Non-functional properties (NFPs) represent an important facet of service descriptions, especially when a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) approach is used. An effective SOA service development approach requires the identification, specification, implemen-tation, aggregation, management and monitoring of service-related NFPs. However, at this point in time, NFPs are either not handled at all or handled partially in proprietary ways. The goal of this thesis is to encourage their availability for use. In this thesis, the focus is on the NFPs relevant from the perspective of service consumers, in opposition to the perspective of service providers (or developers) and to multi-perspectives. In other words, the scope covers only the NFPs that need to be pub-lished to help service consumers determine whether a given service is an appropriate one for their needs (e.g., description of NFPs to be attached to the service along with the functionality description). This thesis provides the following contributions to the SOA knowledge base: definition of a domain-independent catalogue comprising 17 NFPs relevant to the descriptions of atomic services from the perspective of service consumers. These NFPs have been derived from a literature review and have been vali-dated via a two-step survey; formalization of NFP representation by defining data structures to enable quantifying and codifying them, together with a corresponding XML schema; definition, implementation and validation of algorithms to aggregate the NFPs of the composite service based on the NFPs of its underlying services, with a discussion of the NFP aggregation limitations; definition of a modeling approach for the NFP-aware selection of services, which involves aspect-oriented modeling with the User Requirements Nota-tion, in the context of SOA; integration of NFP descriptions into the Web Services Description Language (WSDL); and definition and use of the discriminator operator in service composition, to en-able the creation of fault-tolerant composite services. Overall, this work contributes to research by providing better insight on the nature, rele-vance, and composability of NFPs in a service engineering context. As for industrial im-pact, this work contributes a validated collection of NFPs with a concrete syntax and composition algorithms ready to be used for defining, selecting, and composing NFP-driven services and for evolving current SOA-related standards.

Non-functional properties (NFPs) represent an important facet of service descriptions, especially when a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) approach is used. An effective SOA service development approach requires the identification, specification, implemen-tation, aggregation, management and monitoring of service-related NFPs. However, at this point in time, NFPs are either not handled at all or handled partially in proprietary ways. The goal of this thesis is to encourage their availability for use. In this thesis, the focus is on the NFPs relevant from the perspective of service consumers, in opposition to the perspective of service providers (or developers) and to multi-perspectives. In other words, the scope covers only the NFPs that need to be pub-lished to help service consumers determine whether a given service is an appropriate one for their needs (e.g., description of NFPs to be attached to the service along with the functionality description). This thesis provides the following contributions to the SOA knowledge base: definition of a domain-independent catalogue comprising 17 NFPs relevant to the descriptions of atomic services from the perspective of service consumers. These NFPs have been derived from a literature review and have been vali-dated via a two-step survey; formalization of NFP representation by defining data structures to enable quantifying and codifying them, together with a corresponding XML schema; definition, implementation and validation of algorithms to aggregate the NFPs of the composite service based on the NFPs of its underlying services, with a discussion of the NFP aggregation limitations; definition of a modeling approach for the NFP-aware selection of services, which involves aspect-oriented modeling with the User Requirements Nota-tion, in the context of SOA; integration of NFP descriptions into the Web Services Description Language (WSDL); and definition and use of the discriminator operator in service composition, to en-able the creation of fault-tolerant composite services. Overall, this work contributes to research by providing better insight on the nature, rele-vance, and composability of NFPs in a service engineering context. As for industrial im-pact, this work contributes a validated collection of NFPs with a concrete syntax and composition algorithms ready to be used for defining, selecting, and composing NFP-driven services and for evolving current SOA-related standards.

Non-functional properties (NFPs) represent an important facet of service descriptions, especially when a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) approach is used. An effective SOA service development approach requires the identification, specification, implemen-tation, aggregation, management and monitoring of service-related NFPs. However, at this point in time, NFPs are either not handled at all or handled partially in proprietary ways. The goal of this thesis is to encourage their availability for use. In this thesis, the focus is on the NFPs relevant from the perspective of service consumers, in opposition to the perspective of service providers (or developers) and to multi-perspectives. In other words, the scope covers only the NFPs that need to be pub-lished to help service consumers determine whether a given service is an appropriate one for their needs (e.g., description of NFPs to be attached to the service along with the functionality description). This thesis provides the following contributions to the SOA knowledge base: definition of a domain-independent catalogue comprising 17 NFPs relevant to the descriptions of atomic services from the perspective of service consumers. These NFPs have been derived from a literature review and have been vali-dated via a two-step survey; formalization of NFP representation by defining data structures to enable quantifying and codifying them, together with a corresponding XML schema; definition, implementation and validation of algorithms to aggregate the NFPs of the composite service based on the NFPs of its underlying services, with a discussion of the NFP aggregation limitations; definition of a modeling approach for the NFP-aware selection of services, which involves aspect-oriented modeling with the User Requirements Nota-tion, in the context of SOA; integration of NFP descriptions into the Web Services Description Language (WSDL); and definition and use of the discriminator operator in service composition, to en-able the creation of fault-tolerant composite services. Overall, this work contributes to research by providing better insight on the nature, rele-vance, and composability of NFPs in a service engineering context. As for industrial im-pact, this work contributes a validated collection of NFPs with a concrete syntax and composition algorithms ready to be used for defining, selecting, and composing NFP-driven services and for evolving current SOA-related standards.

In recent years, the number of regulations an organization needs to comply with has been increasing, and organizations have to ensure that their business processes are aligned with these regulations. However, because of the complexity and intended vagueness of regulations in general, it is not possible to treat them the same way as other types of requirements. On the other hand, the cost of being non-compliant can also be fairly high; non-compliance can cause crucial harm to the organization with financial penalties or loss of reputation. Therefore, it is very important for organizations to take a systematic approach to ensuring that their compliance with related laws, regulations and standards is established and maintained. To achieve this goal, this thesis proposes a model-based compliance analysis framework for business processes called Legal-URN. This framework is composed of four layers of abstraction linked to each other. The framework exploits the User Requirements Notation (URN) as the modeling language to describe and combine legal and organizational models. In order to model legal documents, legal statements are first classified into four classes of Hohfeldian rights, and then Hohfeldian models of the regulations and their statements are created. These models are further refined into legal goal and business process models via a domain-specific version of URN called Legal URN profile. To check the well-formedness of the models and to identify instances of non-compliance, 23 Object Constraint Language (OCL) rules are provided. In this thesis, the quantitative and qualitative analysis algorithms of URN's Goal-oriented Requirement Language are extended to help analyze quantitatively and qualitatively the degree of compliance of an organization to the legal models. Furthermore, with the help of a prioritization algorithm, the framework enables one to decide, while taking the organization goals into consideration, which non-compliant instances to address first in order to provide a suitable evolution path for business processes. In addition, to assess compliance with more than one regulation, a pair-wise comparison algorithm enables organizations to identify the similarities and conflicts among regulations and incorporate them in the models. The jUCMNav tool, an Eclipse plug-in for URN modeling and analysis, was extended to support the framework and its algorithms and rules. The thesis contributions are evaluated through a gap analysis based on a systematic literature review, a comparison with closely related work, and two case studies in the healthcare domain: one with a single regulation and realistic business processes, and a second with three additional regulations. We also identify the benefits and limitations of the framework, as well as potential extensions for future work. The Legal-URN framework provides a tool-supported, rigorous approach to compliance analysis of organizations against relevant regulations.

In recent years, the number of regulations an organization needs to comply with has been increasing, and organizations have to ensure that their business processes are aligned with these regulations. However, because of the complexity and intended vagueness of regulations in general, it is not possible to treat them the same way as other types of requirements. On the other hand, the cost of being non-compliant can also be fairly high; non-compliance can cause crucial harm to the organization with financial penalties or loss of reputation. Therefore, it is very important for organizations to take a systematic approach to ensuring that their compliance with related laws, regulations and standards is established and maintained. To achieve this goal, this thesis proposes a model-based compliance analysis framework for business processes called Legal-URN. This framework is composed of four layers of abstraction linked to each other. The framework exploits the User Requirements Notation (URN) as the modeling language to describe and combine legal and organizational models. In order to model legal documents, legal statements are first classified into four classes of Hohfeldian rights, and then Hohfeldian models of the regulations and their statements are created. These models are further refined into legal goal and business process models via a domain-specific version of URN called Legal URN profile. To check the well-formedness of the models and to identify instances of non-compliance, 23 Object Constraint Language (OCL) rules are provided. In this thesis, the quantitative and qualitative analysis algorithms of URN's Goal-oriented Requirement Language are extended to help analyze quantitatively and qualitatively the degree of compliance of an organization to the legal models. Furthermore, with the help of a prioritization algorithm, the framework enables one to decide, while taking the organization goals into consideration, which non-compliant instances to address first in order to provide a suitable evolution path for business processes. In addition, to assess compliance with more than one regulation, a pair-wise comparison algorithm enables organizations to identify the similarities and conflicts among regulations and incorporate them in the models. The jUCMNav tool, an Eclipse plug-in for URN modeling and analysis, was extended to support the framework and its algorithms and rules. The thesis contributions are evaluated through a gap analysis based on a systematic literature review, a comparison with closely related work, and two case studies in the healthcare domain: one with a single regulation and realistic business processes, and a second with three additional regulations. We also identify the benefits and limitations of the framework, as well as potential extensions for future work. The Legal-URN framework provides a tool-supported, rigorous approach to compliance analysis of organizations against relevant regulations.

For interval-censored and truncated failure time data, the truncation ratio is unknown. In this paper, we propose an algorithm, similar to Turnbull's, to estimate the parameters. The truncation ratio for the interval-censored and truncated failure time data can also be estimated by the convergence result of the algorithm. A simulation study is proposed to compare with Turnbull (1976). Our algorithm seems to have better result.

The goal of this dissertation is to investigate the enabling role that agent based simulation plays in business and policy. The aforementioned issue has been addressed in this dissertation through three distinct, but related essays. The first essay is a literature review of different research applications of agent based simulation in various business disciplines, such as finance, economics, information systems, management, marketing and accounting. Various agent based simulation tools to develop computational models are discussed. The second essay uses an agent-based simulation approach to study important properties of the widely used most popular news recommender systems (NRS). This essay highlights the major limitations of most popular NRS in terms of: (i) susceptibility towards manipulation and (ii) unduly penalizing the article which may have "just" missed making the cutoff in most popular list. A probabilistic variant of recommendation has been introduced as an alternative to most popular list. Classical results from urn models are used to derive theoretical results for special cases, and to study specific properties of the probabilistic recommender. In addition to simulations, various statistical methodologies are used, such as regression based methodologies as part of a broader decision analysis tool. The third essay views firms as agents in building regression based empirical models to investigate the impact of outsourcing on firms. Using an economy wide panel data of outsourcing expenses of firms, the third essay first investigates the value addition by the IT backgrounds of project owners in managing IT related projects. Then it investigates the impact of peer-pressure on a firm's outsourcing behavior.

Storage, preservation and access of Master's and PhD theses as well as their abstracts in an electronic form provide unique opportunities to the academic community in Lithuania as well as worldwide. The main aims of this project were to establish an archive (Lithuanian ETD IS) of Lithuanian student final year projects, PhD theses and their abstracts in an electronic form (ETD). This archive should become a part of the Lithuanian academic library network (LABT), ensuring registration and storage of ETD documents, and should be accessible by the academic community in Lithuania and the rest of the world. In order to develop the Lithuanian ETD IS, the most widely used formats and methods for access, retrieval and exchange with NDLTD and other national ETD projects were employed. A solution, ensuring efficient ETD registration, preservation, retrieval and access by users, is presented and discussed. Application of the ExLibris programming products (ALEPH500™, MetaLib™, SFX™), developed during the LABT project, was used.

Submitted by Luciana Ferreira (lucgeral@gmail.com) on 2015-01-27T13:45:09Z No. of bitstreams: 2 license_rdf: 23148 bytes, checksum: 9da0b6dfac957114c6a7714714b86306 (MD5) Dissertação - Paulo Roberto de Oliveira - 2014.pdf: 3459807 bytes, checksum: b199bab67e773541a99d42adfc9dce03 (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Luciana Ferreira (lucgeral@gmail.com) on 2015-01-28T11:28:00Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 2 license_rdf: 23148 bytes, checksum: 9da0b6dfac957114c6a7714714b86306 (MD5) Dissertação - Paulo Roberto de Oliveira - 2014.pdf: 3459807 bytes, checksum: b199bab67e773541a99d42adfc9dce03 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2015-01-28T11:28:00Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 2 license_rdf: 23148 bytes, checksum: 9da0b6dfac957114c6a7714714b86306 (MD5) Dissertação - Paulo Roberto de Oliveira - 2014.pdf: 3459807 bytes, checksum: b199bab67e773541a99d42adfc9dce03 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2014-07-11 / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior - CAPES / Many monthly, others weekly play in lottery games ignoring the randomness of the results, believing in luck or strategies that are sold to them in books about games. This monograph aims to show some concepts of probability and statistics unexplored in high school and also day to day situations that contain mathematical concepts of probability more accessible to this level of education showing some mathematical theories applied in practice games. Concepts will be discussed here: some probability distributions, their hope and variance, as well as lottery games and their probability calculations. Probability distributions will be calculated and listed in situations created from models of urns with two colors of balls, always having green as the color whose extraction will be considered successful and the red, whose extraction will be considered a failure. Now extractions with replacement balls will be made and sometimes extractions will be done without replacing them. Also, there is the case where new balls are added to both colors or one color. / Muitos jogam mensalmente, outros semanalmente, em jogos de loterias desconhecendo a aleatoriedade dos seus resultados, acreditando na sorte ou em estratégias que lhes são vendidas em livros sobre jogos. A presente monogra a tem como objetivo mostrar alguns conceitos da Probabilidade e Estatística não explorados no Ensino Médio e também situações do dia a dia que contenham conceitos matemáticos sobre Probabilidade mais acessíveis a este nível de ensino, mostrando um pouco de teorias matemáticas aplicadas na prática de jogos. Serão conceitos aqui discutidos: algumas distribuições de probabilidade, sua esperan ça e variância, além de jogos de loterias e seus cálculos de probabilidade. As distribuições de probabilidade serão enunciadas e calculadas em situações criadas a partir de modelos de urnas com duas cores de bolas, tendo sempre o verde como a cor cuja extração será considerada sucesso e, o vermelho, cuja extração será considerada insucesso. Ora serão feitas extrações com reposições das bolas e ora serão feitas extrações sem a reposição das mesmas. Também, há o caso em que serão adicionadas novas bolas de ambas as cores ou uma cor apenas.

Yes / Irton Moor was excavated by Derek Simpson in 1973 but remained unpublished at the time of his death in 2006. Material from the excavation including a skeletal report and some publication drawings were located in DDAS’s archives and brought back to Bradford for archiving. Sufficient work had been done by DDAS to bring the report to publication though clearly the archive had suffered over the years. Irton Moor represents a small structured round cairn of the Early Bronze Age producing evidence for long-term occupation of the site from the Early Neolithic though this occupation does not appear to have been continuous. The cairn was used for Food Vessel and Collared Urn-associated cremations.