Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Delaware, 2006. / Principal faculty advisor: Keith S. Decker, Dept. of Computer and Information Sciences. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.S.)--University of Florida, 2000. / Title from first page of PDF file. Document formatted into pages; contains viii, 81 p.; also contains graphics. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. 77-80).

Thesis (M.Sc.)--York University, 2004. Graduate Programme in Computer Science. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 277-284). Also available on the Internet. MODE OF ACCESS via web browser by entering the following URL: http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/yorku/fullcit?pMQ99344

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Iowa, 2006. / Supervisor: Andrew Williams. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 227-231).

Thesis (M.Phil.)--Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 109-110). Also available in electronic version.

Ph.D. / Information technology (IT) system development faces increasing challenges as a result of the complexity involved in the large number of interacting, distributed and concurrently executing components of systems. These components range from operating systems and virtual machines, through to the various frameworks, servers and libraries. To continue delivering on the current trend in resource requirements, hardware is increasingly parallel. The parallelisation of hardware indicates that software systems must be enabled to exploit these multicore, symmetric multiprocessing and distributed architectures as they become more mainstream. Parallelisation of IT systems adds to the number, distribution and concurrency of interacting components. In addition, dynamic self-optimising, selfhealing, self-configuring and self-protecting characteristics are required if systems are to continue operating effectively. The environment into which a system is eventually deployed is often either unknown or dynamic. An unknown environment is one where the exact details of resource availability, along with knowledge or control over concurrently executing systems, is not available beforehand. Added to this is a lack of foreknowledge surrounding the system’s environment, which may be dynamic, meaning it is likely to change during the system’s lifetime. Changes to the system’s environment include new infrastructure, different architectures, replacing old hardware and installing or upgrading software. The current approaches to overcoming unknown and dynamic environments tend to be top-down and centralised as is seen in the use of control theory by autonomic computing. There is, however, a growing realisation that centralised approaches add to the brittleness and complexity of the systems. What is needed is the self-adaptivity of an agent based approach, which is able to overcome these challenges relating to unknown and dynamic environments. Nature has dealt with the same challenges in a far more robust way by employing the principles of self-organising systems underpinning the control of complex adaptive systems. An example of nature’s solution is the self-organising system presented by the gene regulatory system coupled to cell fate and the cell cycle in multicellular organisms. Organisms are self-healing, self-protecting, self-optimising and self-configuring. They are also able, through ontogenesis, to self-adapt to their environments and grow to maximise their performance whilst still maintaining function.

M.Sc. / We live in a modern world in which visual perception has become an absolute necessity. Navigating and walking around in a city without getting lost is a difficult enough task when using all senses, but if you are visually disabled, this becomes a near impossible task. All around us are signs, billboards, motorcars, buildings, computers, and other similar signs of modern times, which are most effectively observed visually. The next logical step in assisting the visually disabled to experience the world around them more freely, is to make more effective use of the technology that has created the shift to the visual world in the first place. It now appears possible to design a framework to incorporate not only current, but also future hardware and software into a solution to the above-mentioned problems. Such a framework has to be flexible to allow it to keep up not only with hardware, but software advances as well. Furthermore, it needs to take into account the needs of a typical blind user. One way of implementing this framework is to make use of a form of sensereplacement. Where the visual sense is impaired, technology can be used to analyze and interpret the visual world, obtain meaningful information from the scene, and then re-route this information to another sense. This dissertation is divided into three sections. The first section will provide an overview of the rest of the dissertation. It will also investigate similar research that is currently being undertaken, and provide a model for a possible solution to the above-mentioned problems. The second section will provide the background study needed to make informed decisions when implementing a prototype system. The third section will investigate the implementation of a prototype model, as well as the construction of a pilot project.

M.Sc. / The manufacturing sector has produced a wide variety of techniques in its attempts to find the ultimate solution for the manufacturing process, with these techniques ranging from material requirements planning, just-in-time production, total-quality management, flexible manufacturing systems and computer integrated manufacturing to advanced planning and scheduling. Given the fact that the technique entitled "advanced planning and scheduling" in the manufacturing environment is primarily aimed at resource planning and scheduling during the production process, however, a clamant need was created for manufacturing companies to broaden their focus in order to include all the processes involved in the production environment, as well as the external processes impacting on productivity. A large area that came into focus owing to the latter paradigm shift is known as "supply chain management". Supply chain management is concerned with the integration of and communication between the various elements in the entire supply chain, including elements such as demand planning and forecasting, scheduling, customer sales, supplier purchases, production planning and forecasting, resource planning and warehouse management. This research study will be devoted to an investigation into the issues surrounding supply chain management and all its manifestations, including its basic components and their integration and interaction. This investigation will also cover research into scheduling systems up to current reactive constraintbased scheduling systems, since scheduling is deemed to be the core of the supply chain in terms of the influence it exerts on most other components, be it directly or indirectly. The investigation will also take us into the realm of an exciting new technology whose exponents are known as "intelligent software agents", which agents are aimed at providing autonomy to the objects within a system and which agents are characterised by their behaviour and decision processes. The said agents can be used to perform highly specialised tasks during the manufacturing process, such as scheduling and forecasting. A prototype system will be developed in the course of the research in a bid to illustrate the integration, evaluation and monitoring of the supply chain elements through the use of intelligent agents. By endowing the system with intelligence, the researchers hope to identify many future uses for intelligent agents in the various segments of the supply chain.

published_or_final_version / abstract / Industrial and Manufacturing Systems Engineering / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

Many of the contemporary routing algorithms use simple mechanisms such as flooding or broadcasting to disseminate the routing information available to them. Such routing algorithms cause significant network resource overhead due to the large number of messages generated at each host/router throughout the route update process. Many of these messages are wasteful since they do not contribute to the route discovery process. Reducing the resource overhead may allow for several algorithms to be deployed in a wide range of networks (wireless and ad-hoc) which require a simple routing protocol due to limited availability of resources (memory and bandwidth). Motivated by the need to reduce the resource overhead associated with routing algorithms a new implementation of distance vector routing algorithm using an agent-based paradigm known as Agent-based Distance Vector Routing (ADVR) has been proposed. In ADVR, the ability of route discovery and message passing shifts from the nodes to individual agents that traverse the network, co-ordinate with each other and successively update the routing tables of the nodes they visit.