This diploma thesis deals with development of a fuzzy decision-making system for evaluating of REONTECH CZ s.r.o. company suppliers. The first part is dedicated to theory of fuzzy logic. The next part contains firstly an analysis of the current situation and then a description of the development process of the fuzzy decision-making system. The main outcome of this thesis is a tool that meets needs and requirements of the company and serves as a decision-making support tool.

Customer Relationship Management has been an integral part of the enterprise since two decades. Today, enterprises that focus on customer satisfaction need to manage their relationships with their customers effectively. This demand has allowed software vendors to create CRM solutions. The technology and broadband advancement allowed the CRM vendors to enhance their product portfolio by developing web-based CRM systems, in addition to their CRM on-premise solutions. These vendors adopted the business model in which CRM on-demand systems are provided via monthly-subscription fees, decreasing the total cost of ownership massively for enterprises in need of these systems. This business model is especially attractive for Small-To-Medium Enterprises who are searching for cost-efficient CRM systems. Currently, CRM on-demand market is quite saturated with more than 40 vendors providing similar solutions. Furthermore, CRM on-demand is delivered via Software-as-a-service method, which is a relatively new technology with unique benefits along with drawbacks. Thus, it’s of vital importance for managers in SMEs to make the right decision while evaluating the CRM on-demand option and systems. This research is meant to address this issue by building a proposed framework for CRM on-demand system evaluation. The inductive research uses qualitative and quantitative approaches for data collection and analysis. The evaluation criteria for CRM on-demand systems at a functional and general level were proposed. The general criteria were refined via collecting data from CRM on-demand experts and users in SMEs by structured questionnaires. Combining these criteria created the proposed framework which was applied to evaluate two major CRM on-demand systems in the market. The results indicate that CRM on-demand systems cover the basic functionalities of CRM including sales, marketing and service modules and offer enhanced functionality such as mobile CRM, social CRM and customizations. The research also revealed drawbacks of CRM on-demand systems such as disintegration with legacy applications, limited language support, limited country availability and technology maturity which needs to be addressed in the future. This research provides valuable insight for managers in SMEs when selecting CRM on-demand systems for their companies. Furthermore, the academicians interested in CRM and cloud computing could improve this initial proposed framework and adapt it further to different cases.

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The use of knowledge-based systems to aid in the diagnosis of faults in physical devices has grown considerably since their introduction during the 1970s. The majority of the early knowledge-based systems incorporated shallow knowledge, which sought to define simple cause and effect relationships between a symptom and a fault, that could be encoded as a set of rules. Though such systems enjoyed much success, it was recognised that they suffered from a number of inherent limitations such as inflexibility, inadequate explanation, and difficulties of knowledge elicitation. Many of these limitations can be overcome by developing knowledge-based systems which contain deeper knowledge about the device being diagnosed. Such systems, now generally referred to as model-based systems, have shown much promise, but there has been little evidence to suggest that they have successfully made the transition from the research centre to the workplace. This thesis argues that knowledge-based systems are an appropriate tool for the diagnosis of faults in complex devices, and that both deep and shallow knowledge have their part to play in this process. More specifically this thesis demonstrates how a wide-ranging knowledge-based system for quality assurance, based upon shallow knowledge, can be developed, and implemented. The resultant system, named DIPLOMA, not only diagnoses faults, but additionally provides advice and guidance on the assembly, disassembly, testing, inspection and repair of a highly complex hydro-mechanical device. Additionally it is shown that a highly innovative modelbased system, named MIDAS, can be used to contribute to the provision of diagnostic, explanatory and training facilities for the same hydro-mechanical device. The methods of designing, coding, implementing and evaluating both systems are explored in detail. The successful implementation and evaluation of the DIPLOMA and MIDAS systems has shown that knowledge-based systems are an appropriate tool for the diagnosis of faults in complex hydro-mechanical devices, and that they make a beneficial contribution to the business performance of the host organisation. Furthermore, it has been demonstrated that the most effective and comprehensive knowledge-based approach to fault diagnosis is one which incorporates both deep and shallow knowledge, so that the distinctive advantages of each can be realised in a single application. Finally, the research has provided evidence that the model-based approach to diagnosis is highly flexible, and may, therefore, be an appropriate technique for a wide range of industrial applications.

The study reported in this thesis investigated Emirati students’ claims related to experiences of cultural bias of the reading component of the IELTS examination through a critical realist lens. Critical realism posits a layered reality which allows for the conceptualization of experiences as emerging from the interplay of events and mechanisms found in two other realms of reality – the actual and the real. Experiences, therefore, have a different ontological status than the events and the causal mechanisms to which they are attributed. Social realism was used to further explore the depth of the realm of the real through Archer’s construct of analytical dualism. This allowed for the placement of generative mechanisms into three domains: structure, culture, and agency. There were two parts to this investigation: a content analysis and a focus group study. The first part of the content analysis consisted of analyzing 60 reading passages from 20 IELTS examinations for a number of cultural categories. These included such things as cultural objects, social roles, idiomatic expressions, traditions and festivals, superstitions and beliefs, and political and historical settings. The second part of the content analysis focused on the question types and syntactical structure of the 5 different IELTS examinations that the focus groups students sat. All three components of the analysis – the cultural content, question types, and syntactical structure – were conducted at the level of the actual. Findings indicated that on average, an IELTS examination contained 14 cultural references of various kinds. Only 4% of all geographical references pertained to the Middle East with the biggest share being western locations. The most common question types were matching questions, fill in the blank questions, and yes/no questions with more than 50% of all questions requiring some form of higher order thinking due to text reinterpretation. The study also found that the question types were not consistently distributed over the examinations with each consisting of a different variety of questions and some even having repetitive question types on one reading examination. The second part of the study was the focus groups. Here, 21 Emirati students sat 5 different IELTS examinations. Upon test completion, these students underwent a semistructured interview to relate their experiences of the test. These experiences, at the level of the empirical, all shared 7 ideas: reading is hard, the questions are too difficult, the passages are too long and difficult, the topics are unfamiliar, the topics are not interesting, the vocabulary is too difficult, and there is not enough time. When the processes of retroduction and abduction were applied to both the content analysis and these common experiences, numerous structures and discourses at the level of the real were identified as having contributed to the emergence of the feeling of bias at the level of the empirical. These structures included such things as the students’ school system (eg. curriculum, assessment, instructors etc.), religion, literacy practices, and home. In the cultural domain, a number of discourses were found to contribute to the experiences at the level of the empirical. Amongst these were the ‘Unimportance of Reading’, the culture of ‘Obedience’, the rejection of the ‘un-Islamic’, and the students’ sense of ‘Entitlement’.

The increase in population, accompanied by an increase in the availability of travel opportunities have kindled the interest in understanding how people make use of the space around them and their opportunities. Understanding the travel behaviour of individuals and groups is difficult because of two main factors: the travel behaviour's wide coverage, which encompasses different research areas, all of which model different aspects of travel behaviour, and the difficulty of obtaining travel diaries from large groups of respondents, which is imperative for analysing travel behaviour and patterns. A travel diary allows an individual to describe how she performed her activities by specifying the destinations, purposes and travel modes occurring during a predefined period of time. Travel diaries are usually collected during a large-scale survey, but recent developments show that travel diaries have important drawbacks such as the collection bias and the decreasing response rate. This led to a surge of studies that try to complement or replace the traditional declaration-based travel diary collection with methods that extract travel diary specific information from trajectories and auxiliary datasets. With the automation of travel diary generation in sight, this thesis presents a suitable method for collecting data for travel diary automation (Paper I), a framework to compare multiple travel diary collection systems (Paper II), a set of relevant metrics for measuring the performance of travel mode segmentation methods (Paper III), and applies these concepts during different case studies (Paper IV). / <p>QC 20160525</p>

Resource sharing is considered to be one of the most important pillars of library service, because no single library can meet all the needs of its users. Libraries have always cooperated to meet the increasing demands of users by sharing their resources. In the past few decades, the need to establish library consortia emerged more strongly as libraries began to take advantage of technology to improve access to information and service delivery. There has been a notable increase in the formation of library consortia on the African continent. South Africa has taken the lead both in the amount of established consortia and the number of member libraries within them. This development accompanied the implementation of common library systems in consortia, where a single system is adopted by all member libraries. In the Southern African region, the library system called INNOPAC/Millennium Pac has already been adopted by consortia and libraries in Botswana, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, and Zimbabwe. The recently-established Lesotho Library Consortium (LELICO) also recognized the need for a comprehensive investigation to identify a common system that will effectively meet the needs of its member libraries. The purpose of this study was to analyze the successes and limitations of the INNOPAC library system operating in consortia and libraries in the Southern African region, in order to assess its suitability for LELICO. The study focused on two South African consortia (The Gauteng and Environs Library Consortium – GAELIC, and The Free State Library and Information Consortium - FRELICO), two university libraries (Namibia and Zimbabwe) and one agricultural college library (Botswana) in the Southern African region that use the system. A special emphasis was the criteria of assessment that would apply to a small, multi-type consortium in a developing country like Lesotho. Data was collected through a literature search, questionnaires, interviews, site visits, and analysis of policy and institutional documents. The target groups of the study were the library managers, system managers, and library professionals of selected GAELIC and FRELICO libraries, and the system managers of the three selected libraries in the region. The study found that the INNOPAC library system is performing satisfactorily in the chosen consortia and libraries, and that it has a positive impact on them. It performed to a high standard in all the key areas, and this may be attributed to keeping abreast of the latest developments in the library world, and offering a range of services that meet the needs of libraries. The study found further that the INNOPAC library system contributed towards increased productivity, improved customer services, and better decision making in the two consortia. However, direct access to members’ holdings was restricted by a decentralized server model adopted by these consortia. This and other lessons shaped a proposal for the implementation and management of the INNOPAC library system in LELICO. A proposed model recommends a central server as a more cost-effective management solution. The model also explains the mode of operation by member libraries and the coordinated structures that would implement and manage the INNOPAC library system, adapted to the specific requirements of a small, multi-type consortium in a developing country like Lesotho. Given its successful performance in consortia and libraries across Southern African countries, the study recommends further research into the advantages and challenges of INNOPAC for wider regional library cooperation. / Thesis (DPhil)--University of Pretoria, 2009. / Information Science / unrestricted

The use of knowledge-based systems to aid in the diagnosis of faults in physical devices has grown considerably since their introduction during the 1970s. The majority of the early knowledge-based systems incorporated shallow knowledge, which sought to define simple cause and effect relationships between a symptom and a fault, that could be encoded as a set of rules. Though such systems enjoyed much success, it was recognised that they suffered from a number of inherent limitations such as inflexibility, inadequate explanation, and difficulties of knowledge elicitation. Many of these limitations can be overcome by developing knowledge-based systems which contain deeper knowledge about the device being diagnosed. Such systems, now generally referred to as model-based systems, have shown much promise, but there has been little evidence to suggest that they have successfully made the transition from the research centre to the workplace. This thesis argues that knowledge-based systems are an appropriate tool for the diagnosis of faults in complex devices, and that both deep and shallow knowledge have their part to play in this process. More specifically this thesis demonstrates how a wide-ranging knowledge-based system for quality assurance, based upon shallow knowledge, can be developed, and implemented. The resultant system, named DIPLOMA, not only diagnoses faults, but additionally provides advice and guidance on the assembly, disassembly, testing, inspection and repair of a highly complex hydro-mechanical device. Additionally it is shown that a highly innovative modelbased system, named MIDAS, can be used to contribute to the provision of diagnostic, explanatory and training facilities for the same hydro-mechanical device. The methods of designing, coding, implementing and evaluating both systems are explored in detail. The successful implementation and evaluation of the DIPLOMA and MIDAS systems has shown that knowledge-based systems are an appropriate tool for the diagnosis of faults in complex hydro-mechanical devices, and that they make a beneficial contribution to the business performance of the host organisation. Furthermore, it has been demonstrated that the most effective and comprehensive knowledge-based approach to fault diagnosis is one which incorporates both deep and shallow knowledge, so that the distinctive advantages of each can be realised in a single application. Finally, the research has provided evidence that the model-based approach to diagnosis is highly flexible, and may, therefore, be an appropriate technique for a wide range of industrial applications. / Science and Engineering Research Council, and Alvey Directorate

The integration of robotic modules is common both in industry and in academia, especially when it comes to robotic grasping and object tracking. However, there are usually two challenges in the integration process. Firstly, the respective fields are extensive, making it challenging to select a method in each field for integration according to specific needs. Secondly, because the integrated system is rarely discussed in academia, there is no set of metrics to evaluate it. Aiming at the first challenge, this thesis reviews and categorizes popular methods in the fields of robotic grasping and object tracking, summarizing their advantages and disadvantages. This categorization provides the basis for selecting methods according to the specific needs of application scenarios. For evaluation, two well-established methods for grasp pose detection and object tracking are integrated for a common application scenario. Furthermore, the technical, as well as the task-related challenges of the integration process are discussed. Finally, in response to the second challenge, a set of metrics is proposed to evaluate the integrated system. / Integration av robotmoduler är vanligt förekommande både inom industrin och i den akademiska världen, särskilt när det gäller robotgrepp och objektspårning. Det finns dock vanligtvis två utmaningar i integrationsprocessen. För det första är både respektive fält omfattande, vilket gör det svårt att välja en metod inom varje fält för integration enligt relevanta behov. För det andra, eftersom det integrerade systemet sällan diskuteras i den akademiska världen, finns det inga etablerade mätvärden för att utvärdera det. För att fokusera på den första utmaningen, granskar och kategoriserar denna avhandling populära metoder inom robotgreppning och spårning av objekt, samt sammanfattar deras fördelar och nackdelar. Denna kategorisering utgör grunden för att välja metoder enligt de specifika behoven i olika applikationsscenarion. Som utvärdering, integreras samt jämförs två väletablerade metoder för posdetektion och objektspårning för ett vanligt applikationsscenario. Vidare diskuteras de tekniska och uppgiftsrelaterade utmaningarna i integrationsprocessen. Slutligen, som svar på den andra utmaningen, föreslås en uppsättning mätvärden för att utvärdera det integrerade systemet.

Researchers and application designers need repeatable methods to evaluateapplications/systems over WiFi. It is hard to reproduce evaluations overWiFi because of rapidly changing wireless quality over time. In this degreeproject, we present NemFi, a trace-driven emulator for accurately recordingthe WiFi trac and later using it to emulate WiFi links in a repeatable fashion.First, we present the advantages of trace-driven emulation over simulationand experimentation. We capture the uctuating WiFi link conditionsin terms of capacity and losses over time and replay captured behavior forany application running in the emulator. Current record-and-replay techniquesfor web trac and cellular networks do not work for WiFi becauseof their inability to distinguish between WiFi losses and losses due to selfinducedcongestion. They are also lacking other WiFi specic features. Inthe absence of a trace-driven emulator for WiFi, NemFi is also equipped toavoid self-induced packet losses. It is thus capable of isolating WiFi relatedlosses which are then replayed by the NemFi's replay. NemFi's record alsoaddresses the frame aggregation and the eect it has on the actual datatransmission capability over the wireless link. NemFi can record frame aggregation,at all instants of the record phase and later accurately replays theaggregation.Experimental results demonstrate that NemFi is not only accurate inrecording the variable-rate WiFi link but also in capturing cross-trac. NemFialso replays the recorded conditions with considerable accuracy. / Forskare och applikationsdesigners behöver repeterbara metoder för att utvärderaapplikationer och system via WiFi. Det är svårt att reproducera utvärderingar genom WiFi eftersom den trådlösa kvalit´en snabbt förändras över tid. I denna rapport presenterar vi NemFi, en spårstyrd emulator för att noggrant registrera WiFi-trafiken och senare använda den för att emulera WiFi-länkar påett repeterbart sätt. Först presenterar vi fördelarna med spårstyrd emulering jämfört med simulering och experiment. Vi fångar de varierande WiFi förhållanden med avseende påkapacitet och förluster över tid och spelar upp fångat beteende för alla applikationer som körs i emulatorn. Nuvarande inspelning och uppspelningstekniker för webbtrafik och mobilnät fungerar inte för WiFi pågrund av deras oförmåga att skilja mellan WiFi-förluster ochförluster pågrund av självinducerad överbelastning. De saknar ocksåandraWiFi-specifika funktioner. I avsaknad av en spårdriven emulator för WiFi är NemFi ocksåutrustade för att undvika självinducerade paketförluster. Den kan alltsåisolera WiFi-relaterade förluster som sedan spelas upp igen av NemFi: s uppspelning. NemFi adresserar ocksåramaggregering och det är effekten påfaktiska dataöverföringsförmåga via den trådlösa länken. NemFi kan spela in ramsamling, vid alla ögonblick i inspelningsfasen och ersätter senare noggrant aggregeringen.Experimentella resultat visar att NemFi inte bara är användbart när det gäller att registrera WiFi-länken med variabel hastighet, utan ocksåför att fånga tvärgående trafik. NemFi ersätter ocksåde inspelade förhållandena medbetydande noggrannhet.