Blekinge Institute of Technology
Electronic Research Archive - Blekinge Tekniska HögskolaNot a member yet
1855 research outputs found
Sort by
FoU vid MAM (3). I närkamp med "tredje uppgiften".
No full textUr förordet:
Högskolans ”tredje uppgift” är att samverka med aktörer utanför högskolan och
göra det som ett nytt sätt att bedriva undervisning och forskning och inte som
någon extra pålagd vid-sidan-uppgift.
De tre artiklarna i detta nummer av FoU vid MAM har vi samlat under titeln I
närkamp med den ”tredje uppgiften”. De är exempel på hur samverkan med
utomakademiska aktörer kan se ut i praktiken. Denna praktik är förstås
olikartad. Här i förordet lyfter jag fram två teman i artiklarna. Ett tema är
vad för slags samverkan det är fråga om. Det andra temat är att samverkan kan
vara konfliktfylld. Sammantaget säger dessa
teman något viktigt om samverkansuppgiften: Vilka samhällsaktörer är inblandade
och hur ska de olika intressen de representerar hanteras produktivt när nya
utvecklingsgrupperingar skapas i FoU-arbetet
Breed and ”Booze”, naval demand and early modern production
No full textThis investigation discusses the connection between military supply needs, or
more specific the navy capability to supply, primarily bread and alcohol, and
the transformation from small-scale to large-scale production during the early
modern period. Three questions are addressed: the significance of the
relationship between burghers and military representatives to this
transformation; the significance of military experience, including military
techniques, to this transformation; and finally, whether or not early modern
military production can be linked to modern industrialization. Together these
questions can begin to answer the question about the connection between the
nations military past and the shape of the modern industrial and political
landscape.
The period after the founding of the naval base Karlskrona in the south east of
Sweden in the 1680´s was marked by repeated negotiations, disputes and severe
production problems. The burghers could not always meet the growing demands of
the Navy. This situation is investigated as an incentive for the Navy to begin
the production of foodstuffs. In 1752, a Crown bakery could produce 100 000
pieces of so-called “succarie-breds” a day. The creation of a Crown distillery
is another example of a state-operated manufacture at the time. Some of the
ventures could be described as more successful than others. The Success and
failures of these examples is studied in relation to the experience of military
administration, the technical skills developed at the Naval base, as well as
the importance of an “institution” that could mobilize labour forces and
economic resources, to early modern Swedish production. At another level those
questions is related to the Navy as a modernization force in confrontation with
older forms of production in the hands of the guilds – and the Naval city as a
possible “nod” for modernization in general.
The connection between the early modern military production pattern and the
long-term impact for the modern industrial landscape in the region is discussed
in relation to the fact that this region became the leading industrial producer
of alcohol and the leading grower of potatoes needed for this industry. Later
on the potatoes became the base for the modern starch industry in the region
Beacon-Enabled Cognitive Access for Dynamic Spectrum Access
No full textIn dynamic spectrum access networks, the unused licensed spectrum used by
primary users (PU) is opened to unlicensed secondary users (SU) for improving
spectrum efficiency.
We design a simple time-based threshold policy for collective protection of
PUs, enabled by an out-of-band channel. In particular, multiple SUs may be
widely distributed in a geographic location. The interference that collocated
SUs cause to each other, termed self-interference, becomes a major source that
may degrade the SUs communication performance.
We establish an analytical framework for carrier sense multiple access (CSMA)
based coexistence mechanisms when integrated into a family of time based
threshold policies, and study its performance though theoretical analysis
Pedagogical Approaches and Design Aspects To Enable Leadership for Sustainable Development
No full textVarious sets of skills for dealing with sustainability and the complexity of
the modern world have been put forward by different actors in the field of
Education for Sustainable Development (ESD). In connection with these skills,
pedagogical methods such as lifelong learning, social learning, problem-based
learning, dialogue education, and empowerment for ESD have been discussed. This
paper looks at how these theories and methods can be put into practice by
examining a real-world example of a sustainability master’s program at Blekinge
Institute of Technology (BTH) in Sweden. In 2004, BTH launched the
international transdisciplinary master’s program Strategic Leadership towards
Sustainability, which aims to develop leaders who will be able to address the
ever-increasing sustainability challenge. The program combines a robust
scientific framework for planning and decision making toward sustainability,
with the leadership skills needed to energize large-scale societal change. In
2009, the Engineering Education for Sustainable Development (EESD) observatory
awarded BTH the ranking of No. 1 in Sweden and third in Europe for
demonstrating success in EESD. This paper describes the specific pedagogical
approaches and design elements that were implemented to train and develop the
skills and expertise surrounding leadership for sustainable development. It
further presents and analyzes survey data taken from program alumni reflecting
on the success of the program. The results of the survey clearly show that
while there is room for improvement, overall the program design is extremely
successful in equipping its graduates with the skills necessary to address the
sustainability challenge. Finally, the authors offer reflections on the lessons
learned after six years of continual improvements
Cognitive Radio Networks with Elastic Traffic
No full textWe model and evaluate an infrastructure based cognitive radio network where
impatient unlicensed or secondary users (SUs) offer elastic traffic. The
interference created by SUs to the licensed users is analyzed when the
secondary network uses two different spectrum access schemes, the conventional
random access scheme and a new scheme we refer to as access with preference. To
further control the interference, a limit is set to the number of channels SUs
have access to. With this new constraint, the abandonment probability, the mean
delay and throughput of the SUs degrades significantly. To improve the QoS
perceived by the active SUs, we define and evaluate an admission control scheme
for the SUs
Developing Secure Software - in an Agile Process
No full textBackground: Software developers are facing increased pressure to lower
development time, release new software versions more frequent to customers and
to adapt to a faster market. This new environment forces developers and
companies to move from a plan based waterfall development process to a flexible
agile process. By minimizing the pre development planning and instead
increasing the communication between customers and developers, the agile
process tries to create a new, more flexible way of working. This new way of
working allows developers to focus their efforts on the features that customers
want. With increased connectability and the faster feature release, the
security of the software product is stressed. To develop secure software, many
companies use security engineering processes that are plan heavy and
inflexible. These two approaches are each others opposites and they directly
contradict each other.
Objective: The objective of the thesis is to evaluate how to develop secure
software in an agile process. In particular, what existing best practices can
be incorporated into an agile project and still provide the same benefit if the
project was using a waterfall process. How the best practices can be
incorporated and adapted to fit the process while still measuring the
improvement. Some security engineering concepts are useful but the best
practice is not agile compatible and would require extensive adaptation to
integrate with an agile project.
Method: The primary research method used throughout the thesis is case studies
conducted in a real industry setting. As secondary methods for data collection
a variety of approaches have been used, such as semi-structured interviews,
workshops, study of literature, and use of historical data from the industry.
Results: The security engineering best practices were investigated though a
series of case studies. The base agile and security engineering compatibility
was assessed in literature, by developers and in practical studies. The
security engineering best practices were group based on their purpose and their
compatibility with the agile process. One well known and popular best practice,
automated static code analysis, was toughly investigated for its usefulness,
deployment and risks of using as part of the process. For the risk analysis
practices, a novel approach was introduced and improved. As such, a way of
adapting existing practices to agile is proposed.
Conclusion: With regard of agile and security engineering we did not find that
any of the investigated processes was agile compatible. Agile is reaction
driven that adapts to change, while the security engineering processes are
proactive and try to prevent threats before they happen. To develop secure
software in an agile process the developers should adopt and adapt key concepts
from security engineering. These changes will affect the flexibility of the
agile process but it is a necessity if developers want the same software
security state as security engineering processes can provide
Effect of primary network on performance of spectrum sharing AF relaying
No full textMost of the research in spectrum sharing has neglected the effect of
interference from primary users. In this reported work, the performance of
spectrum sharing amplify-and-forward relay networks under interference-limited
environment, where the interference induced by the transmission of primary
networks is taken into account, is investigated. In particular, a closed-form
expression tight lower bound of outage probability is derived. To reveal
additional insights into the effect of primary networks on the diversity and
array gains, an asymptotic expression is also obtained
FOU vid MAM (2) Pedagogisk praktik, teoribildning och forskning
No full textA variety of texts showing/promoting several pedagogical themes ranging from
the very practical on composing an application to an experimental text
combining a literary/narrative approch with a general activity perspective
Coordination and Monitoring Services Based on Service Level Agreements in Smart Grids
No full textThe EU Climate and Energy package, setting the 20-20-20 targets of future
energy systems by 2020 will change the landscape of future energy system in
Europe and worldwide. A transition from monopolised controlled Power network
to customer oriented Smart Grids operating in deregulated energy markets poses
several regulatory, organizational and technical challenges. To that end
several international Smart Grid projects have been launched worldwide in EU,
the US and China. To cope with the inherent complexity of Smart grid systems
the systemic property of Interoperability has been proposed by organisations
such as NIST and GridWise in the US and is also adopted by EU.
Interoperability of smart grids entails design, implementation, validation and
maintenance of systems ensuring technical, information, and organizational
interoperability. In order to address Quality of Service (QoS) in this setting,
the tool of Service Level Agreements (SLAs) has been proposed. A SLA set up
the coordination between stakeholders in a business case and relevant services
with set-points and agreements to be monitored. A challenge is to identify
relevant (new) stakeholders, their competences and roles in the business case.
In the thesis we specifically address the following issues:
• Empowerment of end-users
• Trustworthy integration of DER- Distributed Energy Resources in delivered
services
• Validation (Interoperability) of SLAs
To those ends, we have implemented an experimental test bed based on
Multi-agent systems and sensor technologies.
The thesis concludes with assessments of our findings and some pointers to
future work. Our work is validated scientifically and industrially by
participating in the two EU project INTEGRAL and SEESGEN-ICT , both ended in
late spring 2011
Multi-Agent Potential Field Based Architectures for Real-Time Strategy Game Bots
No full textReal-Time Strategy (RTS) is a sub-genre of strategy games which is running in
real-time, typically in a war setting. The player use workers to gather
resources, which in turn is used for creating new buildings, training combat
units and build upgrades and research. The game is won when all buildings of
the opponents have been destroyed. The numerous tasks that need to be handled
in real-time can be very demanding for a player. Computer players (bots) for
RTS games face the same challenges, and also have to navigate units in highly
dynamic game worlds and deal with other low-level tasks such as attacking enemy
units within fire range.
This thesis is a compilation of nine papers. The first four papers deal with
navigation in dynamic game worlds, which can be very complex and resource
demanding. Typically it is solved by using pathfinding algorithms. We
investigate an alternative approach based on Artificial Potential Fields and
show how a PF based navigation system can be used without any need of
pathfinding algorithms.
In RTS games players usually have a limited visibility of the game world, known
as Fog of War. Bots on the other hand often have complete visibility to aid the
AI in making better decisions. In a paper we show that a Multi-Agent PF based
bot with limited visibility can match and even surpass bots with complete
visibility in some RTS scenarios. In the sixth paper we show how the bot can be
extended and used in a full RTS scenario with base building and unit
construction.
This is followed by a paper where we propose a flexible and expandable RTS game
architecture that can be modified at several levels of abstraction to test
different techniques and ideas. The proposed architecture is implemented in the
famous RTS game StarCraft, and we show how the high-level architecture goals of
flexibility and expandability can be achieved.
The last two papers present two studies related to gameplay experience in RTS
games. In games players usually have to select a static difficulty level when
playing against computer opponents. In the first study we use a bot that during
runtime can adapt the difficulty level depending on the skills of the opponent,
and study how it affects the perceived enjoyment and variation in playing
against the bot.
To create bots that are interesting and challenging for human players a goal is
often to create bots that play more human-like. In the second study we asked
participants to watch replays of recorded RTS games between bots and human
players. The participants were asked to guess and motivate if a player was
controlled by a human or a bot. This information was then used to identify
human-like and bot-like characteristics for RTS game players