<p>Development of the World Wide Web makes it possible for multiple computers to work together in order to solve problems and make the most efficient use of resources. A distributed system is composed of such computers which are separately located and connected with each other through a network. One paradigm for computation using distributed systems is the multi-agent systems, in which many autonomous agents interact with each other to solve problems. The agents in a multi-agent system may be distributed on different computers (or nodes), where each computer owns its resources. Although the resources in a multi-agent system are connected by a network through which mobile agents can migrate for accessing sufficient resources, how to share these independently owned resources in both an effective and an efficient way is not fully understood. A key challenge in multi-agent systems is how to account for and control the resources which are located on individual nodes.</p> <p>The CyberOrgs model offers one approach to manage resources among competitive or collaborative agents by organizing computations and resources in a hierarchy. A cyberorg encapsulates agents and resources in a boundary and distributes the resources available to it within this boundary. A cyberorg contained in another cyberorg has a contract with the outer cyberorg, according to which it receives resources that it may use. A cyberorg also encapsulates an amount of the eCash, which is the currency for purchasing resources from its host cyberorg. Therefore, cyberorgs have a hierarchical structure in which resources are delivered to computations by a process where resources flow down from the root to the leaves of the hierarchy and the eCash flows up from the leaves toward the root. However, the hierarchical structure of the CyberOrgs model presents challenges in scalability. As a result, efficiency is an important concern in the implementation of CyberOrgs.</p> <p>In this thesis, an efficient implementation of the CyberOrgs model is described. System design, APIs of the implementation, example applications, experimental results, and future directions are presented.</p>

Several recent articles stress that enough research has not been devoted to the performance management of expatriates. The cost of an expatriate is two to three times higher than the cost of a local employee. Therefore it is important to ensure that the investment made is returned to the company. Hence, this study aims to investigate how MNC’s evaluate their expatriates. By interviewing expatriate managers in four Swedish MNC’s we came to the conclusion that companies tend to rely much on informal measurements to evaluate expatriates whereas using formal measurements of hard criteria was done in the same way as for all employees. Our findings suggest that companies, in order to get the most out of their expatriates, ought to put more emphasis on the selection process and the repatriation process.

Collections of hardware components are the foundation of computation and consist of interconnections of different types of the same core elements: processors, disks, memory cards, I/O devices, and network links. Designing a system for managing collections of hardware is challenging because modern infrastructures (i) distribute resource control across multiple autonomous sites, (ii) operate diverse sets of hardware, and (iii) support a variety of programming models for developing and executing software services. An operating system is a software layer that manages hardware by coordinating its interaction with software. This thesis defines and evaluates an architecture for a networked operating system that manages collections of hardware in infrastructures spread across networks, such as the Internet. The foundation of a networked operating system determines how software services share a common hardware platform. A fundamental property common to all forms of resource sharing is that software services, by definition, share hardware components and do not use them forever. A lease is a natural construct for restricting the use of a shared resource to a well-defined length of time. Our architecture employs a general neutrality principle, which states that a networked operating system should be policy-neutral, since only users and site administrators, and not operating system developers, know how to manage their software and hardware. Experience building, deploying, and using a prototype has led us to view neutrality as a guiding design principle. Our hypothesis is that an operating system architecture for infrastructure resource management that focuses narrowly on leasing control of hardware provides a foundation for multi-lateral resource negotiation, arbitration, and fault tolerance. In evaluating our hypothesis we make the following contributions:*Introduce a set of design principles for networked operating systems. The principles adapt and extend principles from node operating system design to a networked environment. We evaluate existing systems with respect to these principles, describe how they deviate from them, and explore how these deviations limit the capabilities of higher level software.*Combine the idea of a reconfigurable data center with the Sharp framework for secure resource peering to demonstrate a prototype networked operating system capable of sharing aggregations of resources in infrastructures. *Design, implement, and deploy the architecture using a single programming abstraction---the lease---and show how the lease abstraction embodies the design principles of a networked operating system.*Show that leases are a foundational primitive for addressing arbitration in a networked operating system. Leasing currency defines a configurable tradeoff between proportional-share scheduling and a market economy, and also serves as a basis for implementing other forms of arbitration. *Show how combining the use of leases for long-term resource management with state recovery mechanisms provides robustness to transient faults and failures in a loosely coupled distributed system that coordinates resource allocation.*Evaluate the flexibility and performance of a prototype by managing aggregations of physical and virtual hardware present in modern data centers, and showing that the architecture could scale to manage thousands of machines. *Present case studies of integrating multiple software services including the PlanetLab network testbed, the Plush distributed application manager, and the GridEngine batch scheduler, and leverage the architecture to prototype and evaluate Jaws, a new light-weight batch scheduler that instantiates one or more virtual machines per task. / Dissertation

Interactive multimedia sessions combine requirements of traditional telephony services and Internet applications. This requires call setup, call signaling, negotiation, routing, security, and network resources. Seeking to facilitate the use of quality of service (QoS) mechanisms to users of such applications, this thesis presented new signaling architectures that addressed the interaction of the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) as the session control signaling protocol and current resource management frameworks. The Differentiated Services (DiffServ) architecture is used as the primary example. The new architectures addressed the roles of SIP agents and proxy servers in subjects such as resource negotiation, call authorization, and end-to-end QoS in heterogeneous networks. First, an architecture based on the use of QoS-enhanced SIP proxies and a SIP-based interface between the application and network layers was developed, implemented in a testbed, and performance enhancements demonstrated. Further studying of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) proposal for the integration of SIP and resource management led to the development of a new signaling scheme, Resource management Overlapped with Answering Delay (ROAD). It explores the SIP user agent interaction with the network in a way that takes advantage of parallel user answering delays and reservation delays. An experimental evaluation of the ROAD scheme showed its call setup delay savings and reduced signaling load. Then, on the interaction of SIP and call admission control, an inter-domain call authorization model that implements the concepts of proxies as gate controllers (QoS-enhanced SIP proxies-GC), and that provides call authorization status and adds more granularity to the authorization process is proposed. This model showed to be scalable in terms of the need to add more resources to compensate for the increasing service load on the servers. Finally, an example framework that applies the new signaling architectures to achieve end-to-end QoS in heterogeneous networks is presented.

The thesis focuses on resource management or sensor allocation when we use bearings-only measurements to track targets in an unattended ground sensor (UGS) network. Intelligent resource management is necessary because each UGS sensor node has limited power and it is desirable that estimation performance not degrade very much when only a few nodes are active to maximize the effective tracking lifetime. For scheduling to prolong the tracking lifetime, a new energy-based (EB) metric is proposed to model the number of snapshots remaining for a hypothesized node set, i.e., the remaining battery energy divided by the energy to sense and share information amongst the node set. Unlike other methods that use the total energy consumed for the given snapshot as the energy-based metric, the new EB metric can achieve load balancing of the nodes without resorting to computationally demanding non-myopic optimization. The metrics to choose nodes at a given snapshot could be geometry-based (GB) to minimize the estimation error, EB, or multiobjective. In determining the active set, each node only knows the existence of itself, the active set of nodes from the previous snapshot and the node's neighbors, i.e., the set of nodes within a distance of r_nei. When measuring the tracking lifetime of the system, we propose an adaptive transmission range control, known as the knowledge pool (KP) where the transmission range is determined by the knowledge of the network and the currently remaining battery level. The KP saves more energy usage than another adaptive transmission range control bounded with the GB metric when the global location information is available. We also provide practical search algorithms to optimize a constraint metric (multiobjective function) using one metric as the optimization metric under the constraint of the other. We also demonstrate the resource management schemes for multitarget tracking with the field data.

Prior research has shown that differences in human resource management (HRM) perception/practices do exist between nations. These differences have been attributed to variations in culture. The fundamental purpose of this study was to determine whether subcultures differing in location, religion, and ethnicity significantly affect perception/ practices of human resource management within a common national context (Indonesia). A secondary purpose of the current study was to compare with those found within Indonesia by the Best International Practices Consortium or Best Practices Project (BPP). Participants in the present study were 762 agri-business employees who were members of three distinctly separate subcultures within Indonesia; Sundanese/ Javanese, Balinese, and Minahasan. Data are obtained through the distribution of written questionnaires modeled after those employed by the BPP. Within each subculture, there were numerous disparities between current perceived practices and those desired by employees. This study also revealed several significant differences in HRM practices and perceptions across the three observed subcultures in the areas of hiring, training, performance appraisal, leadership, and communications. Participants reported differences in current and desired managerial styles across subcultures. However, within these groups, current management practices matched employee preferences. The overall findings of the present study differed from those of the BPP. These differences may be attributable to dissimilarities in the samples for the two studies’ samples. This study indicates that employee attitudes and perceptions of HRM practices do differ across cultural boundaries within a common national context. This discovery has wide implications for international companies which may be looking to establish overseas enterprises in countries with diverse cultural populations.

The field of strategic human resource management attempts to investigate the role and contribution that human resources may provide to organizations. Although various theoretical perspectives have been applied to the field of strategic human resource management, some scholars still label this field as atheoretical. I apply discretion theory to this atheoretical discussion with the expectation that discretion theory will allow a better examination of what may be occurring in the “black box” between human resource practices (i.e. high performance work practices) and organizational outcomes. Specifically, my intent was to determine under what conditions human resource managers might influence the high performance work practices/organizational outcomes relationship. I surveyed dyads consisting of one senior human resource manager and one other human resource employee within various organizations to assess 1) the nature of the human resource practices that each organization employs, 2) the intensity of the senior human resource manager’s individual discretion, and 3) the intensity of the organization’s contextual discretion. Moderated regression analysis was utilized to test each hypothesis. Upon testing each hypothesis, partial support was found for the following hypotheses: Hypothesis 1a: The use of high performance work practices will be negatively related to absenteeism, Hypothesis 1b: The use of high performance work practices will be negatively related to turnover, Hypothesis 2a: The use of high performance work practices will be positively related to ROA, Hypothesis 3b: Individual discretion will moderate the relationship between HPWPs and turnover: specifically, HPWPs will be more strongly related to turnover (i.e. less turnover) when individual discretion is high than when individual discretion is low, and Hypothesis 4a: Individual discretion will moderate the relationship between HPWPs and ROA; specifically, HPWPs will be more strongly related to ROA (i.e. higher levels of ROA) when individual discretion is high than when individual discretion is low. No support was found for Hypotheses 2b, 3a, and 4b. With respect to each of the three-way interaction hypotheses, slope difference tests revealed that none of the slopes for were significantly different from one another, hence no support was provided for Hypotheses 5a-5c, 6a-6c, 7a-7c, and 8a-8c.

Abstract In an enterprise, the purpose of any strategy or management activity is to enhance the business performance and corporate competitiveness. Therefore, the management of an enterprise employs different human resource management systems, utilizes a variety of specialists, materials, capitals, and information systems to lift up the human capital, and in turn, the business performance. Therefore, this research focuses on the influence of the team performance by utilizing variety of human capital and activities. It also discusses the effectiveness of different team leader empowerment in different enterprise. The software industry in this research is categorized based on the industry classification ¡¥Industrial, commerce, and service industries survey¡¦ by the Executive Yuan, including computer software industry (program design, system design, system analysis, packaged software design, system administration), computer system integrated service industry (system integration, turn-key system). A total of 420 questionnaires were distributed to 63 companies; 181 valid questionnaires were returned at the usable response rate was 43.10%. This research applied 12 human resource management activities as the basis for discussion over the effect of human resource management activity to the organizational performance, and generalized three factors, that are factor (1) human resource development, factor (2) teamwork design, and factor (3) member relation. In respect to these three categories, this research also defines the empowerment of team leader in enterprise into three aspects as (1) ¡§self-awareness of development¡¨, (2)¡¨team relationship discipline¡¨, (3) ¡§team relationship influence¡¨. The research findings showed that the human resource management activity (which is adopted by the software industry with high human resource capital) has three symptoms regarding to team performance. (1). Enhanced by team member relationship management system. (2). Team leader empowerment has no significant impact on team performance, as contrast to team empowerment has negative relationship with ¡§Quality Acceptance¡¨. (3). Different team leader empowerment resulting different team performance and it varies with different kind of business / industries.

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In order to pursue the better service quality and the more long term customer relations, more and more many enterprises considered establishes the guest to take the center to respond the customer as necessary the demand; But because voluntarily establishes the guest to take central the cost too to be huge, as well as the specialized technology obtains with difficulty, the most enterprises choice and outside the specialized committee the company cooperated after the careful appraisal, cause the guest to take outside the committee the demand in recent years the large increase. Because the modern enterprise's competition is intense, how will sell, stratification plane union and so on the marketing, customer service will be one, will be the modern enterprise strives for the time the important topic, therefore the guest will take outside the committee the tenderer whether will be able to respond the enterprise customer immediately the demand, and if will establish long-time and the stable partnership, then will become the guest to take the key aspect which whether outside the committee will succeed. In addition, the guest takes outside the committee the tenderer to have to assist the customer to solve the multiplex talented person demand problem in the shortest time, therefore elastic human resources management, is the guest takes the biggest challenge which outside the committee the industry faces. This research utilizes half structural formula interview, carries on depth interview to the document company participant, and interview of manuscript, the electronic files and the written material the penetration document company, auxiliary by the home, outside are connected the literature, analyzes the guest to take outside the committee the tenderer and the customer establishment partnership various stages interaction key, and its the human resources management design and the operation, finally infers goes visiting outside the clothing committee the industry if the customer establishment partnership model. This research discovery, the enterprise chooses the guest takes outside the central committee the main reason to develop for the dedicated occupation, suddenly to reveal the cost benefit and obtains the specialized knowledge. The enterprise chooses when the guest takes outside the committee the supplier, pays great attention to the specialized ability does not have the question, the cooperation experience for the communication in is rich, the systematic surface specialized and the specialized organization approval. Outside the committee both sides establish the partnership the process to be possible to divide are three stages: Service development, special case management and transport business management. But human resources management penetrates recruits the assign, the training development, the salary system and the achievements appraisal and so on the daily operation, has the quite tremendous influence to the special case management and transport business management stage partnership.