Made available in DSpace on 2014-12-17T15:47:54Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 TaniroCR_DISSERT.pdf: 2000139 bytes, checksum: 735cb695e5e427f975c5c2630eff3731 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2011-02-21 / Coordena??o de Aperfei?oamento de Pessoal de N?vel Superior / Research on Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) has evolved, with potential applications in several domains. However, the building of WSN applications is hampered by the need of programming in low-level abstractions provided by sensor OS and of specific knowledge about each application domain and each sensor platform. We propose a MDA approach do develop WSN applications. This approach allows domain experts to directly contribute in the developing of applications without needing low level knowledge on WSN platforms and, at the same time, it allows network experts to program WSN nodes to met application requirements without specific knowledge on the application domain. Our approach also promotes the reuse of the developed software artifacts, allowing an application model to be reused across different sensor platforms and a platform model to be reused for different applications / A pesquisa sobre Redes de Sensores Sem Fio (RSSF) evoluiu bastante ao longo dos ?ltimos anos com aplica??es potenciais em diversos dom?nios. No entanto, o desenvolvimento de aplica??es de RSSF ? uma tarefa complexa, dentre outros fatores, pela necessidade da programa??o no (baixo) n?vel de abstra??o provido pelo sistema operacional dos sensores e de conhecimentos espec?ficos, tanto dos diferentes dom?nios de aplica??es quanto das diferentes plataformas de sensores existentes. Neste trabalho, ? proposta uma abordagem MDA para o desenvolvimento de aplica??es de RSSF, que visa facilitar a tarefa dos desenvolvedores. Esta abordagem permite a contribui??o direta dos especialistas em dom?nio no desenvolvimento de aplica??es de RSSF sem precisar de conhecimento espec?fico de programa??o em plataformas de RSSF e, ao mesmo tempo permite que especialistas em rede programem sensores aderentes aos requisitos da aplica??o sem a necessidade de conhecimento espec?fico do dom?nio da aplica??o. A abordagem proposta tamb?m promove a reutiliza??o de artefatos de software desenvolvidos, permitindo um modelo de aplica??o ser reutilizado em diferentes plataformas de sensores e que o modelo possa ser reutilizado em diferentes aplica??es

Against the background of increasing multidisciplinarity as well as the focus on quality, transparency and economic efficiency of medical services, clinical pathways (CPs) have been established as a promising tool at the organizational level in recent years. They are primarily intended to ensure an adequate description of the care processes and to manage the balance between best treatment practice and economic viability. CPs standardize the internal care services by explicating the institution-specific knowledge with regard to recommendations for action, service portfolio, organizational structures, infrastructure, etc. of a specific service provider. The development of hospital information systems (HIS) has so far been characterized by an evolutionary development of modules in the field of laboratory, radiology, nursing and picture archiving systems as well as in the area of administrative systems. As one result of this development, the HIS usually comprises a heterogeneous network of software systems of different types and manufacturers. However, the actual control of patients by means of evidence-based processes and integration of CPs into HIS was not addressed until the recent years, when HIS manufacturers started developing modules for CP modeling and workflow support. The objective of this thesis is to provide a holistic methodical support for the description of clinical pathways and their integration into a hospital information system to finally improve the compliance of daily care to standard process definitions. Therefore, conceptual models provide an adequate mean to describe and communicate complex matters in a comprehensible form as well as to configure IT systems due to their semi-formal nature. Hence, a first research thread investigates the question, how clinical pathways can be described adequately using conceptual models. This results in an iterative design of adequate modeling languages for clinical pathways. A second research thread further investigates the question, how conceptual models of clinical pathways can be used to configure process-oriented application systems in health care. This thread therefore describes the design of a model-based method, that enables a consecutive transformation of CPs into technical (workflow) specifications, based on the principles of the Model-Driven Architecture.

The purpose of this thesis was to investigate different concepts and tools which could support the development of a middleware which persists a temporal and versioned relational data model in an enterprise environment. Further requirements for the target application was that changes to the data model had to be facilitated, so that a small change to the model would not result in changes in several files and application layers. Other requirements include permissioning and audit tracing. In the thesis the reader is presented with a comparison of a set of tools for enterprise development and object/relational mapping. One of the tools, a code generator, is chosen as a good candidate to match the requirements of the project. An implementation is presented, where the chosen tool is used. An XML-based language which is used to define a data model and to provide input data for the tool is presented. Other concepts concerning the implementation is then described in detail. Finally, the author discusses alternative solutions and future improvements.

e-learning, as defined to be the use of information and communications technology (ICT) for supporting the educational processes, has motivated Tanzania to apply ICT in its education system. Tanzania secondary schools in rural areas are geographically and socially isolated. Rural Tanzania secondary schools face a number of problems including ways in getting learning materials, as well as inadequacy in qualified teachers. The impact of these problems is poor performance in National Examinations. This poor performance however is highly noted in science and mathematics subjects. The problem in getting learning materials can be reduced by employing ICT in secondary school education system. This research develops an interactive e-learning management system (e-LMS) to be used by Tanzanian secondary schools. The research is aiming to support teaching and learning functions by allowing creation and storage of learning materials, making them available, easily accessed and sharable among students from different secondary schools in Tanzania in a more organized way. Tanzania has only one curriculum for all secondary schools registered under the Ministry of Education and Vocational Training (MoEVT). During development stage it will not be easy to involve all scattered Tanzanian secondary schools. The research is focusing to two selected pilot schools; Kibaha secondary school and Wali-ul-Asr girls’ seminary in Kibaha town, Pwani region. Features of the e-LMS will represent the standard form of any other secondary school registered by the MoEVT. The complete implementation of the e-LMS to these selected pilot schools will later be extended to all other secondary schools in Tanzania. The development uses Object-Oriented System Analysis and Design (OOSAD) approach along with the power of modeling as it has been emphasized by Model Driven Architecture (MDA). Unified Modeling Language (UML) is mainly used in both cases. To create an interoperable system, UML is integrated with extensible markup language (XML) during model transformation from e-LMS Platform Independent Model (PIM) to e-LMS Platform Specific Model (PSM). Development will make use of open source software. For context specific development, participatory action research methodology is adopted and the inputs are well presented in developing e-LMS. Customization of open source learning management system (LMS) platforms is employed to help generate a timely solution to e-LMS development. Finally, this thesis also considers the need for replication and mirroring of the database for the purpose of making learning materials highly available to end-users.

Even though there are many software development and project management methodologies available, research and practice both show that IT software development projects still fail, and that the quality of software products does not always meet customers' expectations. There might be multiple causes for such failures, but some of these reasons can be seen to influence or create others. Therefore, the larger the project is, the higher its risk of failure, especially if the teams involved work remotely (distributed and outsourced). This increase in project complexity is considered the motivation for this paper. Similarly, there are other factors that can result in a project's failure and customers' dissatisfaction regarding software quality. All such factors identified by research conducted by organizations specializing in this area are analyzed in order to identify a common root of IT project failures. Once the root causes of these failures have been identified and analyzed, the goal of the Interface based software development methodology is to solve them. The solution offered by an Interface based software development methodology is to improve understanding of software requirements and to describe these requirements with interfaces in an object-oriented way. Interface based software development will support and drive development towards service-oriented architecture (SOA) and component-based development (CBD). The goal of interface based software development is to increase software testability and maintainability and to make it more easily feasible to execute various software development processes in parallel.

The aim of the master thesis is to describe Apache Spark framework , its structure and the way how Spark works . Next goal is to present topic of Model- Driven Development and Model-Drive Architecture . Define their advantages , disadvantages and way of usage . However , the main part of this text is devoted to design a model for creating tasks in Apache Spark framework . Text desribes application , that allows user to create graph based on proposed modeling language . Final application allows user to generate source code from created model.

Against the background of increasing multidisciplinarity as well as the focus on quality, transparency and economic efficiency of medical services, clinical pathways (CPs) have been established as a promising tool at the organizational level in recent years. They are primarily intended to ensure an adequate description of the care processes and to manage the balance between best treatment practice and economic viability. CPs standardize the internal care services by explicating the institution-specific knowledge with regard to recommendations for action, service portfolio, organizational structures, infrastructure, etc. of a specific service provider. The development of hospital information systems (HIS) has so far been characterized by an evolutionary development of modules in the field of laboratory, radiology, nursing and picture archiving systems as well as in the area of administrative systems. As one result of this development, the HIS usually comprises a heterogeneous network of software systems of different types and manufacturers. However, the actual control of patients by means of evidence-based processes and integration of CPs into HIS was not addressed until the recent years, when HIS manufacturers started developing modules for CP modeling and workflow support. The objective of this thesis is to provide a holistic methodical support for the description of clinical pathways and their integration into a hospital information system to finally improve the compliance of daily care to standard process definitions. Therefore, conceptual models provide an adequate mean to describe and communicate complex matters in a comprehensible form as well as to configure IT systems due to their semi-formal nature. Hence, a first research thread investigates the question, how clinical pathways can be described adequately using conceptual models. This results in an iterative design of adequate modeling languages for clinical pathways. A second research thread further investigates the question, how conceptual models of clinical pathways can be used to configure process-oriented application systems in health care. This thread therefore describes the design of a model-based method, that enables a consecutive transformation of CPs into technical (workflow) specifications, based on the principles of the Model-Driven Architecture.:A. Synopsis of the Doctoral Dissertation B. Agility in Medical Treatment Processes C. Domain Specific Modeling Language - CPmod D. BPMN4CP - Version 1.0 E. BPMN4CP - Version 2.0 F. BPMN4CP - Version 2.1 G. MDA in Health Care IS Development H. Transforming Clinical Pathways into Care Workflows I. CDA Templates - Utilizing the MediCUBE

Due to the changing scope of data management from centrally stored data towards the management of distributed and heterogeneous systems, the integration takes place on different levels. The lack of standards for information integration as well as application integration resulted in a large number of different integration models and proprietary solutions. With the aim of a high degree of portability and the reduction of development efforts, the model-driven development—following the Model-Driven Architecture (MDA)—is advantageous in this context as well. Hence, in the GCIP project (Generation of Complex Integration Processes), we focus on the model-driven generation and optimization of integration tasks using a process-based approach. In this paper, we contribute detailed generation aspects and finally discuss open issues and further challenges.

L'évolution rapide des besoins dus entre autres à l'innovation technique, la concurrence ou la réglementation conduit souvent à décrire le cadre d'étude des systèmes d'information dans des modèles conceptuels, pour faciliter l'évolution du fonctionnement des systèmes. La mise au point de ces modèles s'effectue en plusieurs phase au cours desquelles collaborent plusieurs équipes de nature différente, chaque intervenant apportant sa perception du système à construire en se limitant à la partie de son domaine de spécialisation. Il faut alors concilier les différentes perceptions. L'objectif essentiel de la thèse est de concevoir les mécanismes permettant d'une part d'obtenir le modèle factorisant les concepts communs à plusieurs modèles et, d'autre part, de proposer aux concepteurs une méthodologie de suivi de l'évolution de la factorisation. Pour réaliser la factorisation, nous avons mis en œuvre l'Analyse Formelle de Concepts et l'Analyse Relationnelle de Concepts (ARC) qui sont des méthodes d'analyse de données basées sur la théorie des treillis. Dans un ensemble d'entités décrites par des caractéristiques, les deux méthodes extraient des concepts formels qui associent un ensemble maximal d'entités à un ensemble maximal de caractéristiques partagées. Ces concepts formels sont structurés dans un ordre partiel de spécialisation qui les munit d'une structure de treillis. L'ARC permet de compléter la description des entités par des relations entre entités. La première contribution de la thèse est une méthode d'analyse de l'évolution de la factorisation d'un modèle basée sur l'AFC et l'ARC. Cette méthode s'appuie la capacité de l'AFC et de l'ARC à faire émerger au sein d'un modèle des abstractions thématiques de niveau supérieur, améliorant ainsi la sémantique des modèles. Nous montrons que ces méthodes peuvent aussi être employées pour suivre l'évolution du processus d'analyse avec des acteurs. Nous introduisons des métriques sur les éléments de modélisation et sur les treillis de concepts qui servent de base à l'élaboration de recommandations. Nous effectuons une expérimentation dans laquelle nous étudions l'évolution des 15 versions du modèle de classes du système d'information SIE-Pesticides. La seconde contribution de la thèse est une étude approfondie du comportement de l'ARC sur des modèles UML. Nous montrons l'influence de la structure des modèles sur différentes variables étudiées (comme les temps d'exécution et la mémoire occupée) au travers de plusieurs expérimentations sur les 15 versions du modèle SIE-Pesticides. Pour cela, nous étudions plusieurs configurations (choix d'éléments et de relations dans le méta-modèle) et plusieurs paramètres (choix d'utiliser les éléments non nommés, choix d'utiliser la navigabilité). Des métriques sont introduites pour guider le concepteur dans le pilotage du processus de factorisation et des recommandations sur les configurations et paramétrages à privilégier sont faites. La dernière contribution est une approche de factorisation inter-modèles afin de regrouper au sein d'un modèle l'ensemble des concepts communs à différents modèles sources conçus par différents experts. Outre le regroupement des concepts communs, cette analyse produit de nouvelles abstractions généralisant des concepts thématiques existants. Nous appliquons notre approche sur les 15 versions du modèle du SIE-Pesticides. L'ensemble de ces travaux s'inscrit dans un cadre de recherche dont l'objectif est de factoriser des concepts thématiques au sein d'un même modèle et de contrôler par des métriques la profusion de concepts produits par l'AFC et surtout par l'ARC. / The rapidly changing needs among other things due to technical innovation, competition and regulation often leads to describe the context for the study of conceptual models in information systems to facilitate the evolution of operating systems. The development of these models is carried out in several phases during which several working teams of different nature, providing each participant's perception of the system to be built is limited to the part of his area of specialization. It must then reconcile the different perceptions.The main objective of the thesis is to design mechanisms to obtain a share of the model factoring concepts common to several models and, secondly, to provide designers with a methodology for monitoring the evolution of factorization.To perform the factorization, we have implemented the Formal Concept Analysis and Relational Concepts Analysis (RCA), which are methods of analysis based on the theory of lattice data. In a set of entities described by features, both methods extract formal concepts that combine a maximum of entities to a maximum set of shared characteristics together. These formal concepts are structured in a partial order of specialization that provides with a lattice structure.The CRA can complement the description of the entities by relationships between entities.The first contribution of the thesis is a textbf {method a model for analyzing the evolution of the factorization based on the FCA and the RCA}. This method builds the capacity of the AFC and the CRA to emerge in a model of thematic abstractions higher level, improving semantic models. We show that these methods can also be used to monitor the analytical process with stakeholders. We introduce metrics on the design elements and the concept lattices which are the basis for the development of recommendations. We conduct an experiment in which we study the evolution of the 15 versions of the model class of information-Pesticides EIS system.The second contribution of this thesis is a textbf {depth study of the behavior of the RCA on UML models.} We show the influence of model structure on different variables studied (such as execution time and memory used) through several experiments on 15 versions of the EIS-Pesticides model. For this, we study several configurations (choice of elements and relations in the meta-model) and several parameters (choice of using unnamed elements, choice of using airworthiness). Metrics are introduced to guide the designer in managing the process of factoring and recommendations on the preferred configurations and settings are made.The last contribution is a textbf {approach to inter-model factorization} to group in a model all the concepts common to different source models designed by different experts. In addition to the consolidation of common concepts, this analysis produces new abstractions generalizing existing thematic concepts. We apply our approach on 15 versions of the model EIS-Pesticides.All this work is part of a research framework which aims to factor thematic concepts within a model and control metrics by the profusion of concepts produced by the FCA and especially by RCA.

La complexité croissante des systèmes d'information modernes a motivé l'apparition de nouveaux paradigmes (objets, composants, services, etc), permettant de mieux appréhender et maîtriser la masse critique de leurs fonctionnalités. Ces systèmes sont construits de façon modulaire et adaptable afin de minimiser les temps d'arrêts dus aux évolutions ou à la maintenance de ceux-ci. Afin de garantir des propriétés non fonctionnelles (par ex. maintien du temps de réponse malgré un nombre croissant de requêtes), ces systèmes sont également amenés à être distribués sur différentes ressources de calcul (grilles). Outre l'apport en puissance de calcul, la distribution peut également intervenir pour distribuer une tâche sur des nœuds aux propriétés spécifiques. C'est le cas dans le cas des terminaux mobiles proches des utilisateurs ou encore des objets et capteurs connectés proches physiquement du contexte de mesure. L'adaptation d'un système et de ses ressources nécessite cependant une connaissance de son état courant afin d'adapter son architecture et sa topologie aux nouveaux besoins. Un nouvel état doit ensuite être propagé à l'ensemble des nœuds de calcul. Le maintien de la cohérence et le partage de cet état est rendu particulièrement difficile à cause des connexions sporadiques inhérentes à la distribution, pouvant amener des sous-systèmes à diverger. En réponse à ces défi scientifiques, cette thèse propose une abstraction de conception et de déploiement pour systèmes distribués dynamiquement adaptables, grâce au principe du Model@Runtime. Cette approche propose la construction d'une couche de réflexion distribuée qui permet la manipulation abstraite de systèmes répartis sur des nœuds hétérogènes. En outre, cette contribution introduit dans la modélisation des systèmes adaptables la notion de cohérence variable, permettant ainsi de capturer la divergence des nœuds de calcul dans leur propre conception. Cette couche de réflexion, désormais cohérente "à terme", permet d'envisager la construction de systèmes adaptatifs hétérogènes, regroupant des nœuds mobiles et embarqués dont la connectivité peut être intermittente. Cette contribution a été concrétisée par un projet nommé ''Kevoree'' dont la validation démontre l'applicabilité de l'approche proposée pour des cas d'usages aussi hétérogènes qu'un réseau de capteurs ou une flotte de terminaux mobiles. / The growing complexity of modern IT systems has motivated the development of new paradigms (objects, components, services,...) to better cope with the critical size of their functionalities. Such systems are then built as a modular and dynamically adaptable compositions, allowing them to minimise their down-times while performing evolutions or fixes. In order to ensure non-functional properties (i.e. request latency) such systems are distributed across different computation nodes. Besides the added value in term of computational power (cloud), this distribution can also target nodes with dedicated properties such as mobile nodes and sensors (internet of things), physically close to users for interactions. Adapting a system requires knowledge about its current state in order to adapt its architecture to its evolving needs. A new state must be then disseminated to other nodes to synchronise them. Maintaining its consistency and sharing this state is a difficult task especially in case of sporadic connexions which lead to divergent state between sub-systems. To tackle these scientific problems, this thesis proposes an abstraction to design and deploy distributed adaptive systems following the Model@Runtime paradigm. From this abstraction, the proposed approach allows defining a distributed reflexive layer to manipulate heterogeneous distributed nodes. In particular, this contribution introduces variable consistencies in model definition and divergence in system conception. This reflexive layer, eventually consistent allows the construction of distributed adapted systems even on mobile nodes with intermittent connectivity. This work has been realized in an open source project named Kevoree, and validated on various distributed systems ranging from sensor networks to “cloud” computing.