Purpose – The purpose of this study is to provide a structured process to evaluate data sharing opportunities. In doing so, we provide a three phase process that assists data owners to increase utilisation of their resource, as well as introducing the possibility to scale such a process to other industries through future research. Method – To gain insights, thematic analysis was used on data collected through a single case study in three separate waves of interviews, as well as through observations. A total of 13 respondents were involved, all industry experts from a global pharmaceutical company working actively with the researched question. Findings – The findings resulted in 25 challenges with the current evaluation process, segmented into 11 sub themes and four main themes: Unstructured process for evaluating data sharing, Unclear information gathering requirements, Lack of objective evaluation criteria, and Uncertain decision making. Theoretical contribution – This study contributes to the existing literature by conceptualising challenges with evaluating data sharing opportunities. Furthermore, by applying principles and logic of Stage-Gate methodology, the thesis introduces a more structured way of evaluating data sharing opportunities. Practical contribution – This study introduces a process for data owners and companies within the pharmaceutical industry that facilitate a smoother and more efficient workflow when faced with data sharing opportunities. Our three phase process promotes utilisation to increase development through data sharing. Limitations of the study – The case study was limited to a single company that imposed the risk of bias and misguided focus. We propose future research to trial the recommended process in other companies within the pharmaceutical industry as well as introduce it to other data focused industries. / Syfte - Syftet med den här studien är att tillhandahålla en strukturerad process för att utvärdera möjligheter till datadelning. Därmed tillhandahåller vi en process i tre faser som hjälper dataägare att öka utnyttjandet av sina resurser och som ger möjlighet att skala upp en sådan process till andra branscher genom framtida forskning. Metod - För att få insikter användes tematisk analys av data som samlats in genom en enda fallstudie i tre separata intervjuer samt genom observationer. Totalt deltog 13 respondenter, alla branschexperter från ett globalt läkemedelsföretag som arbetar aktivt med den aktuella forskningsfrågan. Resultat - Resultaten resulterade i 25 utmaningar med den nuvarande utvärderingsprocessen, uppdelade i 11 underteman och fyra huvudteman: Ostrukturerad process för utvärdering av datadelning, otydliga krav på informationsinsamling, brist på objektiva utvärderingskriterier och osäkert beslutsfattande. Teoretiskt bidrag - Den här studien bidrar till den befintliga litteraturen genom att konceptualisera utmaningar med att utvärdera möjligheter till datadelning. Genom att tillämpa principerna och logiken i Stage-Gate-metodiken introducerar avhandlingen dessutom ett mer strukturerat sätt att utvärdera möjligheter till datadelning. Praktiskt bidrag - I denna studie introduceras en process för dataägare och företag inom läkemedelsindustrin som underlättar ett smidigare och effektivare arbetsflöde när de ställs inför möjligheter till datadelning. Vår process i tre faser främjar utnyttjandet för att öka utvecklingen genom datadelning. Begränsningar i studien - Fallstudien var begränsad till ett enda företag, vilket medförde en risk för bias och missriktad fokus. Vi föreslår framtida forskning för att testa den rekommenderade processen i andra företag inom läkemedelsindustrin samt införa den i andra datafokuserade branscher.

The sharing economy, which has been receiving significant attention from research due to its unprecedented growth in the recent past, is being seen as a potential driving force to transform and rethink society’s unsustainable approach to consumption. Especially, the concept of food sharing as part of the sharing economy is being considered as essential for a more sustainable world and thus aims at counteracting the unsustainable consumption behaviour of individuals. Even though the importance of food sharing concepts for society is undisputed, academia lags extensive research of this domain from a consumer perspective.  The aim of this study is to investigate the behavioural intention of consumers to engage and use digital, for profit food sharing platforms in a business to consumer setting to obtain an in-depth understanding of the key determinants by extending the Theory of Planned Behaviour. Additionally, a cross-cultural comparison has been undertaken to acknowledge the international importance of this field.  For the purpose of data collection, an online survey has been conducted. This yielded 4353 responses of which 2995 have been taken into account for the data analysis procedures in SPSS and SmartPLS. The software SmartPLS has been utilized to perform a partial least square structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) assessing the measurement as well as structural model including the testing of the proposed hypotheses. Additionally, a multigroup analysis has been performed to investigate behavioural differences between cultures.  The empirical findings show that perceived usefulness and attitude are the strongest predictors of the behavioural intention followed by perceived behavioural control, economic benefit as well as subjective norm. Moreover, the attitude of consumers is strongly driven by sustainable considerations and the perceived trust of consumers towards digital food sharing platforms. Lastly, no statistically significant moderating effect could be identified with regards to culture.

Bakgrund: Äldreboendet är en plats som utgör den boendes livsmiljö, vilket även innefattar relationer. Då vårdpersonalen är ständigt närvarande kring de äldre, blir skapandet av relationer dem emellan en följd av livet på boendet. I den transpersonella omsorgen har kommunikationen en central position, och att ta sig tid och lyssna och att lära känna varandra i den gemensamma vardagen har både ett etiskt och relationellt värde. Problem: Den relationella aspekten av berättande beskrivs sällan ur den äldres perspektiv, utan dess förtjänster relateras ofta till vårdpersonalens möjlighet att ge personcentrerad vård. Hur upplever de äldre berättande i vårdrelationen och vad upplever de att berättande tillför? Syfte: Att beskriva äldres upplevelser av berättande i vårdrelationer på äldreboende. Metod: Systematisk litteraturstudie med beskrivande syntes, baserad på kvalitativa studier. Resultaten tyder på att äldre genom att berätta om upplevelser och erfarenheter för någon som lyssnar aktivt kan uppleva känslor av stärkt identitet och gemenskap, vilket i sin tur främjar upplevelser av mening och ökad livskvalitet. Slutsatsen är att vårdpersonal genom att visa intresse och skapa utrymme för berättande i vårdrelationen har potential att främja äldres välbefinnande.

With network enabled consumer devices becoming increasingly popular, the number of connected devices and available services is growing considerably - with the number of connected devices es- timated to surpass 15 billion devices by 2015. In this increasingly large and dynamic environment it is important that users have a comprehensive, yet efficient, mechanism to discover services. Many existing wide-area service discovery mechanisms are centralised and do not scale to large numbers of users. Additionally, centralised services suffer from issues such as a single point of failure, high maintenance costs, and difficulty of management. As such, this Thesis seeks a Peer to Peer (P2P) approach. Distributed Hash Tables (DHTs) are well known for their high scalability, financially low barrier of entry, and ability to self manage. They can be used to provide not just a platform on which peers can offer and consume services, but also as a means for users to discover such services. Traditionally DHTs provide a distributed key-value store, with no search functionality. In recent years many P2P systems have been proposed providing support for a sub-set of complex query types, such as keyword search, range queries, and semantic search. This Thesis presents a novel algorithm for performing any type of complex query, from keyword search, to complex regular expressions, to full-text search, over any structured P2P overlay. This is achieved by efficiently broadcasting the search query, allowing each peer to process the query locally, and then efficiently routing responses back to the originating peer. Through experimentation, this technique is shown to be successful when the network is stable, however performance degrades under high levels of network churn. To address the issue of network churn, this Thesis proposes a number of enhancements which can be made to existing P2P overlays in order to improve the performance of both the existing DHT and the proposed algorithm. Through two case studies these enhancements are shown to improve not only the performance of the proposed algorithm under churn, but also the performance of traditional lookup operations in these networks.

The main focus of this PhD thesis is fundamental investigations into control techniques of inverter-based microgrids. It aims to develop new and improved control techniques to enhance performance and reliability. It focuses on the modelling, stability analysis and control design of parallel inverters in a microgrid. In inverter-based microgrids, the paralleled inverters need to work in both grid-connected mode and stand-alone mode and should be able to transfer seamlessly between the two modes. In grid-connected mode, the inverters control the amount of power injected into the grid. In stand-alone mode, however, the inverters control the island voltage while the output power is dictated by the load. This can be achieved using droop control. Inverters can have different power set-points during grid-connected mode but in stand-alone mode they all need their power set-points to be adjusted according to their power ratings. However, during sudden unintentional islanding (due to loss of mains), transient power can flow from inverters with high power set-points to inverters with low power set-points, which can raise the DC link voltage of the inverters causing them to shut down. This thesis investigates the transient circulating power between paralleled inverters during unintentional islanding and proposes a controller to limit it. The controller monitors the DC link voltage and adjusts the power set-point in proportion to the rise in the voltage. A small signal model of an island microgrid has been developed and used to design the controller. The model and the controller design have been validated by simulation and practical experimentation. The results confirmed the performance of the proposed controller for limiting the DC link voltage and supporting a seamless mode transfer. The limitation of the droop controller, that is utilized to achieve load sharing between parallel-operated inverters in island mode, has also been addressed. Unequal output impedances among the distribution generation (DG) units lead to the droop control being inaccurate, particularly in terms of reactive power sharing. Many methods reported in the literature adopt low speed communications to achieve efficient sharing. However, the loss of this communication could lead to inaccuracy or even instability. An improved reactive power-sharing controller is proposed in this thesis. It uses the voltage at the point of common coupling (PCC) to estimate the inductance value of the output impedance including the impedance of the interconnecting power cables and to readjust the voltage droop controller gain accordingly. In an island microgrid consisting of parallel-connected inverters, the interaction between an inverter’s output impedance (dominated by the inverter’s filter and voltage controller) and the impedance of the distribution network (dominated by the other paralleled inverters’ output impedances and the interconnecting power cables) might lead to instability. This thesis studies this phenomenon using root locus analysis. A controller based on the second derivative of the output capacitor voltage is proposed to enhance the stability of the system. Matlab simulation results are presented to confirm the validity of the theoretical analysis and the robustness of the proposed controller. A laboratory-scale microgrid consisting of two inverters and local load has been built for the experimental phase of the research work. A controller for a voltage source inverter is designed and implemented. A dSPACE unit has been used to realize the controller and monitor the system in real time with the aid of a host computer. Experimental results of the two voltage source inverters outputs are presented.

File sharing is a significant activity of enterprise computer use. In organizations, files are usually shared using e-mail attachments. However, large media files cannot be shared using e-mail, due to file size limitations. Instead, different external file sharing systems are used to share large files. The use and size of media files will continue to increase, which requires file sharing mechanisms that can handle this. For organizations today, it is difficult to find a file sharing application that fulfills all requirements and needs of the users. Especially for large media rich organizations, where the file sharing scenarios are many and files can be shared internally and externally with dissimilar feature and security requirements. An example of such an organization is Baggie, a fashion company where large media files are shared daily, using various file sharing systems. The inconsistency of what system to use, leads to confusion and frustration among its users. Additionally, their current file sharing systems do not fulfill all of Baggie’s users’ requirements and no system is integrated with their media asset management system. This master thesis aims to solve the challenges of file sharing within large organizations, particularly media rich organizations such as Baggie by centralize file sharing to one application. By performing a theoretical study and user studies, thirteen design guidelines for file sharing applications have been established. The guidelines focuses on usability, security and users’ requirements regarding media file sharing. Based on the studies, a prototype have been designed for a new file sharing application: BShare. BShare aims to replace Baggie’s current file sharing systems and the application fulfills all requirements of Baggie users. The BShare prototype can be seen as a reference design for file sharing applications.

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Visual cryptography, first introduced by Naor and Shamir, allows a secret (black and white) image to be encoded and distributed to a set of participants such that certain predefined sets of participants may reconstruct the image without any computation. In 2000, Blundo, De Santis, and Naor introduced a model for grey-level visual cryptography which is a generalization of visual cryptography for general access structures. Grey-level visual cryptography extends this model to include grey-scale images. Decoding is done by the human visual system. In this thesis we survey known results of grey-level visual cryptography and visual cryptography for general access structures. We extend several visual cryptography constructions to grey-level visual cryptography, and derive new results on the minimum possible pixel expansion for all possible access structures on at most four participants.

Due to introduction of smart phones with data intensive multimedia and interactive applications and exponential growth of wireless devices, there is a shortage for useful radio spectrum. Even though the spectrum has become crowded, many spectrum occupancy measurements indicate that most of the allocated spectrum is underutilised. Hence radically new approaches in terms of allocation of wireless resources are required for better utilization of radio spectrum. This has motivated the concept of opportunistic spectrum sharing or the so-called cognitive radio technology that has great potential to improve spectrum utilization. The cognitive radio technology allows an opportunistic user namely the secondary user to access the spectrum of the licensed user (known as primary user) provided that the secondary transmission does not harmfully affect the primary user. This is possible with the introduction of advanced resource allocation techniques together with the use of wireless relays and spatial diversity techniques. In this thesis, various mathematical optimization techniques have been developed for the efficient use of radio spectrum within the context of spectrum sharing networks. In particular, optimal power allocation techniques and centralised and distributed beamforming techniques have been developed. Initially, an optimization technique for subcarrier and power allocation has been proposed for an Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA) based secondary wireless network in the presence of multiple primary users. The solution is based on integer linear programming with multiple interference leakage and transmission power constraints. In order to enhance the spectrum efficiency further, the work has been extended to allow multiple secondary users to occupy the same frequency band under a multiple-input and multiple-output (MIMO) framework. A sum rate maximization technique based on uplink-downlink duality and dirty paper coding has been developed for the MIMO based OFDMA network. The work has also been extended to handle fading scenarios based on maximization of ergodic capacity. The optimization techniques for MIMO network has been extended to a spectrum sharing network with relays. This has the advantage of extending the coverage of the secondary network and assisting the primary network in return for the use of the primary spectrum. Finally, instead of considering interference mitigation, the recently emerged concept of interference alignment has been used for the resource allocation in spectrum sharing networks. The performances of all these new algorithms have been demonstrated using MATLAB based simulation studies.

In the last few years accountancy firms have started to use outsourcing due to market pressure to be competitive. The industry is highly regulated, and outsourcing poses constraints including confidentiality of information, regulatory restriction and ethical implications. The legal and ethical responsibility of any work outsourced remains with the accounting firm that has purchased the outsourcing service, and not with the outsourcer. Since the aim of outsourcing is to make the accounting firm more efficient, it needs to be sure that the benefits of outsourcing will exceeds the costs and risks of the process. As a knowledge-based industry, this gives the sharing of knowledge a central role in outsourcing. Outsourcing in accounting creates a relationship not only between two organisations, but more importantly among those organisations' workers. The main asset of an accounting firm is its staff and their specialist knowledge. Most outsourcing studies focus on the relationship between organisations, with little emphasis on the relationship between workers. A particular quality of accounting is that workers are the owners of their own knowledge, and firms employ these workers without having a definitive right to the sharing of their knowledge. An efficient working environment stems from the workers' ability to share their knowledge (their assets) within the organisation and in an outsourcing process. The objective of this research is to understand the blocks to knowledge-sharing in a medium-sized accounting firm from an individual unit of analysis with focus on its outsourcing operations. This study examines the following research questions: What is the influence of trust and power on knowledge-sharing from the individual perspective? How does accounting outsourcing create a shift in the unit of analysis, and how does it differ from other types of outsourcing? From the perspective of the individuals involved, what are the blocks to knowledge-sharing within the firm and within its outsourcing operations? To be able to study worker relationships and behaviour in detail, data for analysis was gathered using the participant observation method. The study finds that trust and power are important elements that can influence the sharing of knowledge among individuals. The main types of trust that influence knowledge-sharing, particularly in head office, are found to be benevolence and competence trust, while one of the main factors to influence trust within the outsourcing context is communication. Lack of communication creates fear among in-house staff and thus makes outsourcing contractors less trustworthy. Power is mainly driven by specificity of knowledge and individualism; these two factors promote the use of knowledge as a power tool. Trust and power are blocks to knowledge-sharing in the organisation's in-house activities, but are less influential in blocking knowledge in outsourcing, where the two main blockages are: (i) Physical distance and lack of suitable technological platform to share knowledge, and (ii) Gap in knowledge awareness between the accounting firm and the outsourcing provider. Accounting outsourcing is shown to be different from other types because it is the outsourcing of a core competence (known as third generation outsourcing), and also of knowledge-based work. The accounting firm uses outsourcing within its legal and ethical limits, reducing costs indirectly, because it has to negotiate the profession's constraints. In this context there are two types of outsourcing, namely internal and external outsourcing. This research applies participant observation to an original context and shows the importance of using such a method in future management studies.