Computing and Information Systems - Theses
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ItemExplaining difficulties in realisation of benefits from ERP systems in developing countries( 2007)Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system adoptions by organizations in developing countries such as China, India, Thailand and Sri Lanka have struggled to achieve their intended benefits. The objective of this thesis is to explain why such adoptions have failed to produce intended benefits. To do this, a model is developed that integrates (a) the factors that affect realization of benefits from ERP systems in developed countries, and (b) Hayami's technology-transfer model. With respect to the latter, Hayami argues that misfits related to three factors - culture, institutions, and resources – often inhibit effective adoption of imported technologies in developing countries. The contribution of this thesis is the theoretical model developed using literature and empirical data from the seven in-depth case studies, four in Sri Lanka and three in three developed countries (Australia, Canada and Sweden). No prior published study has proposed a mechanism through which country-contextual factors such as culture and institutions lead to reduced organizational benefits from ERP systems in organisations in developing countries. The mechanism proposed in this study is that (a) misfits between deeply rooted factors such as culture, institutions and resources on the one hand, and assumptions impounded in the western-developed software on the other, often reduce the level or outcomes for the benefit drivers such as ERP module integration, functional fit, and effective use, and (b) that these less-than-desired outcomes, in turn, lead to reduced benefits from ERP systems for organizations in developing countries. By opening up what has hitherto been a "black box" relationship between culture, institutions, and resources on the one hand, and reduced organizational benefits from ERP systems on the other, the model proposed in this thesis lays a foundation for theory testing and further research.
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ItemTechniques for academic timetabling( 2005)This thesis examines two different academic timetabling problems: the Examination Timetabling problem and the Population and Class Timetabling Problem. Initially an extensive survey of academic timetabling literature is undertaken, examining those methods and algorithms that have proved useful for solving academic timetabling problems. A hybrid algorithm, combining constraint programming, simulated annealing and hill climbing, is presented as a method for solving the examination timetabling problem. This algorithm is able to solve the examination timetabling problem at the University of Melbourne, and provides good results on international benchmark data. The population and class timetabling problem is decomposed using the blocking decomposition into a series of integer programs that are all solved to optimality. A model is presented for a simplified version of the class blocking and population problem which solves this problem to optimality without further decomposition. The model is expanded to solve this problem faced by Xavier College, an Australian secondary school. Two separate overlapping blocking schemes are used to allow the problem for different year levels to be solved simultaneously. Two more integer programs allocate to sessions the lessons of the blocks and a subset of the classes from the school. When combined these three stages produce a feasible timetable for Xavier College in a fraction of the time it takes using the current methodology.
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ItemFundamentals of agent computation theory: semantics( 2001)About 5 years ago, the idea of software agents escaped from an obscure existence within the arcane field of Artificial Intelligence, and it is now running rampant through computer science, the software industry and the media, mutating violently as it goes and infecting many who come into contact with it. Despite humble origins in the study of Philosophy of Mind, the term agent has come to be applied to a diverse and disparate range of software constructs, and threatens soon to displace object from its primal position. Every computer scientist knows what agents are, or should be, although scant agreement upon definitions has been achieved, as so many variously qualified uses of the label now flourish. In the Artificial Intelligence research community where it was nurtured, however, the term still has a reasonably specific meaning: an agent is a situated or embedded system which participates in an ongoing interaction with some environment which it can observe and act upon. By assumption, an agent's behaviour is purposeful or motivated: it is thought of as wanting to perform some set of activities or achieve some set of goals and trying to do so when suitable opportunities present; in general it may be viewed as monitoring and controlling itself and its environment so as to bring about or maintain internal or external situations that it in some sense prefers. A very concrete example would be a robot, situated in the physical world, tasked to achieve certain objectives, but required to make its own moment-to-moment decisions about how and when to do so. But more often than not an agent inhabits an entirely artificial environment, within a single computer or a distributed network such as the Internet. It is with agents in this sense that this thesis is concerned. (From introduction)