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Discrete Event Simulation (DES) is one of the most widely used methodologies for Operations Research (OR) modeling and analysis. However, designing and implementing DES can be a time-consuming and error-prone task. This thesis designed, implemented and evaluated a tool, the Event Graph Graphical Design Tool (EGGDT), to help OR analystsin the design, implementation, and maintenance of DES reducing the development and debugging times. The Unified Modeling Language was used to document the development of the EGGDT, which was programmed in Java using J2D and Swing. Human Factors techniques were employed to help in the design process and to evaluate the final prototype of the EGGDT. During the design process, two formative experiments were performed to evaluate the Graphical User Interface design decisions. A final summative experiment was done to test if the potential users consider the tool a useful means to develop OR simulations. Participants of the experiments agreed that tools like the EGGDT are an essential instrument when developing simulation. / Spanish Navy author

Thesis (M.S. in Operations Research) Naval Postgraduate School, Sept. 2001. / Thesis advisor(s): Buss, Arnold; Miller, Nita. "September 2001." Includes bibliographical references (p. 109-110). Also available in print.

Software engineering techniques have been employed for many years to guide software product creation. In the last decade the appropriateness of many techniques has been questioned, given unacceptably high rates of software project failure. In light of this, there have emerged a new set of agile software development methodologies aimed at reducing software projects risks, on the basis that this will improve the likelihood of achieving software project success. Recent studies show that agile methods have been gaining increasing industry attention. However, while the practices recommended by agile methodologies are said to reduce risks, there exists little evidence to verify this position. In addition, it is posited that the very processes recommended by agile methodologies may themselves introduce other risks. Consequently, this study addresses the risks inherent in the human collaboration practices that are central to agile methods. An analysis of the risk management literature reveals that personality conflicts and customer-developer disagreements are social risks that occur through human collaboration. These risks negatively affect team cohesion and software project success. Personality conflicts are said to be mostly influenced through poor team formation, whereas customer-developer disagreements are induced through excessive customer direct interaction. However, these risks are not adequately addressed by standard risk management theories. Furthermore, an evaluation reveals that these risks are also not considered by existing software tools.This study therefore designs and implements a web-based solution to lessen the social risks that may arise in agile projects. The Agile Social-Risk Mitigation Tool (ASRMT) offers support for personnel capability assessment and management and for remote customer feature management, extending the customer's access through an interface. Using software engineering experts to evaluate ASRMT, the tool is shown to effectively address social risk management theories, and is considered likely to assist agile developers in their handling of social risks. In addition, above and beyond its intended purpose, ASRMT is also likely to assist agile teams with general project management. The findings of the ASRMT user evaluations demonstrate sufficient proof of concept to suggest that such a tool could have value in live software projects.

Software engineering techniques have been employed for many years to guide software product creation. In the last decade the appropriateness of many techniques has been questioned, given unacceptably high rates of software project failure. In light of this, there have emerged a new set of agile software development methodologies aimed at reducing software projects risks, on the basis that this will improve the likelihood of achieving software project success. Recent studies show that agile methods have been gaining increasing industry attention. However, while the practices recommended by agile methodologies are said to reduce risks, there exists little evidence to verify this position. In addition, it is posited that the very processes recommended by agile methodologies may themselves introduce other risks. Consequently, this study addresses the risks inherent in the human collaboration practices that are central to agile methods. An analysis of the risk management literature reveals that personality conflicts and customer-developer disagreements are social risks that occur through human collaboration. These risks negatively affect team cohesion and software project success. Personality conflicts are said to be mostly influenced through poor team formation, whereas customer-developer disagreements are induced through excessive customer direct interaction. However, these risks are not adequately addressed by standard risk management theories. Furthermore, an evaluation reveals that these risks are also not considered by existing software tools.This study therefore designs and implements a web-based solution to lessen the social risks that may arise in agile projects. The Agile Social-Risk Mitigation Tool (ASRMT) offers support for personnel capability assessment and management and for remote customer feature management, extending the customer's access through an interface. Using software engineering experts to evaluate ASRMT, the tool is shown to effectively address social risk management theories, and is considered likely to assist agile developers in their handling of social risks. In addition, above and beyond its intended purpose, ASRMT is also likely to assist agile teams with general project management. The findings of the ASRMT user evaluations demonstrate sufficient proof of concept to suggest that such a tool could have value in live software projects.

Refactoring is the process of making changes to the internal structure of existing code without changing the external behavior of that code, The resulting code is more flexible, reusable, and maintainable. While refactoring is becoming more popular in the software development community, manual refactoring can be a long and tedious process. Tools that support refactoring are becoming available; however, many provide only limited types of refactorings and require heavy user intervention. This paper presents an open source framework for an adaptive refactoring tool. The framework allows easy addition of new refactorings or modification of existing ones. An implementation of the framework is described in this paper.

Yes / Immunotherapy treatments can be essential sometimes and a waste of valuable resources in other cases, depending on the diagnosis results. Therefore, researchers in immunotherapy need to be updated on the current status of research by exploring: application domains e.g. warts, datasets e.g. immunotherapy, classifiers or algorithms e.g. kNN and software tools. The research objectives were: 1) to study the immunotherapy-related published literature from a supervised machine learning perspective. In addition, to reproduce immunotherapy classifiers reported in research papers. 2) To find gaps and challenges both in publications and practical work, which may be the basis for further research. Immunotherapy, diabetes, cryotherapy, exasens data and ”one unbalanced dataset” are explored. The results are compared with published literature. To address the found gaps in further research: novel experiments, unbalanced studies, focus on effectiveness and a new classifier algorithm are suggested.

This thesis discusses topics in the field of process engineering that have received much attention over the past twenty years, process integration and optimization of energy and environmental systems. It emphasizes the applications of three commercial software tools for process integration, ADVENT, HEXTRAN and SlTPERTARGET, that are readily available to academic users at low costs. Specifically, Chapter 1 presents an overview of the basic concepts used in process integration of energy systems. Chapter 2 compares the use of single and dual temperature-of-approach methods to synthesize energy-optimum and minimum-cost, heat-exchanger networks (HENs), and shows how to implement them using three software tools. Chapters 3 and 4 demonstrate how to optimize the energy recovery in petroleum refinery distillation systems via process integration. Chapter 3 presents an extension to a case study of heat integration of a vacuum distillation system. Chapter 4 describes the detailed synthesis, retrofit and optimization of HENs for a system of atmospheric and vacuum distillation towers, and it represents the first process integration and optimization study of a complex process in petroleum refineries using all three commercial software tools. Chapter 5 presents, through four progressive tutorial examples, a recent conceptual method developed in the field of process integration of environmental systems applied to wastewater minimization and to the design of distributed effluent treatment systems. / Master of Science

Process patterns allow the modular modelling and adaptable application of software processes. Present descriptions of process patterns show defects like non-uniform and unequivocal description forms and missing relationship definitions. These defects disadvantageously affect the effective usage of process patterns. In this work we present the language PROPEL (Process Pattern Description Language), which provides concepts for the semiformal description of process patterns and relationships between process patterns. With the help of PROPEL single process patterns can be modelled and, by definition of relationships, be composed to more complex processes. With the representation of different views of a process pattern catalog the process patterns and their relationships can be shown clearly. An example illustrates how a process pattern catalog and the contained process patterns are modelled. It is shown that in applying PROPEL the complexity of a process model can be reduced, the inconsistencies of processes can be eliminated and the flexibility of processes can be improved.