safety-critical problems do not stack one to one, but rather is a case of solving these aspects in different layers. This means that changes in software systems functionality do not necessary mean that change in safety-critical modules has to be done as well, and visa versa. To further support the findings in the pre-study, an experiment was created to investigate these matters. A group of twenty-three computer science students from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) participated as subjects in the experiment. They were asked to make two functional additions and two safety-critical additions to a software robot emulator. A dynamic web tool was created to present information to the subjects, and they could here answer surveys and upload their task solutions. The results of the experiment shows that there were not found any evidence that the quality attributes got affected by the design approaches. This means that the findings of this study suggest that there is difficult to create safety-critical versions of software architectural design patterns, because all design patterns have a set of additions and concequences to a system, and all sides of the implications of the design pattern should be discussed by the system architects before used in a safety-critical system.</p>

<p>This report was written as part of our thesis based on an assignment provided by Kantega. It deals with the use of mobile phones to access eGovernment services using the Liberty Identity Web Services Framework (ID-WSF). Additionally, it explores the use of strong authentication mechanisms on mobile phones while using the phone as the terminal to access such services. The first part of the report describes the project and its goals. In this process, it defines three research questions that will be answered in the course of the thesis. Furthermore, it outlines how these questions should be answered. This part also includes a presentation of the prototype that was developed later in the project. The second part of the report concentrates on the theoretical basis of the assignment. Existing standards and technologies for strong authentication and Liberty-enabled products are explored and evaluated. The focus of the evaluation is upon whether the technologies could be used in the prototype. The third part of the report contains the requirements specification, design, implementation and testing documentation for the prototype. This part aims to describe all aspects of the prototype development and enables us to show that it is a valid proof-of-concept. Requirements and design incorporating strong authentication into the prototype are also provided, although this functionality was not implemented as specified in the assignment. The last part of the report evaluates the results obtained in the course of the thesis and especially the resulting prototype. The prototype fulfills our requirements well, but there where some reservations on the security in the strong authentication design. This part also looks at what can be done in the future to further explore the topic and improve the results. Finally, it shows how the report has answered the research questions we defined in the beginning of the thesis by completing a prototype that accesses eGovernment services using Liberty ID-WSF.</p>

<p>Online financial news sources continuously publish information about actors involved in the Norwegian financial market. These are often short messages describing temporal relations. However, the amount of information is overwhelming and it requires a great effort to stay up to date on both the latest news and historical relations. Therefore it would have been advantageous to automatically analyse the information. In this report we present a framework for identifying actors and relations between them. Text mining techniques are employed to extract the relations and how they evolve over time. Techniques such as part of speech tagging, named entity identification, along with traditional information retrieval and information extraction methods are employed. Features extracted from the news articles are represented as vectors in a vector space. The framework employs the feature vectors to identify and describe relations between entities in the financial market. A qualitative evaluation of the framework shows that the approach has promising results. Our main finding is that vector representations of features have potential for detecting relations between actors, and how these relations evolve. We also found that the approach taken is dependent on an accurate identification of named entities.</p>

<p>This master thesis presents PORDaS, the Peer-to-peer Object Relational Database System. It is a continuation of work done in a project of fall 2005, where the foundation for the thesis was laid down. The focus of the work is on distributed query processing between autonomous databases in a structured peer-to-peer network. A great deal of effort has gone into compiling the theoretical foundation for the project, which served as a basis for assessing alternative approaches to introducing a query processor in a peer-to-peer database. The old PORDaS version was extended to include a simplified, pipelined query processor capable of joining tables. The query processor had two different execution strategies, the first was performing join operators at the requesting node and the second was performing join operators parallel among the nodes participating in the query. Experiments which ran PORDaS on a cluster of 36 computers showed that there are room for improvements even though the system was able to perform all the tests.</p>

<p>Today more and more companies acquire enterprise-scale solutions for their organization. Enterprise-scale solutions connect departments and business functions in the organization in order to facilitate the coordination, communication, and work flow between them. However, when systems get more interconnected and complex, they are also more prone to faults. If business critical parts of the system are affected, this can be devastating for a company. When designing large enterprise scale systems, one uses a wide range of specialized models with different view points and applications. This fragmentation and specialization of the representation of the system decreases the clarity of the total enterprise model and implies that it is difficult to analyze the enterprise as a whole. To overcome this problem, specialized software tools that can integrate the sub models in a total model can be developed. This thesis will develop a tool assisted extended process to the development process Rational Unified Process that helps analyzing the design of enterprise solutions by integrating the behavioral and structural models of the system into a unified representation. The tools take basis in digitized models represented in UML, the industry standard language for modeling software systems. We will focus on the two quality attributes availability and criticality.</p>

<p>This project was started to develop a new improved version of the Peer2Me framework. After having evaluated the first version of the Peer2Me framework in our depth study project in the fall of 2005, quite a few possible improvements came up. This report starts with an introduction to Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), wireless networking, Peer-to-Peer (P2P) computing, and mobile ad hoc networking. It also introduces some central concepts concerning design of a software architecture, and technology relevant to the development of the Peer2Me framework. The redesign of the framework was started by eliciting a set of new requirements, constituting the basis for designing the new Peer2Me architecture. Through an iterative and incremental development process, Peer2Me framework v2.0 was developed with several new features. An instant messenger application has been developed using both versions of the framework, in order to compare them. A thorough comparison of Peer2Me v1.0 and Peer2Me v2.0 shows that the redesign has resulted in a reduced framework footprint and complexity, a simplified interface towards the MIDlets, and a considerably increase in transfer rate.</p>

<p>Today's way of life includes increasing amounts of information, and therefore handling and processing of information. Almost everything you do involves some sort of a computer somewhere, and many businesses have implemented comprehensive computer systems into their corporative structure, to serve both employees and customers. But if a new service is introduced to the users, or a new group of users are introduced to an existing service, how do you know if the performance will be satisfying? To deal with such questions, a method called The Scalability Assessment Method (SAM) has been developed. The Scalability Assessment Method is a general procedure for evaluating the scalability of a system architecture. Other projects have applied SAM to real reference systems, and their results have shown that SAM is a method that can be trusted to give credible predictions. Until recently, dedicated software tools that support the SAM method have been absent, and the researchers have been using i.a. spreadsheets in an ad hoc approach to the problems. Therefore, a SAM software package is in development. The SAM Engine (SAMe) is a Java program developed in this project, with an intuitive user interface that is enabling a non-expert user to apply the method on a desired architecture. This report documents the development of the prototype SAM Engine (SAMe), and how the program supports the SAM method. Keywords: Performance evaluation, scalability, simulation, Structure and Performance, SAM.</p>

<p>This thesis is a continuation of my previous work `Supporting Notetaking with Digital Writing System: the case of teacher education’. The main goal of this thesis is to design a customized digital pen and paper based note taking system for the practice based teacher education, PPE. This thesis work has further performed a literature review to state the pedagogical objectives of PPE. Literature review on state-of-the-art has also been carried out. Together, these researches have informed the development of deployment scenarios and requirements for the system design. The system design is based on the Logitech io2 system deployed in my previous work. The system design extends the original system with a specialized paper design and a functionality to invoke storing of notes to specified folders at note taking time. The system has been evaluated by both experts and users, and has received positive feedback from both groups. The feedback is presented in this thesis to inform possible further work with this system</p>