Browsing by Author "Weerakoon, W.A.C."

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AN INFORMATION ENABLED WORKFLOW ENGINE
(2010) Weerakoon, W.A.C.; de Silva, C.H.
Today most of the workflows of document/information processes or transactions are managed by the systems build on IT infrastructure of an establishment. Workflow Management can be done best, by fully or partially automated tools that combine human and machine based activities. This paper presents the entire life cycle of the development process of such a partially automated tool, the Document/Information enabled Workflow Engine (WFE) and its integration in to the Content Management Solution (CMS) of a reputed software vender. A workflow engine, the generator and the coordinator of document/information enabled workflows, have been designed, implemented and integrated into the company?s Content Management Solution, as an effort to improve application reliability and availability throughout the enterprise. This approach standardizes the user?s software packaging process provides automated document/information enabled workflows, which can be used for rapid deployment and flexible execution of edocumentation processes thereby tying the people, systems, organizational knowledge and goals to congregate into comprehensive, efficient processes, reducing the administrative overhead. In the development process unified modeling approach has been used, which not only provides a methodology for the software development process, but also combines best practices and processes together with the Unified Modeling Language?s notations and diagrams for better understanding Object-Oriented Concepts and system development, in the context of effective management of information.
Automated Financial Management System with an Android Application.
(Faculty of Computing and Technology, University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka., 2017) Gunathilaka, M.D.T.; Weerakoon, W.A.C.
A financial company who offers both daily and monthly loans to their customers had to increase their functionality in an efficient manner to full fill the higher demand. The solution was to introduce an automated financial management system to their company by automating their manual process. The main objective of this project was to develop a main system with an android application to use in the company. The main system included the features to input, edit, update, and store the details such as customer, collector, package and loan. Further, it was required to send massages to collectors’ smart phone or Tab, update the system database using incoming massages form collectors’ smart phone or Tab, and generate reports. The android application includes features to manage a database in smart phone or Tab, update device database using incoming messages from the main system, send messages to update the system database and generate an invoice through a Bluetooth printer. Therefore, there were two parts in this project. The first part was to design and construct the main system, which was located in the head office. This was implemented using Java Standard Edition. By using the main system, owner or manager can handle the activities done inside the office. When a loan was issued to a customer, the particular details are stored in the main system and send to the mobile phone of the field collector via SMS using a GSM modem. Further, the details received via SMS to the modem from field collectors are used to update the MySQL system database. The second part was to build the android application using Dalvik Virtual Machine on Linux Kernel to use in field collectors’ mobile phone. Furthermore, the application is automatically updated with the details received from the main system located in the head office. While field collectors are collecting loans, they can access the details through the application and they can print an invoice using a Bluetooth printer to issue for the customer. Further, the collection details are stored in the device and are sent to the main system via SMS. The two parts were connected through a mobile network. Since, they have to use this android application in the areas with lower or no internet facilities, online solutions could not be provided. Although, the internet facility is not available, the main system and the application can be upgraded with software agents using JADE or JaCa like platforms. Further, system testing was conducted by the colleagues using about 100 test cases. In addition to that, the customer acceptance testing was conducted according to the criteria defined by the company. Hence, it was able to prove the completeness and the functionality of the entire system. Finally, with the automated system, they were able to improve the performance of the company by saving the human and physical resources and removing the unnecessary queues in the head office.
A Plug-in to Boost the Behaviour of a Rule-Based Expert System More Like a Human
(Faculty of Graduate Studies, University of Kelaniya, 2015) Weerakoon, W.A.C.; Karunananda, A.S.; Dias, N.G.J.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is one major aspect of Computer Science. Among the applications of AI, expert systems are predominant. There are expert systems built for variety of subject domains such as education, medicine, and engineering, and were built by imitating the human experts with the ability to make accurate decisions by resolving the proper set of rules and facts stored in a knowledgebase to solve more complex problems. When it comes to systems, it is expected to be more accurate, reliable, efficient and complete. The current expert systems consists of many facilities such as user interfaces, reasoning of the system, knowledgebase, working memory, making inferences, prioritizing and an automatic way for the user to enter knowledge, with compared to the human experts. Even though, the expert systems are still behind and much specific in some aspect such as the abilities in generalizing concepts, drawing associations among knowledge entities depending on the causal relationships, adding new knowledge, removing irrelevant knowledge, prioritizing knowledge entities for the execution as per the input to gain improvements over generations of execution as human experts do. Among the technical categories of the expert systems such as rulebased, frame-based and induction-based, our concern is to improve the rule-based expert systems by solving the said problem by constructing a processing model which consists of the processing states such as Origin, Classified, Pre-State, Resolve and Terminate with newly introduced multiple sub-processes such as Input/Identify knowledge entities, Classify facts/rules depending on the causal relationships crafting the generalizing facility and Termination. When the system executes over generations, it produces outputs and gains improvements using the above mentioned processing model as per the input/queries. For this processing model, newly introduced sub-processes will be implemented using C programming language and will integrate to the current expert systems written in ‗C Language Integrated Production System‘ as a plug-in. The system will be able to evaluate by comparing its states With-Plug-In and Without-Plug-In for the quality using a non-parametric test such as Mann-Whitney-U-test and for the time using a paired-t-test. As a result we are capable of providing an expert system which is more like a human expert.
Smart Meter- Multifunctional Electricity Usage Meter
(Faculty of Computing and Technology, University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka, 2016) Bandara, K.R.S.N.; Weerakoon, W.A.C.
Internet of things (IoT) is the modern concept which makes new approach to make connect people and people, people and devices via internet. This concept is a great solutions for many practical problems of people. Such as connecting people with each other easily, controlling remotely, managing people or devices easily etc. This concept combined with other technologies will make more use for people. Such a modern technology is Multi-Agent technology; connecting these two technologies will make great solutions for many human problems. Software agents are well trained computer programs for certain task with different environment conditions. These agents can act autonomously with sudden changes in artificial environment. (A) Multi-Agent system (MAS) is the collection of software agents who play in artificial environment. Applying IoT and MAS together is great way of creating solutions for major problems of people. One of such problem is uncontrollable power usage. Smart Meter (SM) is the solution for this problem, which is integrated both IoT and MAS concepts. Electricity is the major type of energy which is used for everything in modern world. So electricity plays major role in industry as well as the domestic. More than 50% of domestic use electricity as their first power source. With the great usage of electricity the wastage also becomes higher. This wastage make uncomfortable to domestic economics so people need a better way to eliminate the wastage. And also it will put the world at risk. Because all resources which are used to generate electricity have decaying characteristics, this wastage will make quick reach to end of the resources. Looking at the two tasks of this problem, the key factor of acting on this issue, so people must think on this issue and must act themselves so the wastage must represent to them in manner, which they can feel the problem. Representing current usage in representative manner and predicting future usage according to past usage details will be much easier to understand on how they must act for themselves as well as the world. Implementing the methods to act according to the future plan is one important component for this concept, and remote access and automatic control will add new value to this concept and will make better and easy way to eliminate wastage. Developing countries are struggling to eliminate wastage of electricity because they spend big portion of their economy to generate electricity. If the wastage elimination plan is more expensive it is not feasible for those country. Then it need less expensive power saving equipment. So the smart Meter is such equipment which developed using less expensive equipment such as Arduino, RPI, etc. Complete SM system contains three parts they are, Physical system – which contains a component connected to the home electricity system to collect consumption data of home areas. This system contains microcontrollers, sensors, etc. Processing Unit – this is the system which contain multi-agents and other software which is used to control micro controllers. This is the core of the SM which does all calculations, and all analytical processes and report generating processes. UI Component is the third system which is used to display analytical results of those generated by Processing Unit and it lets user to control the electricity system remotely. All three units of the SM can be built cost effectively which is appropriate to developing countries. When considering the situation in Sri Lanka another major issue is that there is no good connection between domestic system and service provider so the use manual system of collecting of details of consumption. So it will take more time to process consumption data to service provider and make analysis report of domestic. But using the system SM is the best way of collecting consumptions details and also analyzing the consumption data of domestic to make sense on people to save the power because SM will predict the future data consumption and weaknesses of the power consumption of the user.SM uses an analytical program called R in the core module and it is programmed to generate the forecasting for the users’ future consumption of data to represent in understandable manner. This SM concept can be extended for industrial users and this can be extended to make power grid in the area as well as the country. So then it will give new interface for the Power Grid concept. This will lead the whole country to stand for power saving as one. SM is the MAS which is integrated with IoT concept to achieve the above tasks, which is implemented using MadKit agent platform and Java language. Each software agent is assigned for a task. These agents work together to bring out one major task alive. All devices which are connected to the central system communicating with each other as well as with the user, will bring out the concept IoT. Together these two technologies will make a complete solution for electricity wastage.
Student Attendance Management System Based on Fingerprint Recognition
(Faculty of Computing and Technology, University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka, 2016) Pushpakumara, D.C.; Weerakoon, W.A.C.
During lectures in the university, traditionally students’ attendance is taken manually by using attendance sheets given by lecturer in class and not by an automated system. At the end of the semester, the students’ attendance is used in calculating the final grade of each subject. Supporting staff manually input attendance data into excel sheets based on signature lists collected during lecture hours. This manual method requires a lot of stationery materials. It will be a tedious job to maintain the record by the user and the retrieval of the information is not as well. Hence, this manual process consumes a lot of human and physical resources, and has many disadvantages such as, expensive and time consuming data entry process, large manual data insertions prone to errors, sometimes lecturers find it inconvenient to track and analyze attendance registry due to dishonest behaviors of students and lack of automated system. The lecturers are responsible to monitor all the students’ attendance for the whole semester and it is apparent that the current manual process is highly inefficient. Because of this problem, an automated system is needed in order to reduce the human intervention and the physical resources used in recording the attendance of the students more accurately and efficiently and to forward the attendance to final grading process. This manual system was analyzed and identified the necessary features for the automated system as functional and non-functional requirements. As a result, this implemented system is mainly comprised of development of student attendance management system using fingerprint authentication. A fingerprint device will be provided at each lecture hall at the faculty. This system will record the attendance of students in class when the class begins. The main objectives for this study were to reduce the paper usage, avoid human errors, compare efficiency between the proposed system and the manual system, generate effective reports, and use various sensor technologies to enhance the User Interface experience. The implemented system significance can be discussed from three perspectives such as faculty, lecturers, and students. This system can keep the track of students, courses, time table details etc. This system can only be accessed by the authorized people and there are different privilege categories. Student Attendance Management System provides useful analysis graphs for lecturers with other calculation processes and flexible report for all students. To fulfill all analysed requirements, the system consists of three modules. The first module allows the system administrator (admin) to log into his account and to accomplish the functions such as, adding new students, modifying students’ information and deleting students, adding new course modules and modifying/deleting course details, enrolling students in courses, marking student attendance, adding students’ tutorial marks, practical marks and final marks for each course modules, generating attendance reports, result sheets for each course and each student. Furthermore, reports can be printed or sent via email, generating data analysis graphs for each course unit, managing time table details, adding new users and modifying user information, provision to change login password. The second module of this system defines itself in terms of being used by the lecturers. Lecturer has to enter their login user name and password in system. There are the privileges for lecturers provided by the system such as only view the students’ details, mark students’ attendance/tutorial marks/practical marks/final marks can only be entered by the relevant lecturer, generate attendance reports and can be printed, view time table details, change login password, send special notices to the admin. The last module is for the students. This module provides a web based system for students with the privileges such as view their personal details, time tables, his/her attendance details and results. Student Attendance Management System uses JAVA to implement the front-end and has connectivity with MySQL. The implemented system is based on the database, object oriented and networking techniques. With the Fingerprint module, can check fingerprint, while up to 600 fingerprint memories and 60,000 transaction records contained. It can also get information out of it, because the fingerprint machine supported USB cable and USB Flash Drive both. NetBeans used as the IDEs. Mainly used languages are JAVA, JavaScript, PHP. Student Attendance System consists of a server and a central database. The system administrator can access the database using admin panel. Test cases were created for each criterion and Simple Unit Tests, System Testing, Integration Testing, Security Testing and Performance Testing were successfully done to check all the functional requirements. After analysis of this system’s goal and research direction, a set of objectives were established, such as implementing the attendance system with N-tier architecture, testing the software in a real environment, generating effective reports like attendance reports/results sheets. Implemented system is faster and more accurate than the existing system. As the future work, I am planning to implement the fingerprint machine using a GT-511C1 fingerprint scanner and Arduino and also using Wi-Fi shield fingerprint machine can be passed among the students during the lecturer. Further, the efficiency of this automated system can be enhanced using the Multi Agent Technology introducing different software agents who bare distinct responsibilities within the system. Finally, this system can be integrated into current information system used within the faculties in the university.