Review of the Crown-of-thorns Starfish Research Committee (COTSREC) Program

In December 1988, following criticism in the media of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority's handling of the crown-of-thorns starfish (COTS) issue, the then Minister for the Arts, Sport, the Environment, Tourism and Territories, Senator the Honourable Graham Richardson, requested a review of the Authority's crown-of-thorns starfish research program and policies. The research program had been recommended to the Authority by the Crown-of-thorns Starfish Advisory Committee (COTSAC), a body of experts convened by the Authority in 1984 for this purpose. Funding of $3 million over four years for the program (1985-86 to 1988-89) was provided by the Federal Government. The program was reviewed annually by another advisory body established by the Authority, the Crown-of-thorns Starfish Advisory Review Committee (COTSARC). Zann and Moran (1988), Moran and Johnson (1990) and Lassig (1991) have summarised the structure and results of this program

Operational managers handbook to information technology outsourcing

The academic, consulting, and business community is inundated with books, articles, web sites, and consulting services devoted to IT Outsourcing. As the technology advances and the business community gains practical experience in the area, outsourcing options require constant updating. This handbook provides the sequence of business process steps along with numerous guidelines, checklists, and detailed descriptions for developing a successful outsourcing contract. What is unique about the handbook is that it synthesizes the organizational, cultural, and political aspects of the enterprise that form the underpinnings for the development of a successful outsourcing function within the enterprise. The handbook then delves into the formation of a successful contracting team describing the skill set of the team members and their organization from the planning through the implementation stages of the outsourcing process. Last, the handbook provides the content detail and rationale of the three stages of contract formulation - Request For Information (RFI); Request For Proposal; and the Contract itself

Forum Session at the First International Conference on Service Oriented Computing (ICSOC03)

The First International Conference on Service Oriented Computing (ICSOC) was held in Trento, December 15-18, 2003. The focus of the conference ---Service Oriented Computing (SOC)--- is the new emerging paradigm for distributed computing and e-business processing that has evolved from object-oriented and component computing to enable building agile networks of collaborating business applications distributed within and across organizational boundaries. Of the 181 papers submitted to the ICSOC conference, 10 were selected for the forum session which took place on December the 16th, 2003. The papers were chosen based on their technical quality, originality, relevance to SOC and for their nature of being best suited for a poster presentation or a demonstration. This technical report contains the 10 papers presented during the forum session at the ICSOC conference. In particular, the last two papers in the report ere submitted as industrial papers

Rapid Response Command and Control (R2C2): a systems engineering analysis of scaleable communications for Regional Combatant Commanders

Includes supplementary materialDisaster relief operations, such as the 2005 Tsunami and Hurricane Katrina, and wartime operations, such as Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom, have identified the need for a standardized command and control system interoperable among Joint, Coalition, and Interagency entities. The Systems Engineering Analysis Cohort 9 (SEA-9) Rapid Response Command and Control (R2C2) integrated project team completed a systems engineering (SE) process to address the military’s command and control capability gap. During the process, the R2C2 team conducted mission analysis, generated requirements, developed and modeled architectures, and analyzed and compared current operational systems versus the team’s R2C2 system. The R2C2 system provided a reachback capability to the Regional Combatant Commander’s (RCC) headquarters, a local communications network for situational assessments, and Internet access for civilian counterparts participating in Humanitarian Assistance/Disaster Relief operations. Because the team designed the R2C2 system to be modular, analysis concluded that the R2C2 system was the preferred method to provide the RCC with the required flexibility and scalability to deliver a rapidly deployable command and control capability to perform the range of military operations

Development of an Aeronautical Certification Process Focused on Avionics Equipment

The Final Degree Project “Development of an Aeronautical Certification Process Focused on Avionics Equipment” aims to introduce to the reader about the current aviation certification framework. Even though both, military and civil domains are tackled, a certification process for avionics equipment is developed under the European civil aviation regulations in force. Using the Ground Based Augmentation System (GBAS) as an example, the process for application of its certification, together with the deliverables that must be issued to the European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) and the Agency’s internal application evaluation process are studied.Universidad de Sevilla. Grado en Ingeniería Aeroespacia

Combining SOA and BPM Technologies for Cross-System Process Automation

This paper summarizes the results of an industry case study that introduced a cross-system business process automation solution based on a combination of SOA and BPM standard technologies (i.e., BPMN, BPEL, WSDL). Besides discussing major weaknesses of the existing, custom-built, solution and comparing them against experiences with the developed prototype, the paper presents a course of action for transforming the current solution into the proposed solution. This includes a general approach, consisting of four distinct steps, as well as specific action items that are to be performed for every step. The discussion also covers language and tool support and challenges arising from the transformation

Cloud adoption: a goal-oriented requirements engineering approach

The enormous potential of cloud computing for improved and cost-effective service has generated unprecedented interest in its adoption. However, a potential cloud user faces numerous risks regarding service requirements, cost implications of failure and uncertainty about cloud providers’ ability to meet service level agreements. These risks hinder the adoption of cloud computing. We motivate the need for a new requirements engineering methodology for systematically helping businesses and users to adopt cloud services and for mitigating risks in such transition. The methodology is grounded in goal-oriented approaches for requirements engineering. We argue that Goal-Oriented Requirements Engineering (GORE) is a promising paradigm to adopt for goals that are generic and flexible statements of users’ requirements, which could be refined, elaborated, negotiated, mitigated for risks and analysed for economics considerations. The methodology can be used by small to large scale organisations to inform crucial decisions related to cloud adoption. We propose a risk management framework based on the principle of GORE. In this approach, we liken risks to obstacles encountered while realising cloud user goals, therefore proposing cloud-specific obstacle resolution tactics for mitigating identified risks. The proposed framework shows benefits by providing a principled engineering approach to cloud adoption and empowering stakeholders with tactics for resolving risks when adopting the cloud. We extend the work on GORE and obstacles for informing the adoption process. We argue that obstacles’ prioritisation and their resolution is core to mitigating risks in the adoption process. We propose a novel systematic method for prioritising obstacles and their resolution tactics using Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP). To assess the AHP choice of the resolution tactics we support the method by stability and sensitivity analysis