Per Närman recently (2006) joined the department of Industrial Information- and Control Systems as a PhD-student. As with all researchers at the department for Industrial Information and Control Systems, Per's research is within Enterprise Architecture, and Enterprise Architecture analysis. This discipline focuses on how to visualize IT systems , their properties and interconnections as well as their linking to both the IT and business organization and not least to the business processes the systems are intended to support.

The business domain of Per's research is primarily focused on the asset management process within electrical distribution companies and the information systems needed to support this process. Asset management has gained a great deal of interest among electrical utilities, as the numerous mergers and acquisitions have lead to much larger companies and therefore vastly more complex maintenance, re-investment and investment decisions. Information technology is a cornerstone in any successful new asset management strategy, chiefly due to the large quantities of data related to managing a power grid; the number of objects in a large distribution network can be several millions.

The aim with his PhD project is to improve methods for evaluations of the quality of service of complex IT-applications. Quality of service is measured both in terms of functionality (the behavior of the system) and quality attributes of the system. Examples of functions in the domain of asset management may be maintenance planning. Example of quality attributes are performance (response time etc.), availability (Uptime/Downtime) etc.

The project will make extensive use of architectural models to store collected data and to facilitate the quality analysis. A modeling framework called PERDAF for Purpose-oriented EnterpRise-system Decision-making Architectural framework has been developed and will be tested in a number of case studies in industry. For more information the reader is kindly referred to www.ics.kth.se/perdaf_english.

Here is a list of publications related to my work.

I am course responsible for the course EH2730 Requirements Engineering that will be given for the first time in period 2 2007.