Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Engineering Systems Division, Technology and Policy Program, February 2002. / Includes bibliographical references. / Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, February 2002. / Introduction: If the emergence of the World Wide Web was the communications and business phenomenon of the 1990' s, then the Mobile Web is already poised to be the darling of the next phase of the personal communications evolution. Consumers are already bombarded with a panoply of mobile communications products and services: wireless telephony, cellular handset mini-browsers, short message services, text paging. Driven by either personal or business habits forged on the traditional Internet, the perception is that consumers are increasingly turning to technologies that enable continuous or ad hoc information access in mobile situations, such as driving in a car or walking down the street. These technologies are primarily viewed as complements to, and not replacements for, the traditional modes of information access. As the name would suggest, the addition of the term "Voice Web" to the lexicon suggests yet another mode of mobile information access: speech interaction. While many of the technologies that support general speech recognition applications are hardly new, the consumer is infrequently exposed to anything more substantial than the most trivial of interactions, e.g. "Press or say '1.'" The relative anonymity of speech-interactive applications, coupled with the intoxicating (if not gratuitous) use of the term "Web," has created the perception that a new era of information access is about to dawn on the mobile consumer landscape, e.g. The Kelsey Group forecasts that by the year 2005, 45 million users will propel the voice market to $12 billion annually, more than $5 billion of which will be generated by advertising and commerce.2 The concern is not whether such estimations or projections are merited, but that the uncritical acceptance of the patently ambiguous Voice Web overlooks the multiplicity of dynamic forces that will come to bear on the evolution of the voice market in general. -- How does the structure of the historically vertically-integrated speech industry affect the evolution of the market? -- How will applications be accessed, e.g. democratic web of sites or carrier-specific private network? -- Are all the necessary technology platforms, networks, and standards in place to support the desired vision of the voice market? -- Who owns the direct relationship with the consumer, and how does service pricing affect both the quantity and quality of applications? -- What are the trademark issues involved in providing access to audio content already on the Internet, i.e. does a voice service provider need CNN's permission to play audio files freely accessible on the CNN website? -- What limitations does the telephony voice user interface impose on the application space? -- Ultimately, will the applications being proposed provide significant value for the consumer., thereby creating sufficient demand to seed further development? Given the complex interplay of the technological, economic, regulatory, and even human factors suggested above, the realization of the Voice Web concept is certainly not assured. As the opening quote from Dr. Meisel suggests, the pre-existence of the speech and Internet industries should not lull the reader into assuming that these two worlds will naturally merge into a single coherent and intuitive service model. While recent standardization efforts indicate a desire to extend the Internet service framework to voice applications, there has been little critical analysis of whether these technological innovations are sufficient to the task; moreover, other market factors (e.g. economics) are accorded little consideration in light of their potential impact on the evolution of the industry. For firms individually and the industry collectively, the success of the Voice Web ultimately depends on the anticipation of and appreciation for these interdisciplinary factors. This paper represents an attempt at a framework for both enumerating and negotiating these complex interrelationships, for the purpose of answering the following question: "Will a Voice Web model naturally arise from existing industry structures and market forces?" or conversely, "What is required to ensure the realization of the Voice Web?" / by David E. Pearah. / S.M.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Engineering Systems Division, Technology and Policy Program, 2007. / This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 108-112). / This thesis proposes a practical approach to defining flexible design and development strategies for maximizing the expected value of engineering systems. Specifically, the approach deals with the fact that it is generally computationally impractical to explore all the possible ways a system might be developed and operated, given the large number of possible scenarios in which the system might evolve. To make the analysis tractable within the computational resources available, it proposes that designers and program managers use a catalog of representative operating plans built from combinations of design elements and management decision rules. These are associated with a range of possible scenarios of uncertain variables that might affect the system's expected value and performance. This work develops the novel methodology introduced by (de Neufville, 2006) to guide the search for catalogs of operating plans while aiming at minimizing computational effort. It assumes a model of the engineering system is available, together with several value/performance metrics such as Expected Net Present Value (ENPV) and Value At Risk and Gain (VARG). It uses an algorithm based on statistical experiment design, Adaptive One-Factor-At-a-Time (OFAT) (Frey and Wang, 2006; Wang, 2007), to search the combinatorial space in light of system's responses to a limited set of uncertain variable scenarios. / (cont.) Two case studies demonstrate the benefits of the analysis methodology. One is inspired from the development of a parking garage near the Bluewater commercial center in the United Kingdom. The other relates to the development of a real estate project in the United States. Results from case studies show improvement compared to inflexible design of engineering systems while still requiring minimal computational effort. This, together with appropriate policy recommendations, provides incentives for dissemination of the analysis methodology in industry and government. The simplicity of the methodology and use of tools already familiar to the firm and government agency alleviate political barriers to implementation. It allows designers and program managers to remain within established framework, rules, and management constraints. It favors transparent presentation and efficient application to design and management of engineering systems, thus allowing program managers to present the natural evolution of decisions to senior decision-makers. / by Michel-Alexandre Cardin. / S.M.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Engineering Systems Division, Technology and Policy Program, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 72-79). / This thesis examines the impact of aircraft emissions on local air quality by performing two analyses: an assessment of U.S. commercial aircraft contribution to county budgets of primary pollutants in nonattainment areas, and an assessment of the health effects caused by commercial aircraft emissions that serve as precursors to changes in ozone and ambient particulate matter (PM). Based on 148 airports located in 134 counties, this work found that for the base year 2002, the commercial aircraft contribution to county budgets of primary pollutants of CO, NOx, SOx, VOCs, PM2.5, and PM10 ranged from less than 0.01% to as high as 36.36% with an average contribution of 0.82%. The average contribution for CO was found to be 0.81%, NOx 1.73%, SOx 1.39%, VOCs 0.67%, PM2.5 0.24%, and PM0o 0.07%. In general, this research found public health detriments resulting predominantly from PM2.5 related to aircraft emissions. However, the inventories used for the health impacts analysis are not consistent with the inventories that are described above and have several known errors. Therefore the results are presented only to illustrate the methodologies rather than as a good estimate of the health impacts. Notably, ozone disbenefits occurred with the removal of aircraft emissions of NOx. Urban cores experienced increased levels of ozone resulting in a net increase in incidences of ozone-related health endpoints. There are several limitations to the work described in this thesis. In particular, the inventories used for assessing the health impacts may be in error by as much as +50% and the air quality simulations were completed for only 4 months of the year. Therefore, the primary contribution of this thesis is in providing a description of the methodologies that will be used later within a more comprehensive study. / by Gayle L. Ratliff. / S.M.

Thesis (S.M.M.O.T.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management, Management of Technology Program, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 107-108). / Using Michael Porter's framework for the competitiveness of the nations and Professor Michael Cusumano's theory on the orientation of the software companies toward services, I analyzed the country of Colombia's software industry to elaborate a diagnosis of current conditions and to generate some strategies for the Government and for the business sector using diagrams of dynamic systems. Keeping in mind that Colombia has significant human capital, success in this type of industry is likely, not only because the industry is highly dependent on human talent; but also because seeing the reality and determining that the number of qualified people is not very large, the country should create aggressive strategies to increase the number of people qualified for the industry. In the short term, it should emphasize the information technology (IT) services sector taking advantage of its strengths and looking for specific market niches. For the medium term it should look for software products where Colombia has a competitive advantage. / (cont.) Studies the Government is conducting to identify industries favorable to domestic growth could be very valuable to the software industry and could focus on the products those types of industries need. For example, Colombia could begin to analyze if it is well-suited to develop software products for the bio-fuel industry, relatively new industry, Brazil could be a great client and Colombia already has the necessary natural resources for this type of industry. / by Monica Cepero. / S.M.M.O.T.

Thesis (S.M.M.O.T.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management, Management of Technology Program, 1999. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 115-116). / The Air Force sustainment system, which includes maintenance and logistics, is facing difficult challenges. As the maintenance system is being downsized, operations tempo is increasing and private companies are entering into competition for maintenance workload. The Air Force is under intense pressure to improve maintenance performance. Attempts to change the maintenance system in a piecemeal fashion have often led to unintended consequences and global sub-optimization. High-level simulation models of the maintenance system that could illustrate critical tradeoffs could provide a valuable tool for learning, and help improve system performance in the future. This thesis uses a simple high-level simulation model to model the sustainment of a unit of C-5 aircraft. It examines high-level tradeoffs in performance and cost due to the number of aircraft, the number of spare parts, and cannibalization practices. The effects of depot repair time and the failure probability of aircraft parts are also considered. In a system like that of the Air Force sustainment system that aims to improve maintenance and logistics performance and reduce cost, yet must deal with large demand variability and must be prepared for wartime surge, cannibalization, a large number of aircraft, and a large inventory of spare parts may be necessary and may even be cost-effective. / by Luis C. Tsuji. / S.M.M.O.T.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Science, Technology and Society, 1999. / Includes bibliographical references. / This dissertation follows British professors at Tokyo's late nineteenth century College of Technology (Kobudaigaku) and continues into the twentieth century with the Japanese students they trained. My first chapters map out an argument between British disciplines over Japanese 'adaptation' and/or 'resistance' to nature, a conflict driven by the development of the modem science of seismology in Tokyo. Seismology was a unique cross-cultural project - a 'Western' instrumental science invented and first institutionalized in a non-Western place. I discuss bow artifacts as diverse as seismographs, five-story wooden pagoda, and Mt. Fuji became 'boundary objects' in a fierce dispute between spokesmen for science and an over the character of the Japanese landscape and people. The latter chapters explain bow young Japanese architects and seismologists re-mapped the discursive and instrumental terrains of their British teachers, challenging foreign knowledge-production from inside colonizing disciplines. The text is framed around the story of the Great Nobi Earthquake of 1891. According to contemporary Japanese narratives, the great earthquake (the most powerful in modem Japanese history) was particularity damaging to the new 'foreign' infrastructure, and caused Japanese to seriously question, for the first time, the efficacy of foreign knowledge. 'Japan's earthquake problem' went from being one of bow to import European resistance into a fragile nation, to one of how to make a uniquely fragile imported infrastructure resist the power of Japanese nature. I critically re-tell this Japanese story as a corrective to European and American images of Meiji .Japan as a 'pupil country' and the West as a 'teacher culture'. "Foreign Knowledge" demonstrates in very concrete ways bow science and technology, art and architecture, gender, race, and class co-constructed Meiji Japan. Distinctions between 'artistic' and 'scientific' representations of culture/nature were particularly fluid in late nineteenth century Tokyo. Architects in my text often speak in the name of science and seismologists become an critics and even ethnographers. The narrative is also trans-national; centered in Tokyo, it follows Japanese architects, scientists, and carpenters to Britain, Italy, the United States, and Formosa. / by Gregory K. Clancey. / Ph.D.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Engineering Systems Division, Technology and Policy Program, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 166-170). / Brazil's transformation from an agriculturally-based colonial economy to an industrial republic spans seven decades - from the 1930s to the present - with three rapid growth phases which were each followed by economic and social chaos. Three administrations of different political persuasions implemented policies that brought surges of foreign direct investment, foreign technology, and mechanization to Brazil. The nation's economy grew at an astounding rate - for several years at the highest rate in the world - but increased industrialization only increased the gap between the rich and the poor, and failed to provide the long-term employment and domestic investment required for sustainable advancement. Brazil has a stable economy again, and ready for another period of rapid growth. However, future economic growth for the long-term will be dependent on aiding sectors that have been left behind in previous decades. What is needed is a set of policies that addresses the inequality within regions, poverty in the rural and urban environment, vast income inequality, and sustainable rural development. Combined with renewed investment in domestic innovation, community-based solutions can increase the returns on national investment in development. By working with community partners in low-income areas, appropriate solutions can be introduced to an environment of long-term support. A joint project between MIT, the Universidade de Sio Paulo, and the Escola de Canuani in rural Tocantins, Brazil, serves as an example of how partnerships between local and outside organizations can introduce organizational and technical solutions adapted to local needs and constraints. / (cont.) In January 2005, this interdisciplinary team worked in Brazil with community partners to introduce technology at levels as different as evaporative cooling by pottery and a computer center to address the challenges and ambitions of their everyday life. The technology case studies are not to determine success but rather to discover what needs to be in place for their implementation. A similar model of incorporating community input in program design and execution could be used in national development plans with greater effect than previous methods. / by Stephanie K. Dalquist. / S.M.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management, Technology, Management, and Policy Program, 2000. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 231-240). / The debate over a policy response to global climate change has been and continues to be deadlocked between 1) the view that the impacts of climate change are too uncertain and so any policy response should be delayed until we learn more, and 2) the view that we cannot wait to resolve the uncertainty because climate change is irreversible so we must take precautionary measures now. The objective of this dissertation is to sort out the role of waiting for better information in choosing an appropriate level of emissions abatement activities today under uncertainty. In this dissertation, we construct two-period sequential decision models to represent the choice of a level of emissions abatement over the next decade and another choice for the remainder of this century, both empirical models based on a climate model of intermediate complexity, and analytical dynamic programming models. Using the analytical models, we will show that for learning to have an influence on the decision before the learning occurs, an interaction must be present between strategies in the two decision periods. We define an "interaction" as the dependence of the marginal cost or marginal damage of the future decision on today's decision. When an interaction is present and is uncertain, the ability to learn will introduce a bias in the optimal first period strategy, relative to the optimal strategy if the uncertainty would never be reduced. In general, the bias from learning can be either in the direction of higher or lower emissions, depending on the sign of the interaction and the probability distribution over damage losses relative to abatement costs. / (cont.) We demonstrate using the empirical climate decision models that the difference between optimal emissions abatement today with and without learning is insignificant. The reason is that the IGSM, like most other climate assessment models, omit many of the most important interactions between emissions today and marginal costs or damages in the future. We show that by representing possible interactions, such as induced innovation from policy constraint or the effect of emissions growth on ocean circulation, that learning will have an influence on today's decision, often in the direction of lower emissions if we expect to learn. In general, the "wait-to- learn" is not necessarily a valid argument for delaying a climate policy that constrains emissions. / by Mort David Webster. / Ph.D.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Engineering Systems Division, Technology and Policy Program, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 66-68). / Model uncertainties can have a significant impact on decisions regarding licensing basis changes. We present a methodology to identify basic events in the risk assessment that have the potential to change the decision and are known to have significant model uncertainties. Because we work with basic event probabilities, this methodology is not appropriate for analyzing uncertainties that cause a structural change to the model, such as success criteria. We use the Risk Achievement Worth (RAW) importance measure with respect to both the core damage frequency (CDF) and the change in core damage frequency (ACDF) to identify potentially important basic events. We cross-check these with generically important model uncertainties. Then, sensitivity analysis is performed on the basic event probabilities, which are used as a proxy for the model parameters, to determine how much error in these probabilities would need to be present in order to impact the decision. A previously submitted licensing basis change is used as a case study. Analysis using the SAPHIRE program identifies 20 basic events as important, four of which have model uncertainties that have been identified in the literature as generally important. / (cont.) The decision is fairly insensitive to uncertainties in these basic events. In three of these cases, one would need to show that model uncertainties would lead to basic event probabilities that would be between two and four orders of magnitude larger than modeled in the risk assessment before they would become important to the decision. More detailed analysis would be required to determine whether these higher probabilities are reasonable. Methods to perform this analysis from the literature are reviewed and an example is demonstrated using the case study. We then look at policy issues surrounding the effects of uncertainty in decision making related to nuclear power generation. / by Joshua M. Reinert. / S.M.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Engineering Systems Division, Technology, Management, and Policy Program, 2007. / This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 255-265). / The evolution of the architecture of long-lived complex socio-technical systems have important consequences and can happen in unexpected ways. This dissertation explores this question through the study of the architectural evolution of Municipal Electric Utilities (MEUs) and their diversification into broadband services in the United States. Our research seeks answers to questions of process (why and how did this happen?), impact (what was the economic effect of this evolution?), theory (what is the phenomenon that explains this evolution?) and method (how can we study such changes?). The number of MEUs offering broadband services increased by more than 200% between 2000 and 2005, which made MEUs one of the most important providers of fiber-based broadband services in the nation. As a result, the entry of MEUs into broadband became a heavily debated policy issue at local, state, and national levels, and many laws were proposed for restricting or broadening their role in broadband. Our research provides the first evidence about the economic impact of this phenomenon for better-informed policy making. The analysis of the architectural evolution of MEUs required appropriate methods. / (cont.) We integrated the Representation Stage of the Complex Large Interconnected Open Socio-Technical (CLIOS) Process and Object Process Methodology (OPM) under a framework for system architecture analysis, and developed the CLIOS-OPM Integrated Representation Method (COIReM). COIReM' objective is to study the architectural evolution of socio-technical systems. We applied it to the evolution of MEUs using data from case study research, documentation, field research and interviews. We find that the evolution of MEUs and their entry into broadband services resulted from a process we define as Functional Emergence (FE): the process by which a new externally delivered function emerges triggered by the combined effect of technical and contextual changes affecting internal functions of a complex socio-technical system. The diversification of MEUs into broadband shows that small technological changes related to the internal functions of the system in the presence of regulatory and organizational adaptation, can stimulate the emergence of new externally delivered functions. Especially in organizations with high absorptive capacity and dynamic capabilities, these new functions can become sources of strategic diversification. The inability to understand these dynamics can create dramatic competitive disadvantages. / (cont.) For example, in this case technical changes created significant resources that, while not being perceived as valuable by the system itself, were greatly valued and demanded by an active local customer base. The impact of this evolution was studied quantitatively using Matched Sample Estimators. Results showed that: (i) the adoption of IP-enabled services had a positive impact on the internal efficiency of MEUs, (ii) there is no evidence to support the contention advanced in some policy discussions that MEUs are subsidizing their broadband business with funds from their electric power operations, and (iii) MEUbased broadband is associated with higher growth rates in the number of local business establishments, even after adjusting for the presence of private broadband providers. These qualitative and quantitative results have important implications for policy making. We argue that the entry of MEU into broadband owes more to their nature as an electric utility than as a municipal agency. We suggest that, as result of the economies of scope between electric power and broadband services, MEUs represent a case of sustainable broadband facilities-based providers and that, given the effects in internal efficiency and local economic development, they should be exempted from state legislation preventing local governments from offering telecommunication services. / (cont.) This research makes four main contributions. First, it uncovers a new behavior of complex technological systems: small technological and contextual changes affecting internal components and functions can produce the emergence of new external functions. Second, we propose a new framework to study the architectural evolution of socio-technical systems. Third, it provided evidence that, in the case of MEUs, this behavior is observable and measurable. Finally, the thesis provides a framework with which to formulate intervening policy measures. / by Carlos Alberto Osorio-Urzúa. / Ph.D.