The purpose of this project was to evaluate the feasibility of bridging performance gaps in the program stream between BYU Broadcasting's post production and master control environments by implementing a technical infrastructure that supports a file-based workflow. The system that was evaluated was an Apple Xsan running specialized software, called FORK. Performance gaps were identified and a technical evaluation of the system was conducted. Figuring out how the change initiative would affect and be affected by non-technical factors, such as human nature and social and cultural concerns, was integral to the evaluation process. The evaluation concluded that the System was technically capable of supporting the ideal workflow; however a number of organizational interventions would need to be put in place in order for the change initiative to have success. The recommendations were (a) consolidating all operations employees under a Chief Operations Officer, (b)consolidating all engineering functions under a Manager of Engineering, (c) tasking the Chief Operations Officer and Manager of Engineering with encouraging participant support and organizational responsibility, (d)temporarily localizing the system's implementation, and (e) crafting an official media management policy. Included in the stakeholder report was an implementation design for the system. It was beyond the scope of this evaluation to measure for post-implementation improvement. Completing such an evaluation would require a significant amount of time; however, it is recommended that it be conducted subsequently and separately from this project.

Being faster is good. Being predictable is better. A faithful model of a system, loaded to reflect the system's current state, can then be used to look into the future and predict performance. Building faithful models of processes with high degrees of uncertainty can be very challenging, especially where this uncertainty exists in terms of processing times, queuing behavior and re-work rates. Within the context of an electronic, multi-tiered workflow management system (WFMS) the author builds such a model to endogenously quote due dates. A WFMS that manages business objects can be recast as a flexible flow shop in which the stations that a job (representing the business object) passes through are known and the jobs in the stations queues at any point are known. All of the other parameters associated with the flow shop, including job processing times per station, and station queuing behavior are uncertain though there is a significant body of past performance data that might be brought to bear. The objective, in this environment, is to meet the delivery date promised when the job is accepted. To attack the problem the author develops a novel heuristic algorithm for decomposing the WFMS's event logs exposing non-standard queuing behavior, develops a new simulation component to implement that behavior, and assembles a prototypical system to automate the required historical analysis and allow for on-demand due date quoting through the use of embedded discrete event simulation modeling. To attack the problem the author develops a novel heuristic algorithm for decomposing the WFMS's event logs exposing non-standard queuing behavior, develops a new simulation component to implement that behavior, and assembles a prototypical system to automate the required historical analysis and allow for on-demand due date quoting through the use of embedded discrete event simulation modeling. The developed software components are flexible enough to allow for both the analysis of past performance in conjunction with the WFMS's event logs, and on-demand analysis of new jobs entering the system. Using the proportion of jobs completed within the predicted interval as the measure of effectiveness, the author validates the performance of the system over six months of historical data and during live operations with both samples achieving the 90% service level targeted.

St. Augustinegrass [Stenotaphrum secundatum (Walt.) Kuntze] is a widely used lawn grass in the southeastern United States. St. Augustinegrass is typically vegetatively established from plugs or sod. Establishment of St. Augustinegrass sod can be slowed due to weed competition. Weed-infested sod may not be harvestable and is less desirable by end users. Preemergence herbicides are used to prevent weed infestation; however, preemergence herbicides often negatively affect sod grow-in. Current research evaluated the effects of contemporary preemergence herbicides on St. Augustinegrass grow-in from plugs. Grow-in was evaluated using visual estimates of percentage St. Augustinegrass cover, as well as Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), Ratio Vegetation Index (RVI), and Chlorophyll Index-Red Edge (CI-RE) collected by handheld and aerial multispectral sensors. A sharable workflow was created in ArcGIS Pro to extract vegetation indices from aerial imagery. Trends of increased time to grow-in due to herbicide treatment were detected by visual and multispectral assessments.

No description available.

[pt] A tecnologia de workflow é bastante utilizada para realização de processos dentro de empresas e instituições. É comum encontrar processos que possuem tarefas que devem ser realizadas em locais de difícil acesso, ou que não tenham disponibilidade de computadores desktop e Internet confiável, dificultando a realização dessas tarefas de forma automatizada. Entretanto, com o avanço das tecnologias móveis, a possibilidade de automatizar a realização de tais tipos de tarefas diretamente em campo tornou-se viável. O objetivo deste trabalho é investigar questões relacionadas a sistemas de gerência de workflows em ambientes com suporte à desconexão utilizando dispositivos móveis. / [en] Workflow technology is heavily used to support many processes within organizations. One frequently finds processes that need to be executed in places that are difficult to access or where desktop computers and reliable Internet are not available, which complicates the automated execution of these activities. However, the advance of mobile technologies made it possible to successfully automate such types of activities directly in the field. The purpose of this work is to investigate questions related to workflow management systems in environments with support for disconnected operation using mobile devices.

O uso de padrões de workflow para controle de fluxo em aplicações de e-Science resulta em maior produtividade por parte do cientista, permitindo que se concentre em sua área de especialização. Todavia, o uso de padrões de workflow para paralelização em grades permanece uma questão em aberto. Este texto apresenta uma arquitetura de baixo acoplamento e extensível, para permitir a execução de padrões com ou sem a presença de grade, de modo transparente ao cientista. Descreve também o Padrão Junção Combinada, que atende a diversos cenários de paralelização comumente encontrados em aplicações de e-Science. Com isso, espera-se auxiliar o trabalho do cientista, oferecendo maior flexibilidade na utilização de grades e na representação de cenários de paralelização. / The use of workflow control-flow patterns in e-Science applications results in productivity improvement, allowing the scientist to concentrate in his/her own research area. However, the use of workflow control-flow patterns for execution in grids remains an opened question. This work presents a loosely coupled and extensible architecture, allowing use of patterns with or without grids, transparently to the scientist. It also describes the Combined Join Pattern, compliant to parallelization scenarios, commonly found in e-Science applications. As a result, it is expected to help the scientist tasks, giving him or her greater flexibility in the grid usage and in representing parallelization scenarios.

No mercado global e digital, as empresas são desafiadas a encontrar caminhos inovadores para atender o aumento da pressão -competitiva. A competição é uma das formas de interação das organizações, além da colaboração e da cooperação. A cooperação e a colaboração apresentam formas de produzir conjuntamente aumentando o potencial de atendimento das empresas. Os desafios mais encontrados no mercado são: reduzir os custos, sempre assegurar qualidade e personalizar os produtos e serviços. Um fenômeno de negócios comum hoje é a terceirização da manufatura e da logística para fornecedores domésticos e estrangeiros e provedores de serviços. Essa terceirização provoca, intrinsecamente, um espalhamento geográfico da produção em novos centros que oferecem vantagens nos recursos energéticos, matérias primas e centros de produção de conhecimento. Essa terceirização pode ser realizada também nas formas de colaboração e cooperação. Para isso, as empresas necessitam estabelecer uma forma de confiança entre si. No conceito de empresa virtual, a confiança é amplamente discutida para atingir uma colaboração e/ou cooperação entre empresas. O objetivo deste trabalho é propor e modelar uma ferramenta que atenda as necessidades das empresas para colaboração e/ou cooperação entre elas, considerando suas necessidades de confiança. As empresas aqui são vistas como sistemas produtivos, com suas camadas de gerenciamento de negócios, de acordo com o padrão ANSI/ISA 95. Além disso, um tipo de interpretação da rede de Petri, chamada de rede de Petri produtiva é introduzida como ferramenta para descrever o processo produtivo realizado pelas empresas na forma de workflow. A modelagem dessa arquitetura do sistema produtivo utiliza técnicas de sistemas distribuídos, como a arquitetura orientada a serviços. Além disso, um dos enfoques é das necessidades para o desenvolvimento de novos produtos, que envolve o desafio de personalização. Testes foram realizados para avaliar a proposta de workflow com pessoas de diferentes níveis de conhecimento sobre os processos, sejam de manufatura, sejam de outras áreas. Já a arquitetura proposta foi submetida a um estudo analítico das hipóteses levantadas no ambiente colaborativo. / In global and digital market, companies are challenged tof ind innovative ways to meet the increased competitive pressure. Competition is one way of interacting for organizations, as well as collaboration and cooperation. Cooperation and collaboration have ways to produce together increasing the potential of companies of meeting demands. Challenges most commonly found on the market are reducing costs, always ensuring quality and customizing products and services. A common business phenomenon today is the outsourcing of manufacturing and logistics for domestic and foreign suppliers and service providers. This outsourcing causes, intrinsically, a geographical spread of production in new centers which offer advantages in energy resources, raw materials and knowledge production centers. This outsourcing can be done also in the ways of collaboration and cooperation. For this, companies need to establish a trust between them. In the concept of virtual enterprise, trust is widely discussed to achieve the collaboration and/or cooperation between companies. The goal of this work is proposing and modeling a tool that meets the needs of companies for collaboration among them, considering their trust needs. Companies are understand as productive systems, in here, with their business process management layers, according to the standard ANSI/ISA 95. In addition, a kind of interpretation of Petri net, called productive Petri net is introduced as a tool to describe the production process performed by companies as workow. The modeling of this architecture of productive system uses techniques of distributed systems, such as service-oriented architecture. Furthermore, one of the approaches is the need for developing new products, which involves the customization challenge. Tests were conducted to evaluate the proposal of workflow with people from different levels of knowledge about the processes, both manufacturing and other areas. And the proposed architecture was studied analytically with the hypotheses elaborated from the collaborative environment.

Les systèmes de gestion de workflow font maintenant partie de l'environnement classique des grandes organisations. Ces systèmes sont cependant aujourd'hui considérés comme trop rigides et de nombreux travaux ont pour but d'introduire de la flexibilité dans la modélisation et l'exécution de leurs procédés. Dans cette problématique, la prise en compte de la flexibilité organisationnelle est une étape importante. C'est à cette dernière que nous allons nous intéresser à travers un mécanisme particulier : la délégation de tâches. En effet, la délégation est un mécanisme qui permet d'obtenir une certaine flexibilité organisationnelle dans un système de gestion de workflow. Elle permet également d'assurer une forme de délégation des autorisations dans un système de contrôle d'accès. Dans ce contexte, une délégation sécurisée de tâches implique la présence d'un ensemble d'évènements de délégation et de règles définissant les possibles délégations d'autorisation ainsi que les moyens de contrôler les politiques associées.Dans ce mémoire, nous définissons une approche sécurisée pour la délégation dynamique de tâches dans les systèmes de gestion de workflow. Pour ce faire, nous identifions les évènements spécifiques du modèle de tâches correspondant à la délégation qui entrainent des changements dynamiques de la politique d'autorisation. Puis, nous montrons comment notre approche permet de contrôler dynamiquement les autorisations liées à la délégation et comment elle peut être intégrée dans les systèmes de contrôle d'accès existants. Afin de contrôler le comportement de délégation et de spécifier ses politiques d'autorisation, nous recueillons les événements pertinents qui définissent le chemin d'exécution des tâches ainsi que les politiques générées pour la délégation. Finalement, nous proposons une technique qui automatise les politiques de délégation et qui permet d'accroître la conformité des changements dus à la délégation dans la politique d'autorisation existante / Task delegation presents one of the business process security leitmotifs. We currently observe a move away from predefined strict workflow modelling towards dynamic approaches supporting flexibility on the organisational level and dynamic authorisation on the security level. One specific approach is that of task delegation. Delegation defines a mechanism that bridges the gap between both workflow and access control systems. There are two important issues relating to delegation, namely allowing task delegation to complete, and having a secure delegation within a workflow. Delegation completion and authorisation enforcement are specified under specific constraints. Constraints are defined from the delegation context implying the presence of a fixed set of delegation events to control the delegation execution. In this dissertation, we aim to reason about delegation events to model task delegation and to specify delegation policies dynamically. To that end, we present an event-based task delegation model to monitor the delegation process. We then identify relevant events for authorisation enforcement to specify delegation policies. Subsequently, we propose a task-oriented access control model to address these requirements. Using our access control model, we analyse and specify delegation constraints into authorisation policies. Moreover, we propose a technique that automates delegation policies using event calculus to control the delegation execution and to increase the compliance of all delegation changes in the existing policy of the workflow

La mondialisation, la croissance continuelle des tailles des entreprises et le besoin d'agilité ont poussé les entreprises à externaliser leurs activités, à vendre des parties de leurs procédés, voire même distribuer leurs procédés jusqu'à lors centralisés. En plus, la plupart des procédés métiers dans l'industrie d'aujourd'hui impliquent des interactions complexes entre un grand nombre de services géographiquement distribués, développés et maintenus par des organisations différentes. Certains de ces procédés, peuvent être très complexes et manipulent une grande quantité de données, et les organisations qui les détiennent doivent faire face à un nombre considérable d'instances de ces procédés simultanément. Certaines même éprouvent des difficultés à les gérer d'une manière centralisée. De ce fait, certaines entreprises approuvent le besoin de partitionner leurs procédés métiers d'une manière flexible, et être capables de les distribuer d'une manière efficace, tout en respectant la sémantique et les objectifs du procédé centralisé. Le travail présenté dans cette thèse consiste à proposer une méthodologie de décentralisation qui permet de décentraliser d'une manière optimisée, générique et flexible, des procédés métiers. En d'autres termes, cette approche vise à transformer un procédé centralisé en un ensemble de fragments coopérants. Ces fragments sont déployés et exécutés indépendamment, distribués géographiquement et peuvent être invoqués à distance. Cette thèse propose aussi un environnement pour la modélisation des chorégraphies de services web dans un langage formel à savoir le calcul d'événements. / In mainstream service orchestration platforms, the orchestration model is executed by a centralized orchestrator through which all interactions are channeled. This architecture is not optimal in terms of communication overhead and has the usual problems of a single point of failure. Moreover, globalization and the increase of competitive pressures created the need for agility in business processes, including the ability to outsource, offshore, or otherwise distribute its once-centralized business processes or parts thereof. An organization that aims for such fragmentation of its business processes needs to be able to separate the process into different parts. Therefore, there is a growing need for the ability to fragment one's business processes in an agile manner, and be able to distribute and wire these fragments together so that their combined execution recreates the function of the original process. This thesis is focused on solving some of the core challenges resulting from the need to restructure enterprise interactions. Restructuring such interactions corresponds to the fragmentation of intra and inter enterprise business process models. This thesis describes how to identify, create, and execute process fragments without loosing the operational semantics of the original process models. It also proposes methods to optimize the fragmentation process in terms of QoS properties and communication overhead. Further, it presents a framework to model web service choreographies in Event Calculus formal language.

O ganho de competitividade das organizações está relacionado com quem proporciona serviços ou produtos de forma rápida, com custos mais baixos e com mais qualidade e segurança. Dentro deste cenário, o atendimento destes quesitos reflete na busca por um aumento de eficiência, satisfação do cliente e lucratividade incentivando constantemente as organizações a procurar e identificar novos fatores competitivos, explorando cada vez mais novos métodos de operação e entrega. Conseqüentemente, a introdução de melhorias incrementais ou de um novo desenho de processos são propostos e muitas vezes acompanhados da implementação de sistemas automatizados. Sistemas Workflow vêm ao encontro destas estratégias de redesenho e otimização dos processos de negócio através da automação dos seus fluxos de trabalho, tornando-os mais ágeis, seguros, confiáveis e proporcionando um diferencial para a organização. Porém, são poucos os estudos associados à avaliação do seu impacto sobre processos. Apresenta-se e discute-se os principais conceitos e impactos relacionados a esta tecnologia e associados a processos e indicadores de desempenho, utilizando o método de estudos de casos múltiplos. Conclui-se que os impactos na utilização deste tipo de tecnologia resultam em melhorias para o processo em todas as dimensões consideradas (custo, entrega, qualidade intrínseca e segurança). Entretanto, o impacto variará em função do processo de negócio a ser automatizado. / The gain in competitiveness is related to organizations that provide services and products rapidly, at low costs and with more quality and security. Considering such scenario, those demands reflect in the search for efficiency improvement, customer satisfaction and profit, constantly stimulating organizations to search for new competitiveness factors, exploring new operations and delivery methods. Hence, the introduction of incremental improvements or a new process design are proposed and often accompanied with automated systems implementation. Workflow systems come along with these strategies (business process redesign and optimization) transforming then in more agile, secure and reliable, giving differentiation to organizations. However, studies in terms of evaluating their impact in business process are few. This research has the objective to present and discuss the main concepts and impacts related to that technology associated to business process and performance indicators by the utilization of the multiple case study method. The conclusion is that the impact of the use oh this kind of technology resulted in improvement in all dimensions considered (cost, delivery, quality and security). However, the impact will present variations depending on the business process to be automated.