· · · Institutional Repository

Traditionally embedded applications were limited to dedicated hardware with limited functionalities controlled by a microcontroller. With the advancement of technology and the rising needs embedded applications now run on Consumer off the shelf (COTS) products. Using general-purpose operating systems makes the development cycle for these applications shorter by providing necessary hardware support and thus allowing the application to be developed on a higher abstraction. In this thesis, we develop a model to evaluate different operating systems for such an embedded application. The goal was to be able to predict the application performance on different operating systems without having to port or code the application for each operating system. The model uses micro-benchmarks on operating systems and then consolidates the results to give an overall score. The model thus developed was used to test and evaluate operating systems for a medical image processing application used in cardio vascular intervention procedures.

Report on the planning, design, development and testing of the 'content management' management website 'website4free.co.nz'. The goal of this project was to develop a system that will allow the users to register and build their own website base on a chosen template.

Many large organizations encounter great difficulties with the operational implementation of their business strategy. The concept of Enterprise Architecture is a popular means to translate business strategy changes to implications for the operational organization and govern the overall development direction of the organization. Despite the availability of standard Enterprise Architecture methodologies and frameworks, many organizations struggle with the implementation of Enterprise Architecture in their existing organizational processes. The Mail NL business line of TNT Post is faced with the challenge of introducing Enterprise Architecture in its organization. The experiences of TNT Post may be of great value for large and comparable organizations that are also faced with this challenge. This thesis presents the experiences and implementation of the first steps in the introduction of Enterprise Architecture at the Mail NL business line of TNT Post, in order to support the introduction of Enterprise Architecture at other large organizations. This thesis provides (1) an overview of all the organizational characteristics that are at the basis of the Enterprise Architecture function and implementation, (2) an overview of the process in which Enterprise Architecture is introduced in the organization, (3) an extensive description of the process by means of which Enterprise Architecture is developed and applied within the organization and (4) an overview of the lessons that have been learnt from this first step in the introduction of Enterprise Architecture. As such, this thesis provides an interesting overview of a pragmatic implementation of Enterprise Architecture at a large organization.

Applying architecture implies that it provides added value across an enterprise. Although widely adopted, this claim has only been scarcely investigated, not to mention quantified. This document describes the results of a case study to quantify the effects of applying Enterprise Architecture within a financial institution called FinCom. For confidential information reasons, the name of this company is fictive. The thesis attempts to capture several factors at project level with respect to the application of Enterprise Architecture and its subsequent financial benefits. The study analyzed 40 projects, with regard to time and budget overrun. In order to collect these data, a total of 35 business, enterprise and domain architects were interviewed on their experience with these projects. Among factors taken into account were architecture type, project compliance to architecture and experience of the architect. Consequently, these factors are recorded in hypotheses that relate to the budget and time figures of the project. These hypotheses are incorporated in the 'Architecture Effectiveness Model' and statistically tested with the acquired data. This led to more than 12.000 calculations to show the subsequent benefits of Enterprise Architecture.

Reduction operations are frequently used operations which reduce the size of an input by selecting or combining its element and producing that as the output. Reduction operations can be easily handled in sequential computers in O(n) time. In fact in a parallel systems this time complexity can be reduced to O(log n) by using algorithms like tree-based reduction. However, this tempting decrease in the time complexity cannot be achieved without several platform specific tricks and optimizations. Therefore, in order to harness the power of parallel systems for reduction operations two major steps should be taken. First, a single standard model should be defined for such operations. Second, the model should be easily converted to different parallel platforms without any or with small changes to the underlying model. This thesis materializes the latter by defining a tool-chain called ‘LIME tool-chain’ and the former by defining dataflow models which can be fed into the tool-chain.

Dit verslag beschrijft het bachelor project van Bas Schaafsma, Ronald Evers en Steffan Karger. Het doel van dit project is de website en alle achterliggende systemen van stichting ‘De Delftse Bedrijvendagen’ opnieuw te implementeren in één systeem. Dit in tegenstelling tot het huidige systeem waarin vele losse systemen en scripts op een chaotische en niet onderhoudbare manier met elkaar samenwerken.

The Netherlands houses a great variety of subsidy agencies, each very different in their organizational and operational approach to achieve their goal (the distribution of subsidies). These subsidy agencies share the common problem of being unable to adapt their subsidy system quickly due to a high grade of customization in their information systems. Subsidy processes and supporting systems are tightly coupled and a change in one of them leads to a lot of organizational and operational costs and causes delay which is not desirable. A more adaptive subsidy system is needed to reduce organizational and operational costs and to reduce delay when the system needs to be changed. In this thesis, the concept of Enterprise Ontology has been explored by using generic components to design a generic subsidy system, in order to provide a more adaptive subsidy system, which can be fine-tuned to match the requirements of a variety of governmental organizations. To come to this generic subsidy system the clustering of subsidies as used by subsidy agencies has been analyzed first. Next, the administrative descriptions of five subsidy agencies at different governmental levels have been analyzed with respect to their processes and services. The administrative descriptions also provided an understanding of the actors involved in a subsidy system. Using the analysis results, an abstraction has been made by comparing the process and service models of the five performed case studies to yield a generic process and service model, composed of generic components. Next, the design of the generic subsidy system started with defining the initial conditions followed by the composition of a requirements set which contained requirements to be respected during system design. From this set, a subset of feasible requirements has been selected, since the initial set turned out to be far too large to satisfy in this research. Next, the generic subsidy system has been designed by means of an ontological model (fully independent from its implementation) and an implementation model (containing all the details for implementing the generic subsidy system). To evaluate the design of the generic subsidy system, a prototype has been used to conclude whether the generic subsidy system indeed provided a more adaptive system and to find out potential side effects of implementing a specific subsidy system by using the generic subsidy system as its reference. Concluding this thesis, the evaluation of the generic subsidy system illustrated that a more adaptive subsidy system can be realized using generic components, since: · A subsidy system using a centralized orchestrating process and decentralized process components allows the subsidy process and/or its supporting components to be changed without harming each other; · Changing a subsidy process no longer introduces delay in transitioning from the current version to the next version of the process, since the generic subsidy system and orchestration technology allow various versions of a process to coexist. As a side-effect of implementing a specific subsidy system, overhead in a subsidy system can be reduced as well. Taking the generic subsidy system as a baseline for implementing the specific subsidy system, redundant elements can be left out and only the essential elements are implemented in the specific subsidy system. Implementing the generic subsidy system could have negative side effects when adaptivity alone is not enough and is enforced. These negative side effects however, are not researched in this thesis.

Onderzoek naar een geschikt CMS voor een complexe integratie met het uitgebreide ERP pakket Newyse voor de recreatieve branch binnen een kleinere onderneming.

DEMO is a methodology for designing and engineering organizations which is mostly used for Information System Development (ISD) and redesigning the business processes. DEMO has the ability to reduce the complexity of an organization by providing an ontological model of that organization. Although DEMO has promising advantages and has provided successful outcome in practice, it hasn’t received the deserved attention from The individuals in practical fields. While many of the competitor methodologies are more successful and accepted among the practitioners, DEMO is at the risk of being forgotten among all other methodologies in the methodology jungle. It seems trivial to use effective tactics to increase the acceptance of DEMO among individuals in practice. These tactics can only be effective if they take the reasons behind this specific point of view about DEMO into account. Various factors from a technical anomalies to opinion of others can influence the perception of people about a methodology. While the acceptance of DEMO by people in practice is very important in the success of the methodology in practical fields, no research was found in the literature that the statistics on reports the adoption rate of DEMO in practice and identifies the reasons behind certain adoption behavior. Therefore, alongside providing such statistics the main goal of this thesis is to identify the factors that can determine certain behavior towards DEMO and propose recommendations to increase the adoption of DEMO based on these factors. We conducted this research in three phases: Theoretical, Quantitative and qualitative analysis. In theoretical analysis we have identified the factors that were proven to influence the adoption of other methodologies. In quantitative analysis we have tried to find out whether these factors have any influence on the adoption of DEMO. At the end, we captured the actual experience of the individuals in practice with DEMO. In this research we were able to identify several factors that influence the adoption of DEMO. We realized that the support of DEMO by management, coworkers, other individuals with the same skills as the individual and the eagerness of the individual to keep him self updated about DEMO can increase the adoption of DEMO to a great extent. Furthermore, uncertainty one’s position in the organization has a negative effect on the adoption of DEMO. Finally, the ability of the methodology to produce results in a way that can be communicated with all the individuals with different levels of knowledge about DEMO is also influencing the adoption of DEMO.

Ajax is an umbrella term for a set of technologies that allows web developers to create highly interactive web applications. Ajax applications are complex; they consist of multiple heterogeneous artifacts which are combined in a highly dynamic fashion. This complexity makes Ajax applications hard to understand, and thus to maintain. For this reason, we have created FireDetective, a tool that uses dynamic analysis at both the client (browser) and server side to facilitate the understanding of Ajax applications. Using an exploratory pre-experimental user study, we see that web developers encounter problems when understanding Ajax applications. We also find preliminary evidence that the FireDetective tool allows web developers to understand Ajax applications more effectively, more efficiently and with more confidence. We investigate which techniques and features contributed to this result, and use observations made during the user study to identify opportunities for future work.

The software development has changed dramatically the last two decades. Software was primarily built in house 30 years ago, aiming to fit the needs of a specific user. During the 80’s the tendency changed with the foundation of software houses that were specializing in the development of “off the self” software, fitting the needs of a wider group of users, thus achieving scale economy, cheaper software with better quality. The last years, the explosion of the internet usage has transferred all applications to the “cloud” exploiting the faster and cheaper than ever hardware and netware. Furthermore, software systems such as Content Management Systems and Enterprise Resource Planning have transformed information system development into a process that connects the right components of functionality together. However, no matter what the advances are, tailored software is still required. Organizations, like businesses and institutions, with a variety in characteristics like delivered services, size, people, business processes and operating rules will always have a need for a customized system that fits their needs. Thus, building software has become more complex not in terms of available technological solutions but in terms of determining user needs. There are still excellent flawless software systems that solve the wrong problem. Therefore, enriching software engineering processes with business modeling techniques has been one way to cope with this problem. One of the most famous software engineering processes is the Rational Unified Process (RUP) which includes its own business modeling technique. In this thesis we try to combine DEMO and RUP in order to exploit the advantages of both methodologies which will ultimately assist practitioners in the development of quality software that solves the right problem. Our effort starts with the identification of a common scientific background, continues with devising a framework of assisting the combination and study of the methodologies. Then, the combined methodology is used in a case study in order to test in practice the new methodology.

I worked in the Platform Technologies Group for 12 weeks, porting Darwin to the MV88F6281. The MV88F6281 is an ARMv5 compatible processor, with the custom Sheeva core at its heart. The goal of this project was to get Darwin building and booting into a full multi-user prompt.

At the University of Colombo School of Computing (UCSC) a new e-learning based Bachelor of Information program has been set up. One of the given courses is focused on the Office skills of the student. For this course a new tool should be developed to assess practical tests automatically, so the teacher does not have to assess tests manually. This report is focused on the assessment of skills in Microsoft Word, Excel and Powerpoint. The feasibility of this is investigated and an approach has been found. A tool has been developed, which can be used to assess the word-, spreadsheet- and presentation- processing skills described by the International Computer Driver License (ICDL) standard. First a procedure for taking a test has been made. The test consists of a printed document with some instructions about for example the used letter types. The student should reproduce this document, using his skills. The resulting document will be matched with a model answer, provided by the teacher and assessed using a marking schema. The system has two documents. Now the main problem is to compare these documents. The documents are stored in Microsoft OOXML format, which can be easily read by the tool. The problem of OOXML is that it is not directly comparable. Different structures can be used to represent the same document and a lot of useless data is present. A new format – the DocumentElement format - has been created which has only one possible representation for the same document. Also all non-ICDL data has been removed. The DocumentElement format is a tree of DocumentElements – like paragraphs, pictures, tables, cells – with properties assigned to these elements – like lettertype, size and color. To create a DocumentElement from an OOXML file the use of parsing technology has been suggested. Three levels of parsing are needed to create this format. The first level is parsing the XML file into an object-oriented representation. The next level is parsing the object-oriented representation into a raw DocumentElement representation. To do this, the parser will be provided with some expert data. This data contains information about the relevance of the DocumentElements. The elements and properties that are not mentioned by ICDL or not important to the teacher will be removed. The last level of parsing is the DocumentSweeper. Some extra rules are added to the system to remove the last peaces of useless data. After both documents have been parsed, they can be compared. Using a marking schema provided by the teacher a mark can be given. This part needs some extra investigation, because the used algorithms are exponent ional, so limitations are build in to avoid explosion of execution time. This could cause errors and unjust marks in some cases. A tool has been developed using this techniques and the results are promising. The differences between the marks given by the teacher and the system are in most of the cases beneath 10%, which is acceptable. The developed tool therefore seems to be useful and quickly applicable at the UCSC.

This is the report for our Bachelor project (IN3405). We did an internship at Centric and made a simulator to visualise their concept "Mobile Hubs and Smart Connected Containers".

Tijdens het stage project TAG eForms is een prototype ontwikkeld, dit prototype dient na de stage verder ontwikkeld te worden tot een product. Dit verslag probeert ook enkele recommendations aan te leveren hiervoor. Het bedrijf TAG software & consultancy bestaat ondertussen een jaar of 20. In deze tijd heeft het bedrijf een enorme schat aan ervaring opgedaan op het gebied van kwaliteitsmanagement, interne audits en performance scans. Tegenwoordig levert TAG software & consultancy ook standaard software hiervoor en hoogwaardige consultancy diensten op het gebied van kwaliteits-, proces-, risk- en klachtenmanagement, strategische beleidsvorming en organisatie vraagstukken.TAG software & consultancy heeft 22 medewerkers, waaronder enkele internationaal aangestelden. Formulieren worden binnen een organisatie zo vaak gebruikt dat het soms gewoon niet meer opvalt, dat hetgeen waarmee gewerkt wordt in essentie als een formulier gezien kan worden. Zolang voor deze formulieren geen software oplossing gekocht/gemaakt is, dan zijn dit veelal Microsoft Word of Excel bestanden.Deze zijn vaak niet uniform, leveren een berg papier op of moeten geprint of gekopieerd worden alvorens gebruikt te worden. Dit zijn enkele nadelen die met eForms opgevangen kunnen worden. De opdracht was dan ook het ontwikkelen van een prototype van eForms. Een product waarmee formulieren gemaakt, beheer en gebruikt kunnen worden. Daarnaast moet het product nog aan een aantal specifieke eigenschappen voldoen welke terug te vinden zin in de requirements definition. Het product dient uiteindelijk te functioneren i.c.m. een windows of linux server en een MySQL of SQL server database. TAG eForms zal gebruik maken van MySQL of msSQL, verder wordt er geprogrammeerd in PHP en JavaScript. Deze code dient te worden gedocumenteerd door middel van een tweetal tools, JSdoc en PHPdoc. Deze genereren documenten aan de hand van de objecten methoden, attributen en het commentaar hierbij. Voor de planning en project structuur is sterk gekeken naar eXtreme Programming en pair programming. Het betreffende project team bestond buiten de twee eerder genoemde studenten uit: Rene ten Oever, Emiel van Goor, Danny Hoogendoorn en Michael van Rijswijk. Het project is 4 globale fasen ingedeeld, formbuilder, workflowbuilder, mailboxen en back-end. Deze onderdelen zijn vrijwel niet in de code gekoppeld en kunnen dus prima los van elkaar ontwikkeld worden. Elke fase heeft 3 subfasen namelijk ontwikkelen, testen en debuggen. Aan het begin van het project is, zoals eerder genoemd een aantal requirements opgesteld. Deze requirements zijn vervolgens onderverdeelt in een MoSCoW document, waarin de prioriteit van de functionaliteit in het stage project verduidelijkt wordt. Verder is er in het ontwerp rekening gehouden met de verschillende database servers waarmee de software moet kunnen werken. Verder is het belangrijk dat eForms kan werken met het ASP model van TAG software & cosultancy. eForms is gemaakt met het MVC principe als framework Tot slot is er in eForms gebruik gemaakt van extJS, een javascript library die het ontwikkelen van gebruiksvriendelijke clientside vereenvoudigd. Het is Versie: 2 Status: definitief 8 enorm belangrijk dat het maken en beheren van formulieren zo natuurlijk mogelijk is voor de gebruiker, wil een dergelijk product aanslaan bij het grote publiek. Er werd gebruik gemaakt van pair programming, een methode waarbij 2 programmeurs een workstation delen, zodat zij gezamenlijk tot een resultaat komen. Dit levert een kwalitatief beter product op en een prettigere werksfeer, naar mening van de programmeurs. Voornamelijk omdat de discussie tijdens of voor het schrijven van de code al gevoerd kan worden en zo de beste keuzes gemaakt worden. Het project heeft een prototype van eForms opgeleverd waarmee verder gewerkt gaat worden om te zorgen dat het een product wordt. De meeste van de vele gemaakte keuzes zijn goed bevallen. Vooral de keuze voor extJS is hier een goed voorbeeld van. Ook de ervaring die opgedaan is binnen TAG bij dit project, wordt gezien als een interessante aanwinst.

A well-known problem in peer-to-peer networks is free-riding, where users do not share resources in return for what they consume. Free-riders can be distinguished in two categories: diehard free-riders that are willing to subvert the network’s protocol in order to free-ride, and lazy free-riders that are reluctant to share but do follow the protocol. An important body of research focuses on die-hard free-riders in the popular BitTorrent file-sharing network, but in practice diehard free-riding in BitTorrent is not often observed. Lazy free-riding, on the other hand, is often observed, and in this thesis we investigate whether BitTorrent provides lazy free-riders with an incentive to share. Based on a game-theoretical model, we prove that this is the case for some lazy free-riders, but not for all. We then proceed to investigate the same for BarterCast, a new distributed reputation mechanism that is added to the BitTorrent-based Tribler network to provide additional sharing incentives. Based on an extended version of the same model, we prove that BarterCast also provides incentives only to some lazy free-riders, but not for all. We verify these results with simulations, and find that in practice, even fewer incentives are given than our model predicts. However, we show that lazy free-riding can provide a gain but also a loss, and that the net result is difficult to predict, which can be seen as an additional incentive against free-riding.

Bachelorproject over de ALVAST applicatie voor de ULO's

Peer-to-peer (P2P) technology allows us to create self-organising and scalable systems. The distributed nature of these systems requires a solution for finding interesting peers. In the context of P2P file sharing, finding peers who are downloading the same file is referred to as the swarm discovery problem. In BitTorrent, this problem is solved using a central server, called a tracker. This central component hinders the scalability of BitTorrent. We have designed a distributed swarm discovery algorithm, called 2-Hop TorrentSmell. It is composed of two parts. The first part builds on top of an existing keyword search system to find peers who have recently downloaded a certain file. The second part consists of an algorithm called RePEX, which allows a peer to stay in touch with swarms it is no longer in by periodically recontacting previously encountered swarm members. Our RePEX algorithm leverages a widely used BitTorrent extension for swarm discovery called PEX. We have conducted a study to understand the reliability and usability of PEX to optimize the design of our solution. We have implemented the RePEX part of 2-Hop TorrentSmell as an addition to the Tribler P2P network. For the evaluation of our RePEX algorithm, we have tested it on the 10 largest swarms on a public tracker. In addition, we have deployed the algorithm in a beta version of Tribler and let it run on swarms the user has downloaded from. Evaluation results show our algorithm is scalable and effective in popular swarms.

This document gives an overview of the progress and achievements of R. Spliet and S. Smit during their internship at SKION, including all delivered documentation.

BitTorrent has turned into the most popular P2P file sharing protocol and is used for various purposes such as Video on demand and Media Streaming. The fundamental problem with P2P networks in general is that quality of service highly depends on altruistic resource sharing by participating peers. Many peers freeride on the good intentions of others and BitTorrent is no exception. Current solutions like reputation systems and sharing ratio enforcement are complex, exploitable, inaccurate or unfair at times. The need to design scalable mechanisms that mitigate such problems is evident. We demonstrate through measurements that BitTorrent peers are able to barter pieces of different files (indirect interaction) which is a previously unknown property of the BitTorrent protocol. We introduce a centralized extension for the BitTorrent protocol which we refer to as the indirect interaction mechanism (IIM). IIM incentivizes seeding and mitigates problems of unfairness and exploitation while at the same time achieving linear scalability. We provide game theoretical models of the mechanism and demonstrate through analysis and simulations that IIM improves BitTorrent performance for certain cases and that it does not degrade performance for others. We conclude that IIM is a practical solution to the fundamental problem of P2P networks like BitTorrent.