Computing and Information Systems - Theses
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ItemUnderstanding the business benefits of ERP system use( 2006)ERP systems are large, complex, integrated software packages used for business transaction processing by thousands of major organizations worldwide. Yet outcomes from ERP system implementation and use can be very different, and current understanding of how and why such variation exists is limited. Since most studies of ERP systems to date have focused on ERP implementation, this research focused on the post-implementation period. The aim was to better understand the 'what', 'how' and 'why' of achieving business benefits from ERP systems during ERP use. Achieving business benefits from ERP systems was considered as a process of organizational change occurring over time within various societal and organizational contexts. A retrospective, interpretive case study approach was used to study this process. The post-implementation periods of four Australian manufacturing organizations that had implemented ERP systems were studied. This study makes three important contributions to the information systems research literature. First, a new framework was developed to explain 'how' and 'why' business benefits were achieved from ERP systems. This explanatory framework is theoretically based and is firmly grounded in the empirical data. Three types of themes, along with the interrelationships between them, were identified as influencing the business benefits achieved from ERP systems. The first group of themes, the process themes, are 'Education, training and support', 'Technochange management' and 'People resources'. The second group of themes, the outcome themes, are 'Efficient and effective use of the ERP system', 'Business process improvement' and 'New projects to leverage off the ERP system'. The third group of themes, the contextual themes, are the 'External context', the 'Internal context' and the 'ERP planning and implementation phases'. This new framework makes a significant contribution to understanding how and why some organizations achieve more business benefits from ERP systems than others. Second, the case studies provide a rich description of four manufacturing organizations that have implemented and used ERP systems. Examining the 'what' of business benefits from ERP systems in these four manufacturing organizations resulted in a confirmed, amended and improved Shang and Seddon (2000) ERP business benefits framework. This replication and extension of previous research is the third contribution of this study. The results of this research are of interest not only to information systems researchers, but also to information systems practitioners and senior management in organizations that either plan to, or have implemented ERP systems. Overall this research provides an improved understanding of business benefits from ERP systems and a sound foundation for future studies of ERP system use.
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ItemA declarative debugger for Haskell( 2006-12)This thesis considers the design and implementation of a Declarative Debugger for Haskell. At its core is a tree which captures the logical dependencies between function calls in a given execution of the program being debugged (the debuggee). The debuggee is transformed into a new Haskell program which produces the tree in addition to its normal value. A bug is identified in the tree when a call returns the wrong result but all the calls it depends upon are correct.
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ItemScheduling distributed data-intensive applications on global grids( 2006-07)The next generation of scientific experiments and studies are being carried out by large collaborations of researchers distributed around the world engaged in analysis of huge collections of data generated by scientific instruments. Grid computing has emerged as an enabler for such collaborations as it aids communities in sharing resources to achieve common objectives. Data Grids provide services for accessing, replicating and managing data collections in these collaborations. Applications used in such Grids are distributed data-intensive, that is, they access and process distributed datasets to generate results. These applications need to transparently and efficiently access distributed data and computational resources. This thesis investigates properties of data-intensive computing environments and presents a software framework and algorithms for mapping distributed data-oriented applications to Grid resources. (For complete abstract open document)
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ItemOnline vicarious-experience: using technology to help consumers evaluate physical products over the Internet( 2006-09)This research investigates ways to help shoppers evaluate physical products via the Internet. The primary research issue is, therefore, how to provide experience vicariously. The study was undertaken in three parts. First, an extensive range of Web sites belonging to Internet-based retailers was examined, together with literature on vicarious experience and Web page design. These helped to explore the question of ‘What components of Web-based representations of physical products might assist shoppers when trying to evaluate those products as part of a purchase decision?’ Online store systems that are representative of the main communication styles found in the Web survey were then evaluated in a series of laboratory-based experiments. This second part of the study makes a broad assessment of the impact of representative technologies on the product evaluation process. Finally, a smaller-scale, more targeted investigation was conducted, also using a laboratory-based experiment. This third part of the study assesses the impact of an individual’s evaluation style on the perceived success of representative technologies.
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ItemPatterns and protocols for agent-oriented software development( 2006-11)Agent-oriented software engineering is faced with challenges that impact on the adoption of agent technology by the wider software engineering community. This is generally due to lack of adequate comprehension of the concepts of agent technology. This thesis is based on the premise that the comprehension of the concepts of and the adoption of agent technology can be improved. Two approaches are explored: the first approach is the analysis and structuring of the interactions in multiagent systems; the second approach is sharing of experiences of what works and what does not in agent-oriented software engineering using software patterns. While analysis of interactions in multiagent systems improves the understanding of the behaviour of multiagent systems, sharing multiagent system development experience improves the understanding of the concepts of agent technology as well as the challenges that face the engineering of multiagent systems. It is therefore believed that interaction analysis and experience sharing can enhance the comprehension of agent technology and hence, the adoption of the technology by the wider community of software practitioners. This thesis addresses the challenges facing agent-oriented software engineering by presenting a dedicated approach for developing agent interaction protocols to guide the interactions in a multiagent system; and a comprehensive framework for classifying, analyzing and describing agent-oriented patterns for the purpose of sharing multiagent systems development experiences.
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ItemAgents for logistics: a provisional agreement approach( 2006-02)The thesis solves a challenging problem in military logistics for tasks such as transportation scheduling and combinatorial auctions. A conceptual model has been developed that captures the organisational business processes involved and an effective implementation suitable for computer software agents. The protocol facilitates planning and task allocation among organisations in decentralised, dynamic and open environments.
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ItemIndexing to situated interactions( 2006-02)Computing is increasingly pervading the activities of our everyday lives: at work, at home, and out on the town. When designing these pervasive systems there is a need to better understand and incorporate the context of use and yet there are limited empirical investigations into what constitutes this context. The user’s physical and social situation is an important part of their context when operating in an urban environment and thus needs to be understood and included in the interaction design of context-aware pervasive computing. This thesis has combined ideas from human computer interaction (HCI) and architecture to investigate indexicality in interface design as an instrument for incorporating physical and social context of the built environment into context-aware pervasive computing. Indexicality in interface design is a new approach to designing HCI for pervasive computing that relies on knowledge of current context to implicitly communicate between system and user. It reduces the amount of information that needs to be explicitly displayed in the interface while maintaining the usefulness and understandability of the communication.
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ItemThe antecedents of appropriate audit support system use( 2006-08)This study investigates the factors that influence appropriate use of audit support systems. Appropriate use is use of an audit support system in a manner consistent with how the audit firm expects the system to be used. Investigating appropriate use of audit support systems is important because the extent to which these systems can assist auditors achieve efficient and high quality audits depends on how auditors use them. Adaptive Structuration Theory (AST) (DeSanctis and Poole, 1994) and the Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB) (Ajzen, 1991) are combined to model the relationship between constructs hypothesised to increase the probability that audit support systems are used appropriately. The theoretical model decomposes two TPB antecedents, perceived normative pressure (or subjective norms) and perceived behavioural control, into the exogenous constructs hypothesised to influence whether audit support systems are used appropriately. Perceived normative pressure is decomposed into two socio-ideological control mechanisms, team and firm consensus on appropriation. Perceived behavioural control is decomposed into self-efficacy and two technocratic control mechanisms, perceived system restrictiveness and perceived audit review effectiveness. (For complete abstract open document)
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ItemModelling knowledge for scientific collaboration on the semantic web( 2006)This thesis analyses the modelling of knowledge in relation to knowledge sharing in scientific collaboration on the semantic web. It outlines both general and specific conceptual frameworks, as well as hypotheses for the description of the knowledge models. The key motivation form this work is drawn from the vision of e-science research agenda to support effective communication and to enable automated task achievement in scientific research based on accessible data and information on the web. A scientific collaboration is a widely distributed networking scientific community. The internet has become the major vehicle for the distributed groups in scientific collaborations to share knowledge related to their research. The next generation web, called the semantic web promises to dispense with some of the human effort to both conserve and operationalise part of the shared knowledge. A fundamental requirement to move towards a semantic-aware web environment necessitates formal and explicit terminologies based on knowledge models. A knowledge model is an extendable conceptual framework of knowledge. We have proposed two types of knowledge models for scientific collaboration, namely domain and task knowledge models. Hence, the key objective of this research work is to characterise the task and domain knowledge models of a scientific collaboration with particular intention of increasing the confidence of knowledge sharing and reuse on the semantic web. We claim that a shared terminology must agree with the purpose and ultimate use of the model. Consequently, we advocate the modelling of the directively and paradigmatically share knowledge in a scientific collaboration. The directively share knowledge is identified with the ratified and widely disseminated general domain knowledge motivated by general informational needs in a domain. The paradigmatically shared knowledge alludes to the sharing of purposive domain knowledge motivated by the needs of common tasks of researchers in a scientific collaboration. We highlight that both content and context are important for sharing of purposive domain knowledge in a scientific collaboration. We have adapted some previous works on the representation of mathematical expressions to arrive at a general framework for representing mathematical relations involving concepts in a domain knowledge model. Similarly, we have adapted and extended an existing set of evaluation criteria to formatively evaluate the knowledge models being built. The concrete implications of the work reported in this thesis are applied to model knowledge within the domain of Experimental High Energy Physics (EHEP), specifically the Belle scientific collaboration. We sum up the key contributions of this thesis as follows: • Analysis of the requirements in developing knowledge models for sharing of knowledge in a scientific collaboration on the sematic web. • A task model to make explicit the task functionality, which includes the task input-output information that can be relied upon as the context for modelling of purposive knowledge of a domain. • A method to identify, analyse, conceptualise and model general and purposive knowledge of a domain. • An approach to introduce explicit mathematical notation into a web-portal knowledge model. • A detailed study of the knowledge classification specific to the EHEP domain. • An adopted and extended criteria based scheme to formatively evaluate the knowledge models being built.