SYSPOINT: Unit of Measure for IT Infrastructure Project Sizing

What can be done to improve the success rate of IT infrastructure projects? The Standish group considers an IT project successful when it is completed on time and on budget, with all the features and functions originally specified. Thus, time, cost, and scope – the triple constraint of project management is measured for success. The initial project estimation directly results in constructing the baseline for the two success parameters – time and cost. The traditional software estimation models uses lines of code and function points as sizing unit of measure. The IT infrastructure projects are significantly different from software development projects to use the software sizing techniques. This paper defines the concept of size for IT infrastructure projects. Specifically, the project size for IT infrastructure projects are measured in terms of the eight factors (server, workstation, printer, LAN, WAN, handheld, server applications, and client applications), infrastructure related software components, and the complexities defined based on the physical and functional categories of those factors

A flexible object orientated design approach for the realisation of assistive technology

This thesis contributes to a growing body of research conducted by the Interactive Systems Research Group (ISRG) at Nottingham Trent University within the fields of accessibility and accessible technologies. Core to this research is the exploration of how interactive technologies can be developed and applied as platforms for education, rehabilitation and social inclusion. To this end the group has been actively evolving the User Sensitive and Inclusive Design (USID) methodology for the design, development and evaluation of accessible software and related technologies. This thesis contributes to the further development of the USID method with a focus on its application for the design of assistive technology

A Service Late Binding Enabled Solution for Data Integration from Autonomous and Evolving Databases

Integrating data from autonomous, distributed and heterogeneous data sources to provide a unified vision is a common demand for many businesses. Since the data sources may evolve frequently to satisfy their own independent business needs, solutions which use hard coded queries to integrate participating databases may cause high maintenance costs when evolution occurs. Thus a new solution which can handle database evolution with lower maintenance effort is required. This thesis presents a new solution: Service Late binding Enabled Data Integration (SLEDI) which is set into a framework modeling the essential processes of the data integration activity. It integrates schematic heterogeneous relational databases with decreased maintenance costs for handling database evolution. An algorithm, named Information Provision Unit Describing (IPUD) is designed to describe each database as a set of Information Provision Units (IPUs). The IPUs are represented as Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) structured data instead of hard coded queries, and further realized as data services. Hence the data integration is achieved through service invocations. Furthermore, a set of processes is defined to handle the database evolution through automatically identifying and modifying the IPUs which are affected by the evolution. An extensive evaluation based on a case study is presented. The result shows that the schematic heterogeneities defined in this thesis can be solved by IPUD except the relation isomorphism discrepancy. Ten out of thirteen types of schematic database evolution can be automatically handled by the evolution handling processes as long as the evolution is represented by the designed data model. The computational costs of the automatic evolution handling show a slow linear growth with the number of participating databases. Other characteristics addressed include SLEDI’s scalability, independence of application domain and databases model. The descriptive comparison with other data integration approaches shows that although the Data as a Service approach may result in lower performance under some circumstances, it supports better flexibility for integrating data from autonomous and evolving data sources

A Network-Based Design Synthesis of Distributed Ship Services Systems for a Non Nuclear Powered Submarine in Early Stage Design

Even though the early-stage design of a complex vessel is where the important decisions are made, the synthesis of the distributed ship service systems (DS3) often relies on “past practice” and simple vessel displacement based weight algorithms. Such an approach inhibits the ability of the concept designer to consider the impact of different DS3 options. It also reduces the ability to undertake Requirements Elucidation, especially regarding the DS3. Given the vital role the many DS3 provide to a submarine, this research considers whether there is a better way to synthesise DS3 without resorting to the detailed design of the distributed systems, which is usually inappropriate at the exploratory stages of design. The research proposes a new approach, termed the Network Block Approach (NBA), combining the advantages of the 3D physical based synthesis UCL Design Building Block (DBB) approach with the Virgina Tech Architectural Flow Optimisation (AFO) method, when applied to submarine DS3 design. Utilising a set of novel frameworks and the Paramarine CASD tool, the proposed approach also enabled the development of the submarine concept design at different levels of granularities, ranging from modelling individual spaces to various DS3 components and routings. The proposed approach also allowed the designer to balance the energy demands of various distributed systems, performing a steady-state flow simulation, and visualising the complexity of the submarine DS3 in a 3D multiplex network configuration. Such 3D based physical and network syntheses provide potential benefits in early-stage submarine DS3 design. The overall aim of proposing and demonstrating a novel integrated DS3 synthesis approach applicable to concept naval submarine design was achieved, although several issues and limitations emerged during both the development and the implementation of the approach. Through identification of the research limitations, areas for future work aimed at improving the proposal have been outlined

Grid-based semantic integration of heterogeneous data resources: Implementation on a HealthGrid

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and was awarded by Brunel University.The semantic integration of geographically distributed and heterogeneous data resources still remains a key challenge in Grid infrastructures. Today's mainstream Grid technologies hold the promise to meet this challenge in a systematic manner, making data applications more scalable and manageable. The thesis conducts a thorough investigation of the problem, the state of the art, and the related technologies, and proposes an Architecture for Semantic Integration of Data Sources (ASIDS) addressing the semantic heterogeneity issue. It defines a simple mechanism for the interoperability of heterogeneous data sources in order to extract or discover information regardless of their different semantics. The constituent technologies of this architecture include Globus Toolkit (GT4) and OGSA-DAI (Open Grid Service Architecture Data Integration and Access) alongside other web services technologies such as XML (Extensive Markup Language). To show this, the ASIDS architecture was implemented and tested in a realistic setting by building an exemplar application prototype on a HealthGrid (pilot implementation). The study followed an empirical research methodology and was informed by extensive literature surveys and a critical analysis of the relevant technologies and their synergies. The two literature reviews, together with the analysis of the technology background, have provided a good overview of the current Grid and HealthGrid landscape, produced some valuable taxonomies, explored new paths by integrating technologies, and more importantly illuminated the problem and guided the research process towards a promising solution. Yet the primary contribution of this research is an approach that uses contemporary Grid technologies for integrating heterogeneous data resources that have semantically different. data fields (attributes). It has been practically demonstrated (using a prototype HealthGrid) that discovery in semantically integrated distributed data sources can be feasible by using mainstream Grid technologies, which have been shown to have some Significant advantages over non-Grid based approaches

IT process architectures for enterprises development: A survey from a maturity model perspective

During the last years much has been published about IT governance. Close to the success of many governance efforts are the business frameworks, quality models, and technology standards that help enterprises improve processes, customer service, quality of products, and control. In this paper we i) survey existing frameworks, namely ITIL, ASL and BiSL, ii) find relations with the IT Governance framework CobiT to determine if the maturity model of CobiT can be used by ITIL, ASL and BiSL, and (iii) provide an integrated vista of IT processes viewed from a maturity model perspective. This perspective can help us understand the importance of maturity models for increasing the efficiency of IT processes for enterprises development and business-IT alignment

Secure Android cross-app intent-based feature integration

Les funcionalitats d'aplicacions mòbils solen actuar de forma aïllada tot i que els usuaris acostumen a fer-ne servir varies per realitzar accions complexes. Això obre la porta a crear mecanismes que integrin aquestes funcionalitats de forma automàtica, aconseguint així els complexos objectius dels usuaris i, per tant, millorant la seva experiència amb programari mòbil. L'actual estat de l'art ofereix diferents solucions per la integració de funcionalitats, com Deep Linking, APIs i SDKs, però, aquestes estan típicament limitades a un conjunt específic de funcionalitats predefinides. A més a més, aquestes solucions tenen la restricció de ser definides a l'etapa de disseny. En aquest TFG, una solució que integra les funcionalitats d'aplicacions Android de codi obert, de manera semiautomàtica, fent servir injeccions de codi, és dissenyada i implementada. Per això, les funcionalitats integrades són declarades com a origen o destí de la comunicació. De manera que, les funcionalitats d'origen tenen dades a ser enviades com a paràmetres, i les de destí reben aquests paràmetres i amb aquests donen valor als seus propis. A més a més, aquesta comunicació està basada en un mecanisme d'Android anomenat Broadcast Communication. Per últim, però no menys important, el protocol de comunicació implementat inclou una capa de seguretat que maximitza la privacitat de les dades dels usuaris fent servir encriptació i desencriptació dels missatges.Features of mobile applications usually act in an isolated way, although users often use multiple applications for performing complex actions. This opens the opportunity to create mechanisms that integrate these features automatically, in order to accomplish the complex goals of these users, so they can have a better experience in mobile software. The current state of the art offers different solutions for feature integration, such as Deep Linking, APIs, and SDKs, but these are typically limited to a specific subset of pre-defined features. What is more, these solutions are restricted to be defined at design time. In this thesis, a solution that integrates features of open-source Android applications, in a semi-automatic way, through code injections, is designed and implemented. For this purpose, the features that are integrated are declared as the source or target of the communication process. Therefore, source features have data to be sent as parameters, and target features receive these parameters and settle them to their own. Moreover, this communication is based on an Android mechanism called Broadcast Communication. Last but not least, the communication protocol implemented includes a security layer that maximizes the user's private data through the encryption and decryption of the messages