Diss. (sammanfattning) Uppsala : Sveriges lantbruksuniversitet, 2004. / Härtill 4 uppsatser.

This thesis will investigate the possibility of leasing as a 'greener' form of business transaction. With leasing, the customer pays for the service obtained form the product, but does not own the physical asset; ownership remains with the lessor. This has been claimed to increase resource productivity and close material loops. Numerous complications exist, however, such as tax regulations limiting operating leases to terms of 75% of the total product's life. In addition, no clear pattern has emerged in leasing practices, and in most cases manufacturers approach leasing on an ad hoc basis. Research has found that usage-phase impacts play a major role in determining the advantages realized by leasing. Products such as vehicles or refrigerators that continually consume energy negatively impact the environment much more during their use than during manufacturing or transportation. Because most lease agreements contain maintenance contracts, the opportunity to upgrade and increase product efficiency during this use-phase is paramount to reducing negative impacts. Remanufacturing also shows potential to further reduce resource requirements. However, if product efficiency is not improving significantly, remanufacturing alone does not make a significant impact. In some cases, such as carpets, remanufacturing is not practical, but recycling can be utilized. However, tax regulations require leased terms to be less than that of a product's designed life, hastening replacement. This has the potential to offset any advantages seen with a lease agreement. Academic work in this area remains very limited and product-specific. Case study analyses performed in this thesis found that increased product turnover can actually be environmentally beneficial when product technology is improving. These gains can be further improved with remanufacturing and optimized product replacement moderated by lease agreements. If usage energy is significantly less than manufacturing energy, leasing has little value for reducing impacts. Also leasing may motivate closed material loops, without improving product efficiencies there is no advantage to optimizing life cycles with lease contracts.

The objective of reservoir management is to maximize a key performance indicator (net present value in this study) at a minimum cost. A typical approach includes engineering analysis, followed by the economic value of the technical study. In general, operators are inclined to spend more effort on the engineering side to the detriment of the economic area, leading to unbalanced and occasionally suboptimal results. Moreover, most of the optimization methods used for production scheduling focus on a given recovery phase, or medium-term strategy, as opposed to an integrated solution that allocates resources from discovery to field abandonment. This thesis addresses the optimization of a reservoir under both technical and economic constraints. In particular, the method presented introduces a life cycle maximization approach to establish the best exploitation strategy throughout the life of the project. Deterministic studies are combined with stochastic modeling and risk analysis to assess decision making under uncertainty. To demonstrate the validity of the model, this document offers two case studies and the optimal times associated with each recovery phase. In contrast with traditional depletion strategies, where the optimization is done myopically by maximizing the net present value at each recovery phase, our results suggest that time is dramatically reduced when the net present value is optimized globally by maximizing the NPV for the life of the project. Furthermore, the sensitivity analysis proves that the original oil in place and non-engineering parameters such as the price of oil are the most influential variables. The case studies clearly show the greater economic efficiency of this life cycle approach, confirming the potential of this optimization technique for practical reservoir management. / text

Il y a peu, j’ai pu lire « qu’on pouvait considérer que les ponts romains de l’Antiquité, pouvaient être considérés comme inefficaces, au regard des standards actuels : ils utilisaient trop de pierre et énormément de travail était nécessaire à leur construction. Au fil des années, pour répondre à une problématique équivalente, nous avons appris à utiliser moins de matériaux et à réduire la charge de travail ». Ces problématiques nous les retrouvons aussi en conception mécanique où l’on essaye en continu de proposer des systèmes de plus en plus performants mais devant être conçus en moins de temps, étant moins cher à produire et fournissant des prestations au moins équivalentes à ce qui a déjà été conçu.Au cours d'un processus de conception classique, les concepteurs définissent une géométrie ne présentant aucun défaut puis, étant donné que les moyens de production ne permettent pas d’obtenir de telles pièces finales, ils spécifient les schémas de cotation définissant les écarts acceptables garantissant le bon fonctionnement du système. Seulement, cela est fait après avoir produit les dessins détaillés, c'est à dire trop tard. Pour répondre à cette problématique, je présenterai l’intégration, très tôt dans le cycle de vie de conception, d’un processus de validation optimisé, basé sur une maquette numérique directement en lien avec sa représentation fonctionnelle (maquette fonctionnelle), et permettant de valider des schémas de cotation 3D standardisés.Je décrirai d'abord ce que l’on entend par « maquette fonctionnelle » et surtout ce que cette nouvelle définition apporte en plus de la définition numérique. Une fois ce point abordé, je détaillerai les liens qui permettent d’avoir une unicité de l’information au sein de l’environnement de travail, tout comme les processus qui permettent de lier les représentations fonctionnelles et numériques.Ensuite, je détaillerai les processus basés sur ces concepts, et qui ont pour but de valider les choix qui sont effectués en avance de phase au niveau des schémas de cotation. Pour ce faire, je commencerai par présenter l’analyse au pire des cas (utilisant les modèles de domaines écarts notamment), permettant de garantir le bon fonctionnement de l’ensemble mécanique, dans le cas ou touts les écarts se retrouvent à l’intérieur des zones respectives (définies par les tolérances).Enfin, je finirai par introduire ce qu’une couche statistique, couplée à l’analyse au pire des cas utilisant les enveloppes convexes, peut amener dans le contexte industriel et notamment sous la contrainte temporelle. / Some time ago, I read "According to our current standards, we could consider Roman bridges of ancient times as ineffective: they used too much stone and hard work during construction. Over the years, in order to respond to similar problems, we learned how to use fewer materials and reduce the workload. These issues can also be found in the mechanical design field, where we continuously try to offer more efficient systems, but which have to be designed in less time, be cheaper to produce and provide benefits at least equivalent to what has already been designed.During a conventional design process, designers define the ideal geometries and - given that the machining tools cannot produce mechanical parts without any geometrical defects - specify the associated tolerancing schemes. These tolerancing schemes define acceptable geometrical deviations, thus providing a well-functioning system. Unfortunately this is done after having designed detailed parts and thus, too late.In order to address this problem, I will begin by introducing the integration, in the first design stages, of a new optimized validation process based on a Digital Mock-Up, directly linked to its functional representation (Functional Mock-Up), in order to validate 3D standardized tolerancing schemes. I'll first describe what is meant by "Functional Mock-Up" (FMU) and specify which information is added to the Digital Mock-Up (DMU). Once that is done, I will detail the relationship that leads to the uniqueness of the information and the processes linking the Functional and Digital representations.Then, I'll detail the processes based on these concepts, which aim to validate the tolerancing schemes, during the early design stages. To do this, I'll begin by introducing the worst case analysis (using the deviation domain model), which ensures the proper functioning of the mechanical system. Finally, I will end this by introducing the benefits that can be brought, by coupling a statistical layer to the worst case analysis (using the convex hull).