Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, System Design & Management Program, 2001. / "September 2001." / Includes bibliographical references (leaf 62). / by Hsuehyung Benjamin Koo. / S.M.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, System Design and Management Program, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 163-166). / The China auto market is surging as the most fascinating place for the global auto industry today. All major foreign auto OEMs have been aggressively expanding their business in China, and expecting most of their global sales growth to come from China in the next decade. Following the move of foreign OEMs, many foreign auto suppliers also entered the China market, either to serve their traditional OEM customers, or to look for new business opportunities. Among them, one of the global exhaust system suppliers is very interested in China and invited us to conduct a case study on their China operations. In this thesis, we analyzed the dynamics of China auto market and the challenges to foreign OEMs and suppliers. Being driven by the market's rapid growth, tough competition, increasing margin pressures, global pressure on low-cost country sourcing and the Chinese government regulations, foreign OEMs have been increasing their efforts on the localization of manufacturing and product development. We first examine the current strategic role of China operations for major foreign OEMs in China, and the current and future requirements from foreign and Chinese OEMs on auto suppliers in China. / (cont.) Then we analyzed the China exhaust system industry in detail using the Porter's Five Forces. After obtaining a good understanding of how a foreign exhaust system supplier needs to compete in China, the authors focused on the global exhaust system supplier under the study and investigated how it has been competing in China market, what have been done successfully, and what could be done differently. The root causes of the issues were identified and the suggestions to address some of them were presented. In the last section, we extend the findings and suggestions to other foreign auto suppliers in China. / by Hao (Howard) Jin. / S.M.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, System Design & Management Program, 2003. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 129-132). / by David E. Willmes. / S.M.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, System Design and Management Program, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 124-125). / NASA is examining the utility of requiring a certain degree of commonality in both flight and ground systems in the Constellation Program. While the benefits of commonality seem obvious in terms of minimizing upfront development and long-term operations and maintenance costs, success in real, large-scale engineering systems used to support launch operations is relatively unknown. A broad literature review conducted for this paper did not yield a single paper specifically addressing the application of commonality for ground systems at any launch site in the United States or abroad. This paper provides a broad overview of the ground systems, captures historical and current application of commonality at the launch site, and offers suggestions for additional research to further develop commonality approaches. / by Shawn M. Quinn. / S.M.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, System Design & Management Program, February 2001. / Includes bibliographical references (leaf 193). / by Christopher M. Renaud. / S.M.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, System Design and Management Program, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 88-92). / When people talk about software security, they usually refer to security applications such as antivirus software, firewalls and intrusion detection systems. There is little emphasis on the security in the software itself. Therefore the thesis sets out to investigate if we can develop secure software in the first place. It first starts with a survey of the software security field, including the definition of software security, its current state and the research having been carried out in this aspect. Then the development processes of two products known for their security: Microsoft IIS 6.0 and Apache HTTP Web Server are examined. Although their approaches to tackle security are seemingly quite different, the analysis and comparisons identify they share a common framework to address the software security problem - designing security early into the software development lifecycle. In the end the thesis gives recommendations as to how to design security into software development process based upon the principles from the research and the actual practices from the two cases. Finally it describes other remaining open issues in this field. / by Chang Tony Zhang. / S.M.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, System Design & Management Program, February 2000. / Includes bibliographical references (leaf 85). / by Jerrold I. Lavine. / S.M.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, System Design and Management Program, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 26-29). / This thesis attempts to study the technological progress of wireless technology and the wireless industry throughout history, using high-level, non-device specific performance metrics. Such metrics are developed by following the broad functional category approach. The analysis performed is both qualitative and quantitative. Firstly, the quantitative study provides a general perspective of how the technology has evolved through history, looking for signs of constant evolution and/or signs of technological saturation or acceleration. Following this, the qualitative section aims to provide the basis of a strategic framework that could be of importance to organizations in the industry, in particular to those interested in making the right decisions regarding technology selection, new spectrum licensing, and new services pricing, by using a cost-benefit approach. It was found that, in concordance with the two previous analyses performed on the information and energy technology domains, a continuous progress in the metrics identified is observed in the three Functional Performance Metrics (FPM) determined for this study. Still, some weak signs of eventual saturation were observed in one of the metrics identified in the study for the first time in this kind of study. A rate of yearly progress of 15% was obtained from the spectral efficiency Functional Performance Metric (FPM), while significantly higher rates, close to 50%, were obtained for both the throughput and coverage density FPMs. The time series comprises over 100 years of data, from the late 1800's / early 1900's until the present. / by Mario A. Amaya. / S.M.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, System Design and Management Program, 1998. / Includes bibliographical references (leaf 135). / by Daniel S. Stout. / S.M.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, System Design and Management Program, 2009. / "April 2008." Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 79-80). / At the beginning of 2009, the global mobile industry is in the midst of a revolution, characterized by a trend towards openness, driven by technological advances, evolving consumer demands and increasing competition. Open mobile operating systems, which allowed third party software development, have existed since 2001, but they haven't had much effect on the industry's business ecosystem or the customers' expectations and demands. The release of the iPhone in 2007 had profound impact not only on dominant design of smartphones and on consumers' expectations, but also on the balance of power in the mobile industry amongst network operators, mobile device manufacturers and software developers. The trend continued with the subsequent announcements of leading industry players that they will develop open source operating systems for mobile phones, and make them accessible to everyone. Today, top mobile device manufacturers are on the verge of releasing dozens of new devices running open source operating systems, which has the potential to completely change the current market share of the players in the market. The purpose of this thesis is to guide product managers in the mobile industry. It examines the historical and current structure of the mobile business ecosystem, reviews latest developments in open operating systems and open source platforms and their affects on industry players today, and identifies potential influences and developments for the future based on analysts' reports assessment, industry experts' viewpoints study, and interviews with industry executives. / by Ofri Markus. / S.M.