Abstract Xeratech AB is a medium-sized company in Karlstad, Sweden. Part of their business involves support of their products. This support has been managed manually; incoming errands has been received, by phone or by e-mail, and afterwards sent to a consultant for processing. This approach lacks the ability to efficiently store these errands, to make useful reports based on the work done with it, and to automatically send out notifications and e-mail to support members involved with the errand.   The goal of this dissertation is to implement an errand support system (a help desk) able to do the above things automatically. Since Xeratech use mostly Microsoft products, and uses SharePoint as their intranet platform, a choice has been made to implement this help desk system as a SharePoint State Machine Workflow. A state machine workflow is a workflow consisting of states, transitions and events. This type of workflow has been chosen because of its resemblance to the life cycle of an errand: errands will, during its life time, change from one state to another in a non predetermined way. For instance, when an errand is created, it will start in the New state, the workflow will then, when a person has started working with it, transition to the In Progress state, followed by a number of states until finally its state is Completed, and the work with the errand is done.   This workflow will then be evaluated considering its ability to facilitate the implementation of the help desk system.

Secure Scrum is a framework that integrates security into Scrum. In this thesis Secure Scrum has been evaluated in the development environment at Medius. An aim for the thesis was to implement a configuration tool for the module Generic Workflow in Medius’ product MediusFlowTM. In order to evaluate Secure Scrum, this framework has been used during the development of the configuration tool. Before this thesis began a configuration tool existed but it was Medius’ wish that this configuration tool was redesigned and rewritten. The requirements for the configuration tool were to meet the functionality with the previous configuration tool and add some new functionality. The new implementation of the configuration tool fulfills these requirements successfully. The results of the evaluation of Secure Scrum is that the usage of it during development of the configuration tool went smoothly, and the conclusion of this is that Secure Scrum is a flexible framework that was easily adapted to a smaller development team and a project lifetime of a few months.

The print production workflow consists of various disparate systems — from production equipment to management information systems. During the production of a printed product, information regarding the product must be communicated between the systems in the workflow. Job Definition Format (JDF) is an industry standard that specifies this information interchange. It specifies a digital job ticket format for exchanging administrative and technical information related to a print job, and a messaging protocol for communicating information between the systems in the workflow. This licentiate thesis explores different aspects of integrating systems in a JDF-enabled print production workflow. Paper III and Paper IV analyze the properties of JDF’s messaging protocol—Job Messaging Format (JMF)—and discuss design solutions for a JMF integration layer. Paper I presents a software tool for simulating systems in the print production workflow. The tool is based on an open source software library, called the Elk Framework, which has been developed within the framework of these licentiate studies. The Elk Framework provides the base services required by a piece of JDF-enabled production equipment, called a Device/Worker in JDF parlance. Paper II presents a software tool that was developed for testing the simulation tool presented in Paper I. The test tool, named Alces, can be used for testing if JDF-enabled systems conform to the JDF Specification. / Report code: LIU-TEK-LIC-2006:66.

Ingeniero Civil en Computación / En el año 2011 se implementó un sitio Web llamado U-Papers que se encargaba de almacenar y consultar publicaciones científicas del Departamento de Ciencias de la Computación (D.C.C.) de la Universidad de Chile. Con la ayuda de este sitio, la administración del Departamento asignaba Fondos de Investigación Individual (FII) a los acádemicos que realizaban publicaciones. Luego los académicos podían usar estos fondos para realizar futuras investigaciones. La administración del D.C.C. percibió la necesidad de administrar correctamente esta asignación. El método que se usaba sufría problemas de pérdida de información y éste tenía un acceso muy limitado. Además en la administración se distribuía la información en distintos registros y podían tener diferencias entre sí. Para solucionar estos problemas se implementó un sistema de información administrativa. Este sistema se encargó de gestionar los flujos de trabajo (workflow) y de centralizar la información distribuida. Con la ayuda de la notación B.P.M.N. (Business Process Management Notation) se definieron dos procesos principales. También ayudó a encontrar los casos de uso y los casos excepcionales que se presentaban en los procesos. Como sistema administrador de workflow se utilizó una aplicación llamada Joget Workflow. Esta aplicación es de fuente abierta ("open source"), cuenta con muchas ventajas de un sistema de workflow y con facilidades para adaptar los procesos de negocio. Como resultado final, se construyó un sitio Web llamado U-Fondos que pudo funcionar en un servidor del D.C.C. y distribuir la información de forma remota. El desarrollo fue dividido en varias entregas incrementales. En cada una se implementaron prototipos del sitio y se realizaron pruebas de usabilidad para encontrar los principales errores. También se pudo descubrir el interés y la opinión de los usuarios respecto a la distribución de este tipo de información.

Automated planning is a task to find a sequence of actions leading from an initial state to a desired goal state. There is a lot of formal models for planning problems modeling. The class of hierarchical formal models is one of them. In this thesis we will propose a hierarchical model, called GramPlan, based on attribute grammars. We will present some methods to reduce classical STRIPS formalism to GramPlan and we will prove the correctness of this reduction. Also we will present reduction of the FlowOpt workflow model to GramPlan and we will prove it's correctness. We will desing a couple of verification methods for attribute grammars and we will show these methods are equivalent. Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org)

M.Sc. (Biochemistry) / The vitamin D receptor (VDR) has been implicated in communicable diseases such as tuberculosis (TB), HIV infection and leprosy, as well as development or prognosis of noncommunicable diseases such as multiple sclerosis, lupus, type I diabetes mellitus, and osteoporosis. The burden of these diseases is often higher in specific population groups, for instance the higher TB burden of African as compared to White South Africans. Besides genetics, epigenetic factors play a role in differential disease susceptibility and prognosis between population groups. To uncover the cause of differential susceptibility to VDR-related diseases, it is crucial that population group-specific variations in genetic and epigenetic mechanisms that regulate VDR are identified. Increases in predictive power of in silico tools, and the recent explosion in availability of genome-wide genetic and epigenetic data made bioinformatics an attractive option to preselect regions to study in the VDR...

Businesses are continually striving to become more efficient. In an effort to achieve optimal efficiency, many companies have been forced to re-evaluate the efficiency of their business processes. Consequently, the term “business process re-engineering” (BPR) has been given to the activity of restructuring organizational policies and methods for conducting business. The refinement of business processes is the primary motivation behind the development of automated work- flow systems that ensure the secure and efficient flow of information between activities and participants that constitute the business process. A workflow is an automated business process that comprises a number of related tasks. When these tasks are executed in a systematic way, they contribute to the fulfilment of some goal. The order in which workflow tasks execute is of great significance because these tasks are typically dependent on each other. A workflow management system (WFMS) is responsible for scheduling the systematic execution of workflow tasks whilst considering the dependencies that exist between them. Businesses are realizing the necessity of information management in the functioning and general management of a company. They are recognizing the important role that information security has to play in ensuring that accurate information that is relevant is gathered, applied and maintained to enhance the company’s service to its customers. In a workflow context, information security primarily involves the implementation of access control security mechanisms. These mechanisms help ensure that task dependencies are coordinated and that tasks are performed by authorized subjects only. In doing so, they also assist in the maintenance of object integrity. TheWorkflow Authorization Model (WAM) was developed by Atluri and Huang [AH96b, HA99] with the specific intention of addressing the security requirements of workflow environments. It primarily addresses the granting and revoking of authorizations in a WFMS. TheWAM satisfies most criteria that are required of an optimal access control model. These criteria are the enforcement of separation of duties, the handling of temporal constraints, a role-based application and the synchronization of workflow with authorization flow. Some of these conditions cannot be met through pure role-based access control (RBAC) mechanisms. This dissertation addresses the delegation of task authorizations within a work- flow process by subject roles in the organizational structure. In doing this, a role may have the authority to delegate responsibility for task execution to another individual in a role set. This individual may potentially belong to a role other than the role explicitly authorized to perform the task in question. The proposed model will work within the constraints that are enforced by the WAM. Therefore, the WAM will play a part in determining whether delegation may be approved. This implies that the delegation model may not override any dynamically defined security constraints. The Delegation Authorization Model (DAM) proposed assists in distributing workloads amongst subject roles within an organization, by allowing subjects to delegate task responsibilities to other subjects according to restrictions imposed by security policies. As yet, this area of research has not received much attention. / Prof. M.S. Olivier

Workflow systems have gained popularity not only as a research topic, but also as a key component of Enterprize Resource Planning packages and e- business. Comprehensive workflow products that automate intra- as well inter-organizational information flow are now available for commercial use. Standardization efforts have centered mostly around the interoperability of these systems, however a standard access control model have yet to be adopted. The research community has developed several models for access control to be included as part of workflow functionality. Commercial systems, however, are still implementing access control functionality in a proprietary manner. This dissertation investigates whether a comprehensive model for gain- ing context-sensitive access control, namely CoSAWoE, can be purposefully implemented in a commercial workflow product. Using methods such as an exploratory prototype, various aspects of the model was implemented to gain an understanding of the di±culties developers face when attempting to map the model to existing proprietary software. Oracle Workflow was chosen as an example of a commercial workflow product. An investigtion of the features of this product, together with the prototype, revealed the ability to affect access control in a similar manner to the model: by specifying access control constraints during administration and design, and then enforcing those constraints dynamically during run-time. However, only certain components within these two aspects of the model directly effected the commercial workflow product. It was argued that the first two requirements of context-sensitive access control, order of events and strict least privilege, addressed by the object design, role engineering and session control components of the model, can be simulated if such capabilities are not pertinently available as part of the product. As such, guidelines were provided for how this can be achieved in Oracle Workflow. However, most of the implementation effort focussed on the last requirement of context-sensitive access control, namely separation of duties. The CoSAWoE model proposes SoD administration steps that includes expressing various business rules through a set of conflicting entities which are maintained outside the scope of the workflow system. This component was implemented easily enough through tables which were created with a relational database. Evaluating these conflicts during run-time to control worklist generation proved more di±cult. First, a thorough understanding of the way in which workflow history is maintained was necessary. A re-usable function was developed to prune user lists according to user involvement in previous tasks in the workflow and the conflicts specified for those users and tasks. However, due to the lack of a central access control service, this re- usable function must be included in the appropriate places in the workflow process model. Furthermore, the dissertation utilized a practical example to develop a prototype. This prototype served a dual purpose: firstly, to aid the author's understanding of the features and principles involved, and secondly, to illustrate and explore the implementation of the model as described in the previous paragraphs. In conclusion the dissertation summarized the CoSAWoE model's compo- nents which were found to be product agnostic, directly or indirectly imple- mentable, or not implemented in the chosen workflow product. The lessons learnt and issues surrounding the implementation effort were also discussed before further research in terms of XML documents as data containers for the workfow process were suggested.

The final thesis is focused on the topic of process management and its development in time. Business Process Management and workflow, are described in the thesis as well as its specification and classification. The paper compares these two concepts. The thesis also works with the methodology of ARIS and Balanced Scorecard which are applied in the selected process of the organization. The process is built on the BPMN notation which is also described in the thesis. The aim of the thesis is to examine and to analyze selected process of the organization with specific methodology, to specify potential problems in the process and to suggest possible solution.

Práce pojednává o Procesním Intervalového řízení, které je novým přístupem k řízení společnosti dle procesů obohaceným navíc o další, zcela nové nástroje řízení, jako jsou například optimalizační audit workflow či Intervalové řízení umožňující společnosti nejen reakci na vnější i vnitřní změny v jejím okolí, ale i zrychlení této reakce a tedy získání potřebné konkurenční výhody. Metodika zavedení Procesního Intervalového řízení je zcela odlišná od metodiky, kterou používá většina poradenských firem a v tom je její přidaná hodnota, neboť funguje i v případech, kdy klasické přístupy selhávají.