Contribution of activity-based steering tools in the management of economic business performance

يهدف هذا المقال إلى دراسة أدوات القيادة على أساس الأنشطة والمتمثلة في طريقة (1) التكاليف على أساس الأنشطة (2) الموازنات على أساس الأنشطة (3) التسيير على أساس الأنشطة وكيفية مساهمتها في إدارة الأداء. توصلنا من خلال هذه الدراسة إلى أن أدوات القيادة على أساس الأنشطة تساهم في إدارة الأداء من خلال تحليل الأنشطة ودراسة كيفية مساهمتها في خلق القيمة، فبالنسبة للأنشطة التي تخلق القيمة تحاول المؤسسة تفعيلها قدر الامكان أما بالنسبة للأنشطة التي لا تخلق القيمة فتحاول المؤسسة التحكم فيها قصد تخفيض تكاليفها. وكتوصية لهذا البحث، نقترح على المؤسسات الاقتصادية تبني أنظمة القيادة على أساس الأنشطة وتكوين عمال وظيفة المحاسبة قصد التحكم في مثل هذه التقنيات.       This article aims to study activity-based management methods, namely (1) activity-based costs (2) activity-based budgets (3) activity-based management and their contribution to management of company performance.         At the end of this study, we concluded that the activity-based management tools participate in the performance management of the economic enterprise through the analysis of the activities and their participation in the creation of value, in Indeed, the company tries to strengthen the activities creating value, on the other hand, it aims to control the activities which do not create value in order to minimize its costs.        As a recommendation, we propose the adoption of activity-based management tools within the economic enterprise and the training of the staff of the accounting function to master these tools

Moisture computing-based internet of vehicles (IoV) architecture for smart cities

Recently, the concept of combining 'things' on the Internet to provide various services has gained tremendous momentum. Such a concept has also impacted the automotive industry, giving rise to the Internet of Vehicles (IoV). IoV enables Internet connectivity and communication between smart vehicles and other devices on the network. Shifting the computing towards the edge of the network reduces communication delays and provides various services instantly. However, both distributed (i.e., edge computing) and central computing (i.e., cloud computing) architectures suffer from several inherent issues, such as high latency, high infrastructure cost, and performance degradation. We propose a novel concept of computation, which we call moisture computing (MC) to be deployed slightly away from the edge of the network but below the cloud infrastructure. The MC-based IoV architecture can be used to assist smart vehicles in collaborating to solve traffic monitoring, road safety, and management issues. Moreover, the MC can be used to dispatch emergency and roadside assistance in case of incidents and accidents. In contrast to the cloud which covers a broader area, the MC provides smart vehicles with critical information with fewer delays. We argue that the MC can help reduce infrastructure costs efficiently since it requires a medium-scale data center with moderate resources to cover a wider area compared to small-scale data centers in edge computing and large-scale data centers in cloud computing. We performed mathematical analyses to demonstrate that the MC reduces network delays and enhances the response time in contrast to the edge and cloud infrastructure. Moreover, we present a simulation-based implementation to evaluate the computational performance of the MC. Our simulation results show that the total processing time (computation delay and communication delay) is optimized, and delays are minimized in the MC as apposed to the traditional approaches

Specification of Complex Logical Expressions for Task Automation: An EUD Approach

The growing availability of smart objects is stimulating researchers in investigating the IoT phenomenon from different perspectives. In the HCI area, and in particular from the EUD perspective, one prominent goal is to enable nontechnical users to be directly involved in configuring smart object behaviour. With this respect, this paper discusses three visual composition techniques to specify logical expressions in Event-Condition-Action rules used for synchronizing the behavior of smart objects

My IoT Puzzle: Debugging IF-THEN Rules Through the Jigsaw Metaphor

End users can nowadays define applications in the format of IF-THEN rules to personalize their IoT devices and online services. Along with the possibility to compose such applications, however, comes the need to debug them, e.g., to avoid unpredictable and dangerous behaviors. In this context, different questions are still unexplored: which visual languages are more appropriate for debugging IF-THEN rules? Which information do end users need to understand, identify, and correct errors? To answer these questions, we first conducted a literature analysis by reviewing previous works on end-user debugging, with the aim of extracting design guidelines. Then, we developed My IoT Puzzle, a tool to compose and debug IF-THEN rules based on the Jigsaw metaphor. My IoT Puzzle interactively assists users in the debugging process with different real-time feedback, and it allows the resolution of conflicts by providing textual and graphical explanations. An exploratory study with 6 participants preliminary confirms the effectiveness of our approach, showing that the usage of the Jigsaw metaphor, along with real-time feedback and explanations, helps users understand and fix conflicts among IF-THEN rules

Non-Programmers Composing Software Services: A Confirmatory Study of the Mental Models and Design Challenges

Ordinary web users can now create and publish online content. They even venture into “mashups,” integrating information from different sources into a composite information-providing web service. This is a non-trivial design task, which falls into the area of end-user development when the ordinary users who perform it do not have programming education. In this article, we investigate the service design strategies of 12 such ordinary users and compare them against the baseline of 12 programmers. In our think-aloud study, users completed two contrasting types of tasks involved in developing service-based applications: (a) manual service composition and (b) parametric design using templates with a high degree of software support (or assisted composition). These service composition tasks were chosen to differ in respect to the level of user support provided by the tool. Our findings show that non-programmers liked, more than programmers, the template-based parametric design and did not find the tool assistance as constraining as the programmers did. The difficulty of design involved in manual service composition and the absence of user guidance hindered non-programmers in expressing and implementing accurate design solutions. The differences in the mental models and needs of non-programmers are established to be in stark contrast to those of programmers. We used the details of our findings to propose specialized design recommendations for service composition tools aligned with the profiles of their target users

Predicting Student Performance Using Data Mining and Learning Analytics Techniques: A Systematic Literature Review

The prediction of student academic performance has drawn considerable attention in education. However, although the learning outcomes are believed to improve learning and teaching, prognosticating the attainment of student outcomes remains underexplored. A decade of research work conducted between 2010 and November 2020 was surveyed to present a fundamental understanding of the intelligent techniques used for the prediction of student performance, where academic success is strictly measured using student learning outcomes. The electronic bibliographic databases searched include ACM, IEEE Xplore, Google Scholar, Science Direct, Scopus, Springer, and Web of Science. Eventually, we synthesized and analyzed a total of 62 relevant papers with a focus on three perspectives, (1) the forms in which the learning outcomes are predicted, (2) the predictive analytics models developed to forecast student learning, and (3) the dominant factors impacting student outcomes. The best practices for conducting systematic literature reviews, e.g., PICO and PRISMA, were applied to synthesize and report the main results. The attainment of learning outcomes was measured mainly as performance class standings (i.e., ranks) and achievement scores (i.e., grades). Regression and supervised machine learning models were frequently employed to classify student performance. Finally, student online learning activities, term assessment grades, and student academic emotions were the most evident predictors of learning outcomes. We conclude the survey by highlighting some major research challenges and suggesting a summary of significant recommendations to motivate future works in this field

Determinants of choice of management control tools within the economic enterprise: محددات اختيار أدوات مراقبة التسيير في المؤسسة الاقتصادية

يهدف هذا المقال إلى دراسة محددات اختيار أدوات مراقبة التسيير الأنسب للمؤسسة الاقتصادية وكيف يتم انتقاؤها من قبل مراقب التسيير وهذا باعتبار تعدد الأدوات المستخدمة لقيادة المؤسسة الاقتصادية. توصلت الدراسة إلى أن هناك تيارين عالجا هذه الإشكالية، يرى التيار الأول أن هناك أدوات مراقبة التسيير أنسب للمؤسسة الاقتصادية تتأثر بمجموعة من العوامل التوافقية على غرار تكنولوجيا الاعلام والاتصال، استقرار البيئة من عدمها، حجم المؤسسة، قطاع النشاط ودورة حياة المنتوج...الخ، فيما يقترح تيار آخر تكاملية أدوات مراقبة التسيير فيما بينها من أجل قيادة أشمل لأوجه الأداء.This article aims to study the most appropriate management control tools for the economic enterprise and how they are selected by the management controller, given the multiplicity of tools used to drive the performance of the economic enterprise. The study concluded that there are two trends that have addressed this issue. The first trend considers that there are more appropriate management tools influenced by contingency factors such as information and communication technologies, the stability of the environment, the size of the company, etc. another current believes that management control tools complement each other, and this, to ensure a more complete management of performance