No description available.

As there is more and more threats on the internet the need for security is more crucial than ever for the companies to look into their solutions to protect their information. To be able to see how an attack works, we discus and show how an attack is progressing in this thesis we compare the difference between traditional and Next Generation firewalls. We also compare three different vendors to compare different functions and security performance. By using Systemair AB as testing ground and having their network as a template we will compare the models in a real environment and finally make the changes to get a more effective network at their site with a new Next Generation firewall at their center. It will also contain a description about Cisco’s Next generation firewall ASA with FirePOWER, and some of the installation process to get it to work. This is Cisco’s new firewall that they have created with the help of Sourcefire.

In the fast moving word of sofware engineering many are trying to get their piece of the pot of gold. To do that the engineering process needs to be as cost efficient as possible.Since time is money smartly designed systems make full use of already implemented sofware to save time and money with new development. The usage of services have become a well used strategy for the re-usage of software within as well as between businesses. Loose coupling has long been an architectural strategy for achieving modifiability. The loose coupling between services within a system has lately also been a subject of discussion, since there may be several advatages of using the principles regarding loose coupling and high cohesion within and between services. This document will examine the possible benefits as well as concern of decoupling already tightly coupled services. As well as discovering patterns and anti-patterns regarding coupling and services using Visma Spcs as a case study.

Denna kandidatuppsats ämnar att studera Pinevisions kunders behov av kundtjänst, i syfte att skapa ett underlag för implementation. Extra hänsyn ska tas till de begränsningar som ett litet företag har i både personal och ekonomiska resurser. För att besvara frågeställningarna kommer relevant litteratur och vetenskapliga artiklar analyseras och empiriska data kommer samlas in från nuvarande kundbas. Resultatet är således kopplad till både empirin och teorin. Resultatet påvisar att majoriteten av kundbasen är i nuläget nöjd med den upplevelse av kundtjänst som erbjuds. En återkommande åsikt av stor vikt är Pinevisions lokala koppling till kunderna. Arbetet påvisar på behovet av att kunna erbjuda en upplevelse av personlig kundtjänst till alla kunder samtidigt som det behöver avvägas emot de begränsningar som resurserna skapar. För att skapa en helhetslösning rekommenderas en implementation av flera typer av kundtjänst bestående av personlig kundtjänst via telefon och chatt samt, som komplement, en samling kortare instruktionsfilmer.

This thesis investigates the applicability of multi-agent systems as a control approach for district heating systems. The consumers, i.e., the heat exchange systems, in current district heating systems are purely reactive devices and have typically no communication capabilities. They are only able to make local decisions without taking into account the global situation in the system. In this work, the possibilities of a new type of heat exchanger systems that has an open software environment and communication capabilities are explored. Operators of district heating systems have several, often conflicting, goals, e.g., to satisfy the demand of the customers and to minimize production costs. Major concerns are how to cope with the uncertainty caused by discrepancies between the estimated and actual customer demand, and the temporal constraints imposed by the relatively long production and distribution times (up to 24 hours). The approach studied in this thesis is to equip each consumer with an agent that makes predictions of future needs and to form clusters of consumers within which it is possible to redistribute resources fast and at a low cost. The agents have two fundamental goals: the local goal, which is to satisfy the customers’ needs, and the global goal, which is to improve the overall performance of the system by cooperating with the other agents in the cluster. Results from a simulation study indicate that the suggested approach makes it possible to reduce production while maintaining the quality of service. The study also show that it is possible to control the trade-off between quality-of-service and degree of surplus production. In another study, a smallscale experiment in a controlled physical environment, two agent-based approaches are evaluated and compared to existing technologies. The experiment shows that it is possible to automatically load balance a small district heating network using agent technology. Finally, a generalized formal characterization of the problem space under investigation is provided, i.e., production and logistics network management, together with a preliminary evaluation of the applicability of the suggested multi-agent system approach for this general problem area.

Trust and trustworthiness are two notions that have been discussed extensively in the computer science community, e.g. trust in online banking services.We argue for a broad view on trust, namely trustworthy behavior of online services. We propose solutions enabling online service developers to reason about, and deal with issues of trustworthy online services, from concerns to actual implementations, and assessments. The view on trust in this thesis involves viewpoints on what stakeholders can have trust in, and the need to exhibit and suggest trustworthiness in online services. Trustworthiness and other relevant theories are also discussed. Three main results supporting design and maintenance of trustworthy online services will be introduced. First, a trust framework in the context of online services is introduced, specifying a number of concepts that enhances and clarifies how trust can be addressed. The framework enables an informed analysis, implementation, and assessment of solutions to trust issues based on identified trust concerns. Secondly we present how the concepts of the framework can be interconnected. The concepts enables us to reason about stakeholders trust concerns in relation to deployable solutions called trust mechanisms that are implemented in order to exhibit proper signs suggesting trustworthiness. These signs, we argue, serve as input for stakeholders trust assessment. The interconnected framework opens up for a discussion on how deployed solutions in an online service correspond to certain stakeholders trust concerns. Finally a tool for online service designers is presented, the trust management life cycle. This is an approach enabling an informed design practice that emphasizes on a trustworthy design of online services. The use of the cycle is illustrated by the use of a deployed online service.

Computer games in general and Real-Time Strategy (RTS) games in particular provide a rich challenge for both human- and computer controlled players, often denoted as bots. The player or bot controls a large number of units that have to navigate in partially unknown dynamic worlds to pursue a goal. Navigation in such worlds can be complex and require much computational resources. Typically it is solved by using some sort of path planning algorithm, and a lot of research has been conducted to improve the performance of such algorithms in dynamic worlds. The main goal of this thesis is to investigate an alternative approach for RTS bots based on Artificial Potential Fields, an area originating from robotics. In robotics the technique has successfully been used for navigation in dynamic environments, and we show that it is possible to use Artificial Potential Fields for navigation in an RTS game setting without any need of path planning. In the first three papers we define and demonstrate a methodology for creating multi-agent potential field based bots for an RTS game scenario where two tank armies battle each other. The fourth paper addresses incomplete information about the game world, referred to as the fog of war, and show how Potential Field based bots can handle such environments. The final paper shows how a Potential Field based bot can be evolved to handle a more complex full RTS scenario. It addresses resource gathering, construction of bases, technological development and construction of an army consisting of different types of units. We show that Artificial Potential Fields is a viable option for several RTS game scenarios and that the performance, both in terms of being able to win a game and computational resources used, can match and even surpass those of traditional approaches based on path planning.

This thesis addresses two issues: (i) The execution behavior of JavaScript in established benchmarks and in real-world Web Applications and (ii) whether Thread-Level Speculation is a suitable technique for taking advantage of multicore systems in Web Applications written in JavaScript. The first key result is that JavaScript execution behavior by the benchmarks and the JavaScript execution behavior by the Web Applications differ in several important aspects. For instance Web Applications often use function types such as anonymous and eval functions. Our results also show that just-in-time compilation often increases the execution time of Web Applications, despite that just-in-time compilation decreases the execution time for most of the benchmarks. The second key result is that our implementation of Thread-Level Speculation shows that it can be used to take advantage of multicore systems for Web Applications. We have measured the effect on the execution time for a set of Web Applications, and found that we are able to reduce JavaScript execution time more than 8 times compared to the sequential version on a dual quad core computer. For our use-cases we found that we used between 1.1 and 31.0 MB to store information associated with speculation.

The EU Climate and Energy package, setting the 20-20-20 targets of future energy systems by 2020 will change the landscape of future energy system in Europe and worldwide. A transition from monopolised controlled Power network to customer oriented Smart Grids operating in deregulated energy markets poses several regulatory, organizational and technical challenges. To that end several international Smart Grid projects have been launched worldwide in EU, the US and China. To cope with the inherent complexity of Smart grid systems the systemic property of Interoperability has been proposed by organisations such as NIST and GridWise in the US and is also adopted by EU. Interoperability of smart grids entails design, implementation, validation and maintenance of systems ensuring technical, information, and organizational interoperability. In order to address Quality of Service (QoS) in this setting, the tool of Service Level Agreements (SLAs) has been proposed. A SLA set up the coordination between stakeholders in a business case and relevant services with set-points and agreements to be monitored. A challenge is to identify relevant (new) stakeholders, their competences and roles in the business case. In the thesis we specifically address the following issues: • Empowerment of end-users • Trustworthy integration of DER- Distributed Energy Resources in delivered services • Validation (Interoperability) of SLAs To those ends, we have implemented an experimental test bed based on Multi-agent systems and sensor technologies. The thesis concludes with assessments of our findings and some pointers to future work. Our work is validated scientifically and industrially by participating in the two EU project INTEGRAL and SEESGEN-ICT , both ended in late spring 2011.

The transports of goods are continuously increasing in many regions, for instance within Europe. Often goods travel through many different countries, using several transport modes and involving a number of different actors. As a result, the traffic load on the transport network is increasing, on the roads in particular, and the logistics chains become more and more complex. Implementing some level of intelligence on the goods, which provide them with the capabilities to assist in the logistical activities, is one of the instruments that can be used to make transports and the handling of goods more efficient and controllable. The concept of intelligent goods both opens up for new types of services and may be used to improve currently available services. Our research is mainly focused on the characteristics and possible architectures of intelligent goods systems. In this context, an intelligent goods system refers to a number of interacting components (on-board units (OBU), back-office, RFID tags, etc.), including intelligent goods, which together provide services. The architecture studies are focused on which information and data processing are needed, where they should be stored and which communication links are required. By identifying architectures corresponding to different service solutions, intelligent goods can be valued against other types of solutions, for instance more centralized configurations. In particular, different situations and services put different requirements on a system and the benefits of using intelligent goods vary. We present a framework which can be used to describe intelligent goods systems, including the capabilities of the goods, necessary information entities related to the goods as well as the surrounding entities, primitive functions and the environment around the goods. Additionally, we identify a number of primitive, potential intelligent goods level services which can be used as building blocks when creating more advanced intelligent goods services. The functional and information requirements of these services are also investigated. Based on these findings, a new approach for how to identify and evaluate different architectural solutions for potential intelligent goods services is suggested. Furthermore, a new service description framework is proposed, which can be used to, amongst others, define a service and to perform composition/decomposition analyses. Finally, an investigation of how agent technology can be used to model intelligent goods systems is also presented.