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Values and ethics amidst the economic crisis
No full textThe current protracted economic crisis is giving rise to the scarcity of public
health resources across Europe. In response to budgetary pressures and the
Eurozone public debt crisis, decision-makers resort to a short-term solution:
the introduction of austerity measures in diverse policy fields. Health and
social policy tend to be easy targets in this regard and budget cuts often
include a reduction of healthcare expenditure or social welfare benefits. We
suggest incorporating discussions from the field of ethics in policy making
processes and in the academic debate on austerity. This includes recognising
procedural justice as a social value. On the road to economic recovery,
governments are compelled to resort to fiscal consolidation and austerity
packages but decisions taken to save our European ships in crisis should be
anchored in values such as (procedural) justice, equity and solidarity
Manufacturing Renaissance: Return of manufacturing to western countries
No full textManufacturing Renaissance, i.e. return of manufacturing to west, has been
recently observed. This paper analyzes the patterns observed within each of the
four main drivers behind this new phenomenon and delves more deeply into the
driver that centers on the new manufacturing technologies such as Additive
Manufacturing (AM) and 3D Printing. Next, this paper will make the case that
the location of manufacturing will be in west, relying on the established
theory that has been able to explain the location of manufacturing, i.e.
Product Life Cycle Model (PLC)
A Geographical Information Systems for Transportation (GIS-T) Object Based Data Model for Road Infrastructure Maintenance in Uganda
No full textThis paper presents an object based Geographical Information Systems for
Transportation (GIS-T) data model for road maintenance in Uganda. It is a
result of a PhD undertaking whose main objective was to develop a framework
within which the use of Geographic Information Technologies could be enhanced
as decision support tools for road infrastructure maintenance in Uganda. The
model is based on data requirements of the road maintenance sector and is a
means towards establishing standards for geographical datasets. This was
accomplished through identification of road maintenance data requirements,
review of organisational reports, workshop proceedings, organisational terms of
reference for various projects, understanding and consideration of the
Information Quality Levels (IQL) and a review of existing data models and
standards in transportation. The presented conceptual and logical data models
for road maintenance are based on concepts of dynamic segmentation (dynseg) and
linear referencing. Essential to adoption of the proposed model is the
understanding of the transportation network of the country. The underlying
requirement for implementation of the model is the choice of GIS software with
the full set of dynseg tools.
Key words: GIS-T, Data model, Road maintenance, dynamic segmentation, Linear
referencing, Ugand
Low Cost Road Condition Data Capture System for Sustainable Road Maintenance in Uganda
No full textA low cost system to document and monitor road conditions in Uganda and
comparable countries is presented. We used slightly modified Contour GPS and
Micorsoft Kinect, both inexpensive devices that can be purchased off the shelf
in most countries
Auxiliary beam terrain-scattered interference suppression: reflection system and radar performance
No full textTerrain-scattered interference (TSI), that is, jammer signals reflected on the
earth's surface, is a significant problem to military airborne radar. In
auxiliary beam TSI suppression, the TSI in the main radar beam is estimated by
a single or several auxiliary beams and is subtracted from the main beam
channel. The signal to subtract is the auxiliary beam signals fed through an
estimate of the ‘reflection system’, which describes scattering on the surface.
The authors first present results on the structure of this TSI suppression, on
the estimation of the reflection system and on the quality of the estimate.
Then the authors derive theoretical expressions for the signal-to-interference
plus noise ratio (SINR) and the remaining TSI power for a single auxiliary
beam. Since the SINR is directly connected to the radar performance, it can be
seen what factors affect the performance and how. It was noted that when the
estimated reflection system is missing one or more delays of the true system,
the TSI filter cannot suppress the TSI signal completely. This phenomenon,
which is called ‘TSI leakage’, has a very large impact on the performance. The
SINR cannot be kept constant. Instead, an ‘SINR improvement’ can be defined
Value-Driven Design - A methodology to Link Expectations to Technical Requirements in the Extended Enterprise
No full textCurrent systems engineering (SE) standards do not address ‘Value’ in much
detail. Yet, understanding what drives the generation of stakeholder value in a
given business context, is fundamental to promoting a common and clear vision
throughout the extended enterprise, of what should be the focus of their early,
conceptual work at all levels of development. This paper presents a
Value-Driven Design (VDD) methodology designed to strengthen the value and
requirements maturation process within an extended enterprise setting. The work
presented is the result of a three and a half year European program (CRESCENDO)
within the aerospace sector. The VDD methodology is introduced and explained in
an industrial aircraft development context and a selection of enabling methods
and tools associated to the VDD methodology is presented
Streaming Video over Unreliable and Bandwidth Limited Networks
No full textThe main objective of this thesis is to provide a smooth video playout on the
mobile device over wireless networks. The parameters that specify the wireless
channel include: bandwidth variation, frame losses, and outage time. These
parameters may affect the quality of the video negatively, and the mobile users
may notice sudden stops during the playout video, i.e., the picture is
momentarily frozen, followed by a jump from one scene to a different one.
This thesis focuses on eliminating frozen pictures and reducing the amount of
video data that need to be transmitted. In order to eliminate frozen scenes on
the mobile screen, we propose three different techniques. In the first
technique, the video frames are split into sub-frames; these sub-frames are
streamed over different channels. In the second technique the sub-frames will
be “crossed” and sent together with other sub-frames that are from different
positions in the streaming video sequence. If some sub-frames are lost during
the transmission a reconstruction mechanism will be applied on the mobile
device to recreate the missing sub-frames. In the third technique, we propose a
Time Interleaving Robust Streaming (TIRS) technique to stream the video frames
in different order. The benefit of that is to avoid losing a sequence of
neighbouring frames. A missing frame from the streaming video will be
reconstructed based on the surrounding frames on the mobile device.
In order to reduce the amount of video data that are streamed over limited
bandwidth channels, we propose two different techniques. These two techniques
are based on identifying and extracting a high motion region of the video
frames. We call this the Region Of Interest (ROI); the other parts of the video
frames are called the non-Region Of Interest (non-ROI). The ROI is transmitted
with high quality, whereas the non-ROI is interpolated from a number of
references frames. In the first technique the ROI is a fixed size region; we
considered four different types of ROI and three different scenarios. The
scenarios are based on the position of the reference frames in the streaming
frame sequence. In the second technique the ROI is identified based on the
motion in the video frames, therefore the size, position, and shape of the ROI
will be different from one video to another according to the video
characteristic. The videos are coded using ffmpeg to study the effect of the
proposed techniques on the encoding size.
Subjective and objective metrics are used to measure the quality level of the
reconstructed videos that are obtained from the proposed techniques. Mean
Opinion Score (MOS) measurements are used as a subjective metric based on human
opinions, while for objective metric the Structural Similarity (SSIM) index is
used to compare the similarity between the original frames and the
reconstructed frames
Approaching Strategic Sustainable Materials Management
No full textSociety’s sustainability challenges relatedto materials management have been an
area of concern for policymakers, industry and the public for decades. However,
if those challenges are managed in a strategic way, they are not only aproblem,
but could also bring in new opportunity for companies and other organizations
to improve their competitiveness through developingproduct-service systems that
promote sustainable development of society.
The overall aim of this thesis is to explore how aframework for strategic
sustainable development (FSSD) can support the development and design of
sustainable materials management strategies in product innovation. This is
achieved by four studies investigating howsustainability considerations are, or
could be, integrated in decisions regarding materials selection. The studies
are informed by the FSSD, Maxwell’s model for qualitative research design and
the design research methodology. The first study is a theoretical discussion
which provides a base for the following three exploratory studies. The
exploratory studies have, through literature reviews and semi-structured
interviews, investigated general sustainabilityconsiderations in companies,
made a comparison of the strategic potential of two product improvement
strategies and finally studied what considerations that are in focus and what
types of solutions that are revealed when companies apply a strategic
sustainability perspective to materials management.
The studies have shown that decisions regarding materials management often
arebased on compliance with legislation and on avoiding substances with
characteristics commonly considered problematic (such as toxicity, persistency,
etc.), and that decision support regarding how materials could be managed in a
sustainable way are lacking. However, the results also include some examples
from companies that have successfully developed pro-active strategies towards
sustainable materials management. They have approached this through managing
materials in closedtechnical loops, enabled material substitution through value
chain collaboration and reduced material flows through new and innovative
design. Most importantly, they have assessedactions not only regarding their
potential to reduce a selection of current socio-ecological impacts but also
regarding their potential to link toforthcoming actions towards the full scope
of socio-ecological sustainability. Through this approach, they have found
several ways by which materials with characteristics that are commonly
considered problematic can be.
The results highlight the possibility of enabling sustainable materials
management practices by using a strategic sustainability perspective in
combination with material characteristics knowledge and that a static division
of “sustainable” vs. “unsustainable” materials (e.g., through lists of
forbidden and allowed materials) is not necessarily serving the purpose in the
best way. More subtle considerations are needed. By not applying a strategic
sustainability perspective to materials management, organizations risk using
“sustainable” materials in unsustainable ways or phasing out “unsustainable”
materials that, managed differently, could be helpful for sustainable
development. Developing decision support for materials management that
integrates this new way of thinking will be the focus of future work
Unified Analysis of Transmit Antenna Selection in MIMO Multi-Relay Networks
No full textWe present a unified asymptotic framework for transmit antenna selection in
multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) multi-relay networks with Rician,
Nakagami-m, Weibull, and Generalized-K fading channels. We apply this framework
to derive new closed-form expressions for the outage probability and symbol
error rate (SER) of amplify-andforward relaying in MIMO multi-relay networks
with two distinct protocols: 1) transmit antenna selection with receiver
maximalratio combining (TAS/MRC), and 2) transmit antenna selection with
receiver selection combining (TAS/SC). Based on these expressions, the
diversity order and the array gain with M-ary phase shift keying and M-ary
quadrature amplitude modulation are derived.We corroborate that the diversity
order only depends on the fading distribution and the number of diversity
branches, whereas the array gain depends on the fading distribution, the
modulation format, the number of diversity branches, and the average per-hop
signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs). We highlight that the diversity order of TAS/MRC
is the same as TAS/SC, regardless of the underlying fading distribution. As
such, we explicitly characterize the SNR gap between TAS/MRC and TAS/SC as the
ratio of their respective array gains. An interesting observation is reached
that for equal per-hop SNRs, the SNR gap between the two protocols is
independent of the number of relays
Publikationsstatistik för BTH 2008-2012 - Rapport för årsredovisningen 2012
No full textSom ett underlag för publiceringsredovisningen i årsberättelsen 2012 vid BTH
har jag tagit fram ny publiceringsstatistik ur BTHs forskningsdatabas (FDB) som
täcker de aktuella kvalitetsgranskade dokumenten som publiceras av forskare på
BTH 2008 och framåt. Innehållet i FDB har kompletterats genom import av ”BTH-
poster” från ISI Web of Science (ISI WoS) och Scopus.
Sökningen i ISI WoS för året 2012 gjordes 121129 enligt specifikationerna
nedan. Observera att dokumenttypen review räknas som tidskriftsartikel i den
redovisade statistiken. I kategorin tidskriftsartiklar har ej typen ”Letter/
Notes” medtagits. En liknande sökning I Scopus för året 2012 gjordes 121203.
Posterna fördelades sedan mellan de 5 sektionerna (COM, ING, DSN, HAL, MAM) via
författartillhörighet baserat på min kännedom eller uppslag i FDB eller BTHs
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