The rapid and ubiquitous spread of information technologies (IT) is creating unprecedented effects that challenge traditional fundamentals of the business world. Platform-mediated ecosystems are increasingly attracting the attention of practitioners from diverse industries, from telecommunications to video consoles, as well as academics from different fields ranging from management to economics, and information systems (IS) and innovation management. A platform-mediated ecosystem can be defined broadly as an industrial architecture with an infrastructure in the center that facilitates value co-creation among different agents (platform owners, and providers and users of complementary products) and a set of rules governing their interdependencies. The speed and the magnitude at which platforms diffuse are inspiring numerous analyses from diverse perspectives, mainly focused on drivers of success and ecosystem interdependencies in different contexts. This thesis highlights the importance of detangling the different interdependencies within platform-mediated ecosystems, while building a comprehensive approach based on the ecosystem as a whole. The wide range of platform types and their rapid evolution makes it difficult to establish a consensual categorization of platforms. A common aspect among most of them is that platform-mediated ecosystems usually present network effects that is the value of products depend on the number of peers within the ecosystem. In this sense, the number of adopters, known also as the size of the installed base, in a market has traditionally had a central importance in the literature. The platform-mediated ecosystems, however, are becoming more and more complex due to rising competition. Thus, there is a need for advancing understanding of the fundamentals of platform-mediated ecosystems and the management alternatives inherent in designing such systems which would enable a comprehensive platform approach to be built. Consequently, the main purpose of this thesis is to advance the understanding of the strategic management of platform-mediated ecosystems. Specifically, this thesis aims to unravel the ecosystem interdependencies and to identify strategic choices as a source of competitive advantage. To achieve this aim, different methodologies are applied in this thesis. Specifically, Paper I was based on a structured literature review of relevant papers in platform-mediated ecosystems for the period 2000 through 2014. The empirical analyses conducted in Papers II, III, and IV use different secondary samples from the video console ecosystem. Finally, the results in Paper V were based on a qualitative, multiple case study of global manufacturing firms implementing product-service systems (PSS) through a platform architecture. Overall, the findings within this thesis present the following main theoretical contributions. First, the thesis presents a comprehensive approach toward platform mediated ecosystems covering new ways of value creation and value capture, new governance regimes, and new agents making interdependent choices. Precisely, platform ecosystems offer unprecedented efficiencies and innovation enhancements, and the possibility of establishing rules for new role participation and interaction. Thus, the findings shed light on the fundamentals and future trends in the platform approach. Second, different ecosystem interdependencies may increase the platform adoption and performance. Specifically, the thesis highlights the importance of the positive effects from different agents in the complementary product markets. Accordingly, the findings contribute on unraveling the interdependencies within platform ecosystems. Third, platform performance can be enhanced by exploiting complementarities among strategies and regions. Precisely, the findings show significant complementarities from the joint management of different activities related to the complementary products and the platform, and from the presence in several countries. Consequently, the findings provide strategic choices as a source of competitive advantage. Finally, transformation toward global PSS may be guided by a platform approach, which may be helpful to explain the origins in building a platform ecosystem. In this respect, the findings shed light on how platform-mediated ecosystems are created. In sum, these findings have important implications for researchers in strategic management, economics, and information systems as well as managers from highly innovative industries and traditional sectors under structural transformation. This thesis concludes with the limitations that should be considered when interpreting the findings and some suggestions for future researchers. / Godkänd; 2015; 20150917 (javcen); Nedanstående person kommer att disputera för avläggande av teknologie doktorsexamen. Namn: Javier Cenamor Gómez Ämne: Entreprenörskap och innovation/Entrepreneurship and Innovation Avhandling: Managing Platform-Mediated Ecosystems: Investigating Ecosystem Interdependencies and strategic Choises Opponent: Biträdande professor Andreas Larsson, Institutionen för maskinteknik, Blekinge tekniska högskola, Karlskrona. Ordförande: Biträdande professor Vinit Parida, Avd för innovation och design, Institutionen för ekonomi, teknik och samhälle, Luleå tekniska universitet, Luleå. Tid: Tisdag 10 november, 2015 kl 13.00

Detta arbete behandlar artificiell intelligens som beslutsmetod. Efter inledande diskussioner om de övergripande skillnaderna mellan hjärnans och datorns funktionssätt, olika utvecklingsinriktningar av artificiell intelligens samt olika metoder för att skapa artificiell intelligens identifieras strategier för hur artificiell intelligens kan användas som beslutsmetod beroende på faktorer som transparens, effektivitet samt mängden tillgänglig testdata. Exempelvis identifieras några typiska beslutssituationer där det kan antas att automatiserat beslutsfattande baserat på artificiell intelligens har stor potential, samt situationer då metoden kan antas vara mindre lämplig. Därefter analyseras teknikutvecklingen inom artificiell intelligens, både generellt och inom fyra specifika tillämpningsområden: inom autonoma fordon, inom finans, inom medicin och inom militären. Både den övergripande undersökningen av den generella teknikutvecklingen och studien av de fyra teknikområdena indikerar fortsatt mycket snabb utveckling inom området. Exempelvis visar en analys av patentdatabasen Espacenet att antalet patent inom området utvecklas i det närmaste exponentiellt. Samtidigt har det på senare tid gjorts flera tekniska genombrott, t.ex. utvecklandet av allt effektivare algoritmer genom användandet av hierarkiska strukturer med flera olika nivåer av ickelinjär informationsbearbetning, något som ofta benämns Deep Learning. Ett exempel är den metod för artificiell intelligens som utvecklas av DeepMind, som visat sig vara tillämpningsbar inom många olika områden, från att spela klassiska datorspel som Space Invaders och Breakout på en övermänsklig nivå till att göra betydande effektiviseringar i driften av Googles datorhallar. Även ur ett hårdvaruperspektiv är utvecklingen närmast exponentiell, driven av kontinuerliga framsteg inom tillverkningsprocesser samtidigt som det nyligen gjorts betydande framsteg med specialiserade kretsar för artificiell intelligens, något som sannolikt kommer att resultera i ännu snabbare utveckling av kraftfullare artificiell intelligens inom en nära framtid. Med hänsyn till teknikens effektivitet och den mycket snabba utvecklingen inom området diskuteras även några specifika frågeställningar som ofta nämns i diskussionen om artificiell intelligens, dess påverkan på arbetsmarknaden och den globala säkerhetsbalansen, för att baserat på detta sedan diskutera artificiell intelligens som beslutsmetod även i ett vidare perspektiv.

EU regulations, decisions and policy making are matters that concern every resident in the EU and risk and benefit assessment and analysis form part of the EU decision and policy making. This thesis discusses the decision/policy making in the EU and the risk assessment activities of the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) and the European Chemicals Agency (ECHA), as well as ECHA’s socio-economic analysis activities. It also studies the role of the European Commission and the Comitology process. The EU regulates what chemicals or food stuffs/ingredients, for instance additives, may be made available in the European market. How the decisions are made about what is allowed and what not, and who makes those decisions, is not necessarily evident due to the complexity of the processes. In this thesis the decision making at different stages of the EU regulatory processes has been identified and analysed in order to find out by whom and how the decisions are made. The method used was a literature search with an overview of the existing theories and research from the areas of EU decision making, risk assessment and risk management. The regulatory processes were studied from a decision making perspective with the aim to identify and record possible decision making opportunities of different actors beyond the European Commission. The decision making opportunities were classified and organised based on their level of impact to the processes. Two real cases were studied: the restriction of lead in jewellery under REACH Annex XV restrictions and the authorisation of ammonium chloride in food under Flavourings regulation. Decision making opportunities and methods were looked for in those processes. It was found that while, in the studied cases, there appeared possibilities to ensure science based good regulatory decision/policy making, it remained uncertain and possibly politicised. It was also revealed that in certain steps the processes lacked transparency.

Railways are one of the most important transport systems. It is crucial to have a rail network that is safe, reliable and available. Asset Management for railways involves the optimization of the maintenance activities based on asset condition, life cycle cost and availability of equipment. Irregularities in the track cause the wear of rail resulting in passenger discomfort, speed restrictions and line closures. The track is inspected for these irregularities and corrected using a tamping vehicle. The degradation behavior of the track can be modelled to predict the future degradation. This prediction forms the basis of the maintenance planning based on the expected track condition. A petri net model can be used to simulate the track degradation, inspection and maintenance process over a period of 20 years, and the outputs of the model are used for LCC analysis. Further, the cost is optimized with the safety risk to suggest maintenance threshold levels and Inspection Interval. The proposed methodology will assist the maintenance decision system for Asset Management of Railway track, which is strategic and cost effective. This methodology is demonstrated using a case study of a Line 414 in Sweden, by modelling the track behavior with Standard Deviation of Longitudinal Level. It can be further expanded and adapted for maintenance planning for similar assets within railways.

This is a master thesis report in vehicle aerodynamics and cooling air management. The thesis is carried out at China Euro Vehicle Technology (CEVT) AB and is part of the course P7010T, Master Thesis in Space Engineering at Luleå University of Technology (LTU). The thesis has been supervised by Mattias Olander at CEVT and Gunnar Hellström at LTU and was done over 20 weeks during the spring semester of 2019. As the vehicle industry moves from mostly using combustion engines to hybrid and electric power systems the importance of decreasing cooling air drag has increased. Cooling air drag can be around 5-15% of the total drag, and a lot of research has been done over the years on how to decrease it. Cooling drag is defined as the force acting in x-direction from the cooling air flowing through the engine bay. The air is let in through the grilles to cool down the engine and escapes through different outtakes usually below the vehicle and through the wheelhouse. The air loses a lot of energy inside the engine bay as well as it changes in temperature. In this study a method has been developed to include the energy equation in the aerodynamic computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation. Research has also been done on which design parameters that affect the cooling air drag and how air ducts could be designed to better transport the flow to and from the radiators without loosing to much in energy. In the first part of this study a method was developed to solve the vehicle aerodynamics with energy equation included. All method development and design parameter tests weredone on the Sport Utility Vehicle (SUV) A model, which is a CEVT concept car. The model was first implemented on a simple symmetric model and then on a full model. It was tested both with a normal steady state solution and a pseudo transient solutions. The pseudo transient solution proved to solve for a faster convergence, although both methods worked well. Therefore the design parameter testing was chosen to be done with the pseudo transient solver.The design parameter testing was done in two steps, first opening and closing different outlets and then trying to implement different cooling air ducts. The first study showed that air through the wheelhouses increases the drag as well as having air entering only inthe upper grille and travelling down through floor and wheelhouse. In the second study,the area between the grilles and cooling package was sealed and inlet ducts were created to control the flow from the grilles to the cooling package. When just adding inlet ducts, the mass flow through the grilles was decreased, but the mass flow through the cooling package was increased due to less separation of the air, which lead to a drag reduction of 0.2%. Other design implementations was to reshape the wheelhouse outlets, therefore a wheelhouse outlet duct was designed. The ducts purpose was to lead the air out of the wheelhouse and behind the tire and exit the vehicle parallel to the free stream flow. The wheelhouse duct is most effective and decreases the drag force by 0.7%. An air duct was also designed to lead the flow after the cooling package fan to the outlets. The ducts purpose was to prevent the air from loosing in energy when rising to the roof of the engine bay, the duct compresses the air and leads it efficiently over the engine with a drag force decrease on 0.3%. The inlet duct, wheelhouse duct and after fan duct was all put together to a thesis design. Due to the higher mass flow through the cooling package the upper grille could be sealed by 9.9% and still allow the same mass flow through the cooling package as for the SUV A. The thesis design for improved cooling air management allowed a decrease of drag force timesarea by 0.9%. In conclusion there is much that can be done to improve the cooling air drag. It is most favorable to have a sealed volume with inlet air ducts before the cooling package, have outtakes aligned with the free stream flow, minimize cooling air to escape through the wheelhouse outlets and to minimize the height of the engine bay as much as possible.

Healthcare systems face many challenges that prevent them from reaching their full potential. Overcoming these challenges can be very difficult in part because of their complexity. Predicting all the possible effects that improvement attempts may create is difficult and high-quality decision support material is difficult to obtain. System dynamics modeling and simulation is a technology that has been applied for some time within the healthcare domain in order to assist the decision-making process. This technology has gained increased interest in the domain over the past decade. This project analyses the application of system dynamics modeling to a specific problem in the healthcare sector, namely that of frequent attenders to the emergency department. A literature review is performed to extract suggestions that could be considered when engaged in the process of developing a system dynamics model for managing frequent attenders in healthcare. It has been found that the research on frequent attenders and their management is very heterogeneous and ambiguous making it difficult to draw strong conclusions about the effectiveness of different management strategies. Model builders are forced to turn to other sources for model data. It is also found that system dynamics modeling of frequent attenders has not yet been done. This situation led to the expansion of the search scope to include related modeling research as the basis for suggestion extraction. 65 suggestions are extracted into three broad categories with the limitation of not being strictly specific to the modeling of frequent attenders, but have a more general nature. And although their value is not evaluated, it is hoped that they could contribute as inspiration to certain system dynamics model development endeavors.

Basning är en metod där värme och fukt används för att göra träplastiskt och böjbart. Den traditionella metoden att böja trä är att använda en låda eller ett rör och påföra värme och ånga för att mjuka upp träet inför böjning. Böjningen sker sedan utanför basningslådan. Det här examensarbetet   att basa trä i en påse och genomföra själva böjningen när träet fortfarande finns kvar i ångpåsen. Här beskrivs framtagandet av den flexibla och lättanvända basningspåsen STEAM BAG, från inledande tester, framtagande av böjmall och kompressionsband till utvärdering och jämförelse med traditionell basning. Resultatet av mina tester visa att det är möjligt att förbättra böj metoden traditionell basning med hjälp av ångpåsen då det går att bibehålla värmen och ångan under själva böjningsprocessen.

The importance of reducing the energy consumption and commit towards sustainability efforts has become increasingly important for organizations to consider. Often, managers rely on technology to reduce the energy consumption within facilities. The importance of the behaviour of people within the facility is often overlooked. This thesis focus on investigating how the retail industry in Australia can reduce its energy consumption by changing the behaviours of employees within the facilities. In order to answer how the retail industry can reduce its consumption the following research questions was established:   -          What processes contributes to the energy consumption at a retail facility?   -          How does occupant behaviour affect the energy consumption at a retail facility?   -          How does internal influence barriers for an organization affect the energy consumption within a retail facility?   The following master thesis of 30 ECTS is a qualitative, explorative case study conducted at one of Scanias facilities in Prestons, Sydney. With roughly 80 employees and 12 workshop bays. Primary data have been collected from semi-structured interviews, observations and survey questions. The results showed that behaviour are influenced by many drivers and personal values are often not a good predictor of behaviour. Internal barriers occurring in the facility are lack of vision, people, communication, resource and management. Furthermore, norms and behavioural practices change along with the change of environment. Conversations about energy and sharing of energy-efficient experiences and knowledge are not occurring in the facility. However, there is a strong willingness and desire to change and to develop more efficient behaviours at the facility in Sydney. Lastly, occupant behaviour such as lack of communication, turning off the lights or AC and not turning off their computers are the biggest contributors to the energy being consumed in a retail facility.

In this project a model has been created that with an audio sequence as input can classify the language being spoken to be either english or french. The focus of the project has been to experiment with different ways to process audio files and to design a neural network in order to maximize the performance for the task of language classification. The purpose of the project was to investigate the highest reachable accuracy and to examine what sample length that would be appropriate in order to be useful in voice control application. The signal processing part dealt mainly with how enveloping, Mel frequency ceptral coefficients (MFCC) and Mel frequency spectral coefficients (MFSC) could be used to enhance the accuracy of the model. The neural network design focused on how the width and depth of the network and the use of dropouts could be used to increase the performance. The experiments resulted in a model with a maximum accuracy of 92,30 % that could outperform humans for samples of approximately 1,2 seconds of shorter. A suitable sample length to be usable in other applications was concluded to be in the interval of 0,7 to 1,5 seconds.

Industries aim to have a high performance to get a high profitability. A high performance comes from the employees' work performance every day. This work performance for industry employees comes largely from the motivation they feel for the work. In this study, work motivation for employees in industry has been examined through a questionnaire study together with interviews with selected persons from the management. The conclusion for this study is that employees' work motivation in industry´s is strongly linked to how the management manages and acts within the organization. The management influences the employees' motivation by controlling how the organization is structured, which reward systems are to be used and how the corporate culture is structured. If employees in industry´s experience high motivation for their work, the work performance will increase along with increased work motivation. The result of this study shows how corporate culture together with other motivation factors can motivate employees to increase work performance in the manufacturing industry. This study has also resulted in a self-developed model that can be used by companies to increase work motivation and thereby the work performance of the company.