One of two project reports. Part A can be found at: http://hdl.handle.net/11375/18452 / No abstract was provided. / Thesis / Master of Engineering (ME)

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

Several alternate systems for use in implementing the 911 emergency system in Orange County, Florida were investigated. The proposed systems were compared with the already existing systems on the basis of reliability, response time, and cost. System reliability was the prime consideration of the study. Flow charts of each system were formulated in order to determine the functions required of equipment and humans. The reliability was then determined by examining the difficulty of the tasks that each was required to perform. Reliability models of the present and proposed systems were constructed. By examining these models and comparing the reliabilities, response times, and costs, the most advantageous system configurations were determined. Two systems, Emergency Operator Call Transfer and Emergency Operator Call Relay, were selected as the most desirable; there were no appreciable differences in their reliability, response time, and cost.

The State of Florida has mandated that a statewide 911 system be implemented, and the Department of General Services, Division of Communications, has performed a study of possible 911 system configurations for Orange County based on the findings of a study performed by the Stanford Research Institute for the whole of the State of Florida. The Orange County study determined operator manning levels of the primary law enforcement agencies involved in the system and response times to citizen calls for each of the configurations proposed. This research generated computer simulation models of the two most likely to be implemented configurations for handling citizen calls. The models were run sing the input parameters defined in the Orange County study, and the results compared favorably. Additional runs were made with varying resource assignments to evaluate call service with respect to the level of performance and response time. The models were designed in modular form, such that they can easily be structured to conform to other operational configurations. This will allow evaluation of prosed systems prior to actual start up and analysis of resource requirements based on population predictions.

M.S.

This thesis describes a two part research program in which the applicability of subjective ratings to the selection of independent variables was evaluated. The first portion of the research reviewed a case study involving the application of complex system investigation to the development of a telephone inquiry system. A telephone inquiry system is one in which users seek information in a data base by calling the system, listening to information presented by a synthetic voice, and directing movement through the database with commands on the telephone keypad keys. The complex system investigation method used included identifying the independent variables by brainstorming, then reducing the list by subjecting the variables to literature review, feasibility analysis, relevance analysis, and subjective ratings of the factors based on a prototype system. Variables which were not likely to have an immediate impact on human performance in the system were set to a constant value. The use of subjective ratings to select independent variables stems from the need to reduce large numbers of independent variables to a list which can be used as candidates for a screening study. The result of the case study was a list of 19 candidate factors suggested for implementation in a screening study. The second portion of the research describes an experiment in which 5 independent variables ( number of steps in a search, adapting speech rate, transaction summary, native/non-native, and sex of the voice) were chosen to represent the 19 candidate factors in an experiment testing the validity of the ·subjective ratings technique. The results indicated that the subjective ratings of the prototype system were effective in predicting performance and subjective ratings. The impact of these results on the methodology and telephone inquiry systems is also discussed. / M.S.

This thesis is mainly a survey of optical devices used in optical logic and optical space, time and frequency division switching. These are mainly optical logic devices, optical switches, optical switching matrices, optical memories and optical wavelength multiplexers and demultiplexers and optical wavelength shifters. The devices are based on a variety of operating principles and are implemented with a variety of technologies. The basic principles and technologies are described together with typical performance parameters. The different devices and technologies are compared, and areas of possible improvements indicated. As an application of this survey, the possibility of implementing optical logic circuits and an optical time-division switch for Sonet based transmission systems is discussed. / Master of Science