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Abstract
The field of software engineering for computer supported cooperative work aims at designing and developing software engineering models, methods and tools that assist individuals and groups to cooperate. However, the cooperation is significantly influenced by participants’ awareness of relevant information. The objective of this thesis is to propose a software engineering methodology to design and develop applications that assist individuals to identify their awareness. The present study is based on three main observations from the literature. First, studies on the utilisation of information technology for cooperation emphasise the role of awareness for identifying the relevance of information in the midst of an abundance of inputs. Second, there are bodies of work that indicate the significant contributions of agents to design and develop software applications to assist individuals to maintain their awareness. Third, the literature lacks formalised software engineering methods on how to identify and implement awareness. The objective is to provide a mechanism that can be applied with intelligent agents in order to design and develop software applications to identify awareness. This study introduces Policy-based Awareness Management (PAM), a software engineering methodology that proposes the use of existing policy rules as a source to identify awareness. This methodology presents a formalised framework for policy-based awareness and a step-by-step process for awareness identification. The formalism has been built on the logic of general awareness, and its implementation is based on the platform of policy rules in Directory Enabled Networks (DEN). The research also proposes a systematic software engineering methodology for designing and developing architecture of software applications. The present thesis develops a design methodology for software agents to implement the proposed formalism. In this study, PAM using software agents has been evaluated in terms of its efficacy and cost-efficiency by a triangulation of two simulation studies on hypothetical examples and wireless communication procedures in a hospital environment. The original contributions of this study are illustrated through three applications; two in disaster management and one in healthcare. The results of these evaluations show that PAM is effective and cost-efficient subject to the limitations of the study.