Abstract: This thesis focuses on the physical strain of geocaching in individual age categories in The Central Bohemian region. Geocaching is a new outdoor activity, based on a popular game, which was played by generations of children and young people. The players seek for a well hidden treasure a container called "cache". This game connects younger and older age groups, who have a common aim. It supports the cooperation of different generations, whose family trips get a new motivation. The geocachers get to know interesting towns and cities, their history, national parks or other nature beauties. This final paper compares the physical strain of some age groups of geocachers from the Central Bohemian region. The thesis concentrates on the frequency, length and energetic demands of their routes.

Today, climate change is one of the world's greatest challenges. The main cause of this is humans' emissions of greenhouse gases, which for instance occur when burning fossil fuels. A prerequisite for meeting this challenge is that society change the way energy is produced and used. In the pursuit of fighting climate change, it is therefore crucial to create awareness among people regarding energy use. The purpose of this thesis project is to design a cultivation unit which uses residual heat. In this way, we aim to create awareness regarding the reuse of energy that would otherwise be wasted in society. To achieve this, we have used an established design process and creative methods, such as workshops, focus groups and prototyping. The thesis project resulted in a concept for a cultivation unit that in an innovative way brings attention to the reuse of residual heat. The work has been carried out in collaboration with Luleå Energi, an energy company that supplies Luleå with energy, and works to create conditions for more sustainable energy use. / Idag är klimatförändringar en av världens största utmaningar. Den främsta orsaken är människors utsläpp av växthusgaser, som bland annat förekommer vid förbränning av fossila bränslen. En förutsättning för att möta denna utmaning är att samhället förändrar det sätt energi produceras och används. En viktig del i strävan mot att bekämpa klimatförändringarna är därför att skapa en medvetenhet hos människor gällande energianvändning. Syftet med det här examensarbetet är att utforma en odlingsenhet som använder sig av restvärme, för att på så sätt uppmärksamma återanvändningen av den energi som annars går till spillo i samhället. För att uppnå detta har ett designarbete genomförts genom en etablerad designprocess och kreativa metoder, såsom workshops, fokusgrupper och prototyper. Examensarbetet resulterade i ett koncept för en odlingsenhet som på ett innovativt sätt uppmärksammar återanvändningen av restvärme. Arbetet har genomförts i samarbete med Luleå Energi, ett energiföretag som förser Luleå med energi och som arbetar med att skapa förutsättningar för en mer hållbar energianvändning.

Demand-Side Management concepts have the potential to positively impact the financial as well as the environmental aspects of energy-intensive industries. More specifically, they allow reducing the energy cost for the industrial plants by dealing with energy-availability fluctuations. In this context, efficient frameworks for scheduling with energy awareness have been studied and showed potential to reduce the overall energy bill for energy-intensive industries, for instance stainless steel and paper plants. Those frameworks usually combine scheduling and energy optimization into one monolithic system. This work investigates the possibility of integrating the two systems by specific exchange of signals, while keeping the scheduling model separated from the energy-cost optimization model. Such integration means that the pre-existent schedulers and energy optimizers could be easily modified and reused without re-implementing the whole new system. Two industrial problems with different scheduling approaches are studied. The first problem is about pulp and paper production which uses the Resource Task Network (RTN) scheduling approach. The second one is about stainless steel production which is based on a bi-level heuristic implementation of an improved energy-aware scheduler. This work presents the decomposition methods that are available in literature and their application to the two industrial problems. Besides an improvement in the RTN approach for handling storages, this thesis describes a prototype implementation of the energy-aware RTN scheduler for paper and pulp production. Furthermore, this work investigates the performance of the application of different decomposition methods on different problem instances. The numerical case studies show that even though the decomposition decreases the solution quality compared to the monolithic system, it still gives good solutions within an acceptable duration with the advantage of having two separate pre-existent systems which are simply exchanging signals.

Purpose: this degree project investigates the homeowner’s knowledge about their energy use and the impact of using visualisation tools such as thermal imaging to enhance public engagement in energy conservation in building. Additionally, the study try to increase the understanding of how people's behavior affects the energy use in buildings. The method: the presented study is based on 12 participants who own a single-family house in central Sweden. Participation in this study involved responding to two questionnaires and conducting a thermography inspection. A methodology developed to replace a standard thermography inspection with a DIY themography survey. The study identified and filled the gap in the literature, by allowing house owners to carry out the thermographing inspection of their own buildings, free of charge and by themselves. The participants took part of a developed educational material that helps in increasing energy awareness and includes explanations about how to interpret the thermal images and provides suggestions for possible conservation measures. Finally, a data analyse carried out based on questionnairs, thermal images and communications with the house owners. The results: cold bridges are the most common cause of heat loss in the inspected single-family houses. Householders with older buildings who have long term plan to live in their building are willing to implement measures, while participants with newer buildings do not consider it as necessary. The infrared camera has been an effective tool for visualization of heat loss and attract attention. Many participants are surprised over the results. Conclusion: the study confirms that the infrared camera is an effective tool for heat loss visualization and can be used for enhancing public engagement in energy conservation in building. Thanks to this visualization, Swedish homeowners have gained an increased interest in energy-efficient measures such as additional insulation, window replacement and sun protection. The study has increased the general awareness and knowledge regarding energy efficiency in buildings.

The continuous growth of traffic demand driven by the brisk increase in number of Internet users and emerging online services creates new challenges for communication networks. The latest advances in Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM) technology make it possible to build Transparent Optical Networks (TONs) which are expected to be able to satisfy this rapidly growing capacity demand. Moreover, with the ability of TONs to transparently carry the optical signal from source to destination, electronic processing of the tremendous amount of data can be avoided and optical-to-electrical-to-optical (O/E/O) conversion at intermediate nodes can be eliminated. Consequently, transparent WDM networks consume relatively low power, compared to their electronic-based IP network counterpart. Furthermore, TONs bring also additional benefits in terms of bit rate, signal format, and protocol transparency. However, the absence of O/E/O processing at intermediate nodes in TONs has also some drawbacks. Without regeneration, the quality of the optical signal transmitted from a source to a destination might be degraded due to the effect of physical-layer impairments induced by the transmission through optical fibers and network components. For this reason, routing approaches specifically tailored to account for the effect of physical-layer impairments are needed to avoid setting up connections that don’t satisfy required signal quality at the receiver. Transparency also makes TONs highly vulnerable to deliberate physical-layer attacks. Malicious attacking signals can cause a severe impact on the traffic and for this reason proactive mechanisms, e.g., network design strategies, able to limit their effect are required. Finally, even though energy consumption of transparent WDM networks is lower than in the case of networks processing the traffic at the nodes in the electronic domain, they have the potential to consume even less power. This can be accomplished by targeting the inefficiencies of the current provisioning strategies applied in WDM networks. The work in this thesis addresses the three important aspects mentioned above. In particular, this thesis focuses on routing and wavelength assignment (RWA) strategies specifically devised to target: (i) the lightpath transmission quality, (ii) the network security (i.e., in terms of vulnerability to physical-layer attacks), and (iii) the reduction of the network energy consumption. Our contributions are summarized below. A number of Impairment Constraint Based Routing (ICBR) algorithms have been proposed in the literature to consider physical-layer impairments during the connection provisioning phase. Their objective is to prevent the selection of optical connections (referred to as lightpaths) with poor signal quality. These ICBR approaches always assign each connection request the least impaired lightpath and support only a single threshold of transmission quality, used for all connection requests. However, next generation networks are expected to support a variety of services with disparate requirements for transmission quality. To address this issue, in this thesis we propose an ICBR algorithm supporting differentiation of services at the Bit Error Rate (BER) level, referred to as ICBR-Diff. Our approach takes into account the effect of physical-layer impairments during the connection provisioning phase where various BER thresholds are considered for accepting/blocking connection requests, depending on the signal quality requirements of the connection requests. We tested the proposed ICBR-Diff approach in different network scenarios, including also a fiber heterogeneity. It is shown that it can achieve a significant improvement of network performance in terms of connection blocking, compared to previously published non-differentiated RWA and ICBR algorithms.  Another important challenge to be considered in TONs is their vulnerability to physical-layer attacks. Deliberate attacking signals, e.g., high-power jamming, can cause severe service disruption or even service denial, due to their ability to propagate in the network. Detecting and locating the source of such attacks is difficult, since monitoring must be done in the optical domain, and it is also very expensive. Several attack-aware RWA algorithms have been proposed in the literature to proactively reduce the disruption caused by high-power jamming attacks. However, even with attack-aware network planning mechanisms, the uncontrollable propagation of the attack still remains an issue. To address this problem, we propose the use of power equalizers inside the network nodes in order to limit the propagation of high-power jamming attacks. Because of the high cost of such equipment, we develop a series of heuristics (incl. Greedy Randomized Adaptive Search Procedure (GRASP)) aiming at minimizing the number of power equalizers needed to reduce the network attack vulnerability to a desired level by optimizing the location of the equalizers. Our simulation results show that the equalizer placement obtained by the proposed GRASP approach allows for 50% reduction of the sites with the power equalizers while offering the same level of attack propagation limitation as it is possible to achieve with all nodes having this additional equipment installed. In turn, this potentially yields a significant cost saving.    Energy consumption in TONs has been the target of several studies focusing on the energy-aware and survivable network design problem for both dedicated and shared path protection. However, survivability and energy efficiency in a dynamic provisioning scenario has not been addressed. To fill this gap, in this thesis we focus on the power consumption of survivable WDM network with dynamically provisioned 1:1 dedicated path protected connections. We first investigate the potential energy savings that are achievable by setting all unused protection resources into a lower-power, stand-by state (or sleep mode) during normal network operations. It is shown that in this way the network power consumption can be significantly reduced. Thus, to optimize the energy savings, we propose and evaluate a series of energy-efficient strategies, specifically tailored around the sleep mode functionality. The performance evaluation results reveal the existence of a trade-off between energy saving and connection blocking. Nonetheless, they also show that with the right provisioning strategy it is possible to save a considerable amount of energy with a negligible impact on the connection blocking probability. In order to evaluate the performance of our proposed ICBR-Diff and energy-aware RWA algorithms, we develop two custom-made discrete-event simulators. In addition, the Matlab program of GRASP approach for power equalization placement problem is implemented. / <p>QC 20120508</p>