This thesis deals with the problem of locating emergency vehicles in an urban area. An optimization model is formulated that extends previous work by allowing stochastic travel times, unequal vehicle utilizations, and backup service. The heart of the model is a procedure similar to the Hypercube approximation model. Ten pair-wise interchange heuristics are developed and tested on 240 test problems. Demand and service time components of the test data have been generated using characteristics of the Tucson Emergency Medical System. Geographical components of the test data have been generated using actual city shapes as models. It is believed that these test problems are more indicative of actual emergency vehicle location problems than those previously presented in the literature.

A private telecom carrier partnered with the University of Waterloo to examine opportunities to improve their asset management processes. A reliance on traditional CAD technology made it difficult to generate an enterprise view of operational assets, such as poles and cables, since CAD documents were limited to neighbourhood scale coverage. The CAD documents had to communicate logical and locational properties of these assets. These requirements were often at odds since the elements in these CAD documents were occasionally moved to clarify logical aspects, the most common being connectivity with other telecommunications hardware. Elements within the drawings were also restricted to two dimensions, a legacy of early adoption of CAD technology within the telecom carrier. Developments in GIS and architectural technology that have occurred since the introduction of CAD offer opportunities to manage assets using enterprise geospatial systems with three dimensional content. Prominent technologies and standards, such as CityGML and Oracle, will be examined to develop a model to support requirements related to service location. A service location for this paper is a site that requires the deployment of specific resources to meet the needs of a service request. Additionally, as location displacement is an issue that needs to be addressed, an evaluation of data quality processes related to location will be presented. The results from this evaluation will then be used to construct a final standards based 3D geospatial service location model, one that should address the needs of the partner carrier.

A private telecom carrier partnered with the University of Waterloo to examine opportunities to improve their asset management processes. A reliance on traditional CAD technology made it difficult to generate an enterprise view of operational assets, such as poles and cables, since CAD documents were limited to neighbourhood scale coverage. The CAD documents had to communicate logical and locational properties of these assets. These requirements were often at odds since the elements in these CAD documents were occasionally moved to clarify logical aspects, the most common being connectivity with other telecommunications hardware. Elements within the drawings were also restricted to two dimensions, a legacy of early adoption of CAD technology within the telecom carrier. Developments in GIS and architectural technology that have occurred since the introduction of CAD offer opportunities to manage assets using enterprise geospatial systems with three dimensional content. Prominent technologies and standards, such as CityGML and Oracle, will be examined to develop a model to support requirements related to service location. A service location for this paper is a site that requires the deployment of specific resources to meet the needs of a service request. Additionally, as location displacement is an issue that needs to be addressed, an evaluation of data quality processes related to location will be presented. The results from this evaluation will then be used to construct a final standards based 3D geospatial service location model, one that should address the needs of the partner carrier.

Service discovery is a driving force in realizing pervasive computing. It provides a way for users and services to locate and interact with other services in a pervasive computing environment. Unfortunately, current service discovery solutions do not capture the effects of the human or physical world and do not deal well with diverse device populations; both of which are characteristics of pervasive computing environments. This research concentrates on the examination and fulfillment of the goals of two of the four components of service discovery, service description and dissemination. It begins with a review of and commentary on current service discovery solutions. Following this review, is the formulation of the problem statement, including a full explanation of the problems mentioned above. The problem formulation is followed by an explanation of the process followed to design and build solutions to these problems. These solutions include the Pervasive Service Description Language (PSDL), the Pervasive Service Query Language (PSQL), and the Multi-Assurance Delivery Protocol (MADEP). Prototype implementations of the components are used to validate feasibility and evaluate performance. Experimental results are presented and analyzed. This work concludes with a discussion of overall conclusions, directions for future work, and a list of contributions. / Ph. D.