Competence assessment of final year projects for undergraduate telecommunication students

The value of project-based learning has lead to the inclusion of project development activities in engineering courses, being the Final Year Project (FYP) the most remarkable one. Several approaches have been proposed for assessing and grading FYPs but, among them, rubrics are becoming a standard for such type of assessment. However, due to the different characteristics and orientations of the projects (some are more practically oriented, some more theoretically), and the high amount of different competences to be evaluated (knowledge, working capability, communication skills, etc.), the definition of one unique rubric suitable for the evaluation of all FYPs presented in different degree programs, is a big challenge. In a former work, the educational outcomes expected from the FYP were defined and resulted in a proposal for their assessment. Afterwards, the proposal has been tested during one year within an educational innovation-project at the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid which involved the follow-up of 8 undergraduate telecommunication students elaborating their FYPs. In this publication, our experience will be described, based on the emerging work taking place through the formalisation of the process which consisted in the following steps: i) establishment of a schedule for the whole process (publication of FYPs topics, selection of applying students and their enrolment, assignation of a jury to each FYP, elaboration and follow-up of FYPs, final report submission, oral presentation, etc.); ii) design of rubrics for each of three assessment parts: working process, final report and oral presentation; and iii) follow-up and evaluation of the involved FYPs. Finally, problems that appeared during this experience (e.g. administrative aspects, criticisms and suggestions from the students, tutors and juries involved) are discussed and some modifications in the assessment system will be proposed in order to solve or minimize these problems.

Application of Agent Technology for Fault Diagnosis of Telecommunication Networks

La presente tesis doctoral contribuye al problema del diagnóstico autonómico de fallos en redes de telecomunicación. En las redes de telecomunicación actuales, las operadoras realizan tareas de diagnóstico de forma manual. Dichas operaciones deben ser llevadas a cabo por ingenieros altamente cualificados que cada vez tienen más dificultades a la hora de gestionar debidamente el crecimiento exponencial de la red tanto en tamaño, complejidad y heterogeneidad. Además, el advenimiento del Internet del Futuro hace que la demanda de sistemas que simplifiquen y automaticen la gestión de las redes de telecomunicación se haya incrementado en los últimos años. Para extraer el conocimiento necesario para desarrollar las soluciones propuestas y facilitar su adopción por los operadores de red, se propone una metodología de pruebas de aceptación para sistemas multi-agente enfocada en simplificar la comunicación entre los diferentes grupos de trabajo involucrados en todo proyecto de desarrollo software: clientes y desarrolladores. Para contribuir a la solución del problema del diagnóstico autonómico de fallos, se propone una arquitectura de agente capaz de diagnosticar fallos en redes de telecomunicación de manera autónoma. Dicha arquitectura extiende el modelo de agente Belief-Desire- Intention (BDI) con diferentes modelos de diagnóstico que gestionan las diferentes sub-tareas del proceso. La arquitectura propuesta combina diferentes técnicas de razonamiento para alcanzar su propósito gracias a un modelo estructural de la red, que usa razonamiento basado en ontologías, y un modelo causal de fallos, que usa razonamiento Bayesiano para gestionar debidamente la incertidumbre del proceso de diagnóstico. Para asegurar la adecuación de la arquitectura propuesta en situaciones de gran complejidad y heterogeneidad, se propone un marco de argumentación que permite diagnosticar a agentes que estén ejecutando en dominios federados. Para la aplicación de este marco en un sistema multi-agente, se propone un protocolo de coordinación en el que los agentes dialogan hasta alcanzar una conclusión para un caso de diagnóstico concreto. Como trabajos futuros, se consideran la extensión de la arquitectura para abordar otros problemas de gestión como el auto-descubrimiento o la auto-optimización, el uso de técnicas de reputación dentro del marco de argumentación para mejorar la extensibilidad del sistema de diagnóstico en entornos federados y la aplicación de las arquitecturas propuestas en las arquitecturas de red emergentes, como SDN, que ofrecen mayor capacidad de interacción con la red. ABSTRACT This PhD thesis contributes to the problem of autonomic fault diagnosis of telecommunication networks. Nowadays, in telecommunication networks, operators perform manual diagnosis tasks. Those operations must be carried out by high skilled network engineers which have increasing difficulties to properly manage the growing of those networks, both in size, complexity and heterogeneity. Moreover, the advent of the Future Internet makes the demand of solutions which simplifies and automates the telecommunication network management has been increased in recent years. To collect the domain knowledge required to developed the proposed solutions and to simplify its adoption by the operators, an agile testing methodology is defined for multiagent systems. This methodology is focused on the communication gap between the different work groups involved in any software development project, stakeholders and developers. To contribute to overcoming the problem of autonomic fault diagnosis, an agent architecture for fault diagnosis of telecommunication networks is defined. That architecture extends the Belief-Desire-Intention (BDI) agent model with different diagnostic models which handle the different subtasks of the process. The proposed architecture combines different reasoning techniques to achieve its objective using a structural model of the network, which uses ontology-based reasoning, and a causal model, which uses Bayesian reasoning to properly handle the uncertainty of the diagnosis process. To ensure the suitability of the proposed architecture in complex and heterogeneous environments, an argumentation framework is defined. This framework allows agents to perform fault diagnosis in federated domains. To apply this framework in a multi-agent system, a coordination protocol is defined. This protocol is used by agents to dialogue until a reliable conclusion for a specific diagnosis case is reached. Future work comprises the further extension of the agent architecture to approach other managements problems, such as self-discovery or self-optimisation; the application of reputation techniques in the argumentation framework to improve the extensibility of the diagnostic system in federated domains; and the application of the proposed agent architecture in emergent networking architectures, such as SDN, which offers new capabilities of control for the network.