This thesis investigates minimal surfaces in design and researches their potential for constructability in concrete through the creation of physical prototypes with the design of two mold making processes, one being sacrificial and the other reusable. The study starts by acknowledging that minimal surfaces have been extensively explored in the field of differential geometry for decades. In spite of the availability of geometric definitions which provide the basic background for digital model generation (which in this text is assumed to be equal to design itself), minimal surfaces inspired very few people in their architectural design. This study attempts to look into the wider implications of minimal surfaces for architecture by taking up the challenge of designing and realizing various processes of mold making for the fabrication of such surfaces in concrete. Throughout this study, a gradient of complexity in the definition and digital modeling of minimal surfaces will be included as well as a variety of production methods in a research and fabrication based process, in order to investigate the correlation between what can be designed and what can be produced. I shall begin with a historical survey of the constructability of surfaces in thin shell concrete to provide background information for the reader. This chapter on the evolution of concrete structures presents a compilation of selected projects to illustrate the progress of thin shell construction throughout the history of architecture. It is here that I review what happened, why, and who made it possible. I draw heavily on published scholarly studies as most of the selected projects are cornerstones of the evolution of architecture and have been discussed by many others. Here, I simply attempt to remind the reader of the achievements of these projects in order to justify why investigation of the constructability of minimal surfaces may be the next step in the evolutionary process. After this section, the mathematics of surfaces in the complex plane is discussed based on information retrieved from many excellent resources. Here, the intention is to acquire information related to descriptions of various minimal surface types in differential geometry in order to be able to generate their representations in the digital environment. It would have been impossible to generate digital representations of minimal surfaces without the knowledge acquired through these descriptions. The last section provides a comparison of ruled surfaces and minimal surfaces meant to reveal the similarities and differences of such surfaces with regard to the principles of digital representation and fabrication. It provides insight into various fabrication techniques and materials to illuminate the design of a making process in which the goal is to know and control every parameter regarding both the design and fabrication of an object. The discussion of the design of a making process for a complexly shaped object provided in this part is followed by discussion of casting prototypes in concrete. In that section, the subject matter is the design and testing of various mold making techniques for the production of concrete prototypes of a selected minimal surface geometry. This section presents an increasing complexity of mold making from a sacrificial mold to a reusable mold.

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The ability of the software engineering community to achieve high levels of reuse from software frameworks has been tempered by the difficulty in understanding how to reuse them properly. When written correctly, a plugin can take advantage of the framework’s code and architecture to provide a rich application with relatively few lines of code. Unfortunately, doing this correctly is difficult because frameworks frequently require plugin developers to be aware of complex protocols between objects, and improper use of these protocols causes exceptions and unexpected behavior at run time. This dissertation introduces collaboration constraints, rules governing how multiple objects may interact in a complex protocol. These constraints are particularly difficult to understand and analyze because they may extend across type boundaries and even programming language boundaries. This thesis improves the state of the art through two mechanisms. First, it provides a deep understanding of these collaboration constraints and the framework designs which create them. Second, it introduces Fusion, an adoptable specification language and static analysis tool, that detects broken collaboration constraints in plugin code and demonstrates how to achieve this goal in a cost-effective manner that is practical for industry use. In this dissertation, I have done an empirical study of framework help forums which showed that collaboration constraints are burdensome for developers, as they take hours or even days to resolve. From this empirical study, I have identified several common properties of collaboration constraints. This motivated a new specification language, called Fusion, that is tailored for specifying collaboration constraints in a practical way. The specification language uses relationships to describe the abstract associations between objects and allows developers to specify collaboration constraints as logical predicates of relationships. Since a relationship is an abstraction above the code, this allows developers to easily specify constraints that cross type and language boundaries. There are three variants of the analysis: a sound variant that has false positives but no false negatives, a complete variant that has false negatives but no false positives, and a pragmatic variant that attempts to balance this tradeoff. In this dissertation, I successfully used Fusion to specify and analyze constraints from examples found in the help forums of the ASP.NET and Spring frameworks. Additionally, I ran Fusion on DaCapo, a 1.5 MLOC DaCapo benchmark for program analysis, to show that Fusion is scalable and provides precise enough results for industry with low specification cost. This dissertation examines many tradeoffs: the tradeoffs of framework designs, the tradeoffs of specification precision, and the tradeoffs of program analysis results are all featured. A central theme of this work is that there is no single right solution to collaboration constraints; there are only solutions that work better for a particular instance of the problem.

Dans un monde industriel marqué par un contexte économique difficile, les entreprises se doivent d’étudier toutes les possibilités de réduction de coûts et d’optimisation de leur chaîne logistique. Un des champs récents d’optimisation développé dans la littérature concerne le concept de logistique inverse. Cette logistique représente la gestion des flux traversant une chaîne logistique dans le sens inverse des flux traditionnels. On y retrouve des activités liées au recyclage, à la réparation ou encore à la réutilisation de produits. Au sein de la Chaire Supply Chain, nous nous sommes donc intéressés à l’optimisation de la gestion de ces flux de retours, avec les contenants réutilisables comme objet d’étude intéressant pour nos différents partenaires. Dans ce sens, après avoir passé en revue la littérature sur le concept général de la logistique inverse, nous développons un ensemble de modèles recouvrant les combinaisons mono ou multi niveaux, mono ou multi périodes et mono ou multi contenants afin d’optimiser ces retours au sein de chaînes logistiques déjà définies. Ces modèles sont par la suite appliqués, soit fictivement pour un des modèles mono-période résolu grâce à une heuristique de décomposition développée pour des réseaux logistiques de grande taille, soit réellement chez nos partenaires pour les modèles multi-périodes résolus de façon exacte. Le but de ces applications étant d’utiliser ces modèles théoriques dans un contexte réel d’entreprise et d’en dégager les possibles bénéfices économiques mais également environnementaux grâce à la prise en compte des émissions liées au transport et au cycle de vie de ces contenants. / In an industrial world touched by a complicated economic environment, companies need to explore all opportunities for cost reduction and supply chain optimization. A recent optimization field developed in the literature concerns the concept of reverse logistics. This concept deals with the flows management through a supply chain in the opposite direction to the traditional one. It includes activities related to recycling, repair or products reuse. In partnership with the industrial of the “Chaire Supply Chain”, we are interested in optimizing these reverse flows by focusing more particularly on reusable containers. For that, we propose a literature review on the general concept of reverse logistics and develop a set of models covering combinations between single and multi-levels, single and multi-periods and single and multi-containers problems in order to optimize this type of returns within already defined supply chains. These models are then applied, either in a fictive way for a single-period one solved by a decomposition heuristic proposed for large logistics networks, or in a real way for multi-period models solved exactly and applied to our partners problematic. The purpose of these applications is to use these theoretical models in a real business in order to identify economic benefits but also environmental ones by taking into account emissions from these containers transportation and manufacturing.

This research project report discusses the development of a commercial, consignment-based library (a) of reusable software components to be accessed using the World-Wide Web. The research project consists of two parts: the development of a prototype system that provides interface and information retrieval functionality for such a system, and an analysis of the technical and business issues involved in making the library operational as a commercial entity. <p>The prototype system uses a hypertext browser and a query-based search mechanism to access descriptions of reusable software components; these descriptions are structured by a variation of a faceted classification system. The issues addressed include the classification and description of reusable software components; methods of retrieval, especially library browsing methods based on component classification; and analysis of incentives for reuse. / Master of Science

There are many life cycle assessments performed on nappy products in different countries which differ with waste management, distances to producers of nappies and retailers. In this paper, life cycle assessment is performed using Simapro with assumptions on the Swedish customer and the current waste management that exist in Sweden to evaluate the environmental load for disposable and reusable nappies. The aim of this study is to find out which nappy is better from an environmental perspective. According to the results of this study, reusable nappies perform better in most of the chosen categories. Only a few were outperformed by disposable diapers, these include human carcinogenic, land use, water consumption and stratospheric ozone depletion. The highest impact in the life cycle of a reusable nappy was in the manufacturing phase with cotton production related processes and in the use phase, where most of the impact came from the additional electricity use. For the disposable system, a huge amount of 3796 diapers was needed in the production phase for the nappy usage of an average child. The manufacturing affects the environmental impact categories like resource depletion, freshwater and terrestrial ecotoxicity, ozone formation, global warming potential and others. These findings can improve understanding of different environmental loads of the manufacturing processes, use and end phases of the nappy and contribute to sustainable development. / <p>2020-06-05</p>

There is no doubt Medical Devices have a crucial role in hospital processes such as surgeries and therapeutic procedures. Medical devices available in hospitals are of two types; reusable and non-resalable medical devices. Reusable medical devices are washed and sterilized after each use. The process of sterilizing medical devices is performed in the sterilization department. Each medical device travels through a cycle each time it is utilized. It is explicit that any part of the sterilization cycle that delays the process can cause serious problems for hospitals’ performance. The washing step of the sterilization process has been a bottleneck in the system. Thus, optimization approaches can be highly advantageous to improve this bottleneck. The data of the medical devices are usually unknown prior to the scheduling process since the finishing time of the surgeries are not known in advance. Thus, there is no information available on the ready time of medical devices to be sterilized. Due to this factor, to develop applicable solutions, it is critical to consider this problem as an online problem and develop online scheduling methods. In this thesis, we take advantage of mathematical programming and heuristic algorithms to solve both the offline and online settings of the problem. We model the washing step of the sterilization cycle as a scheduling problem. Batch scheduling and bin packing, two well-known optimization approaches, are used for this purpose. Medical devices are batched together first and then scheduled on machines to reduce the total washing time of all medical devices. First, a mathematical model for the offline problem is provided and tested to solve the problem. Then a series of heuristic algorithms are developed using the batch scheduling approach for solving both offline and online problems. Moreover, a special case with divisible job sizes and equal release dates is studied. It was proved that for the strongly divisible sequence the First Fit Increasing algorithm finds the optimal solution, also for the weakly divisible sequence a Dynamic Programming algorithm is developed. Finally, we couple optimization with simulation to test the impact of the optimization of the washing step on the entire sterilization system. Moreover, since the next step of the sterilization cycle, the sterilization step, is very similar to the washing step, we also implement the developed heuristics in this step to evaluate its performance and improve it further. The results show that as long as the washing step is optimized it does not differ which algorithm is used in the sterilization step, thus, the optimization of this step is not necessary.

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