Yes / Development of robust diagnostic solutions to monitor the health of systems and components to ensure through life cost effectiveness is often technically difficult, requiring an effective integration of design development with research and innovation. This paper presents a structured application of TRIZ and USIT (Unitied Structured Inventive Thinking) to generate concept solutions fur an in-service diagnostic system for a synchronous belt drive system for an automotive application. The systematic exploration through TRIZ and USIT methods has led to the development of six concept solution ideas directed at the functional requirement to determine the state or condition of the belt. The paper demonstrates that the combined deployment of TRIZ and USIT frameworks is a valuable approach addressing difficult design problems. (C) 2013 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. Open access under CC BY-NC-ND license.

Visual inspection in autonomous robotics is a task in which autonomous agents are required to gather visual information of objects of interest, in a manner that ensures safety, efficiency and comprehensive coverage. It is, therefore, crucial for identifying key landmarks, detecting cracks or defects, or reconstructing the observed object for detailed analysis. This thesis delves into the  challenges encountered by autonomous agents in executing such tasks and presents frameworks for scenarios ranging from operations by multiple spacecrafts in close proximity to celestial bodies in Deep Space to terrestrial deployments of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) for inspection of large-scale infrastructures. The research thus pursues two main directions: Firstly, a novel formation control strategy is developed to enable autonomous agents to perform proximity operations safely, efficiently, and accurately in order to map the surface of Small Celestial Bodies (SCBs). This investigation encompasses control and coordination strategies, leveraging a realistic astrodynamic model of the orbital environment to navigate safely around SCBs. Along this direction, the contributions focus on enabling a distributed autonomy framework in the form of a cooperative stereo configuration between two spacecraft, allowing acquisition of 3D topological information of the candidate SCB. The framework employs a Leader-Follower approach, treating the maintenance of the desired stereo-formation as a 6 Degree-of-Freedom (DoF) nonlinear model predictive control (NMPC) problem. The second research direction focuses on addressing the problem of enabling robotic inspection for terrestrial applications. With the growing demand for efficient and reliable inspection techniques to improve in-situ situational awareness, the research concentrates on addressing the problem of obtaining detailed visual scan of available structures without any a priori knowledge of either the environment nor the structures. Thus, the key contributions of the presented work reside in the implementation of a unified autonomy, with the unification drawing it's root from the merging of two distinct research perspectives: Inspection and Exploration planning. The contribution establishes a novel solution by introducing a map-independent approach with a synergistic formulation of a reactive profile-adaptive view-planner coupled with a hierarchical exploration strategy and an environment-invariant scene recognition module. By integrating exploration and inspection methodologies, this research seeks to enhance the capabilities of UAVs in navigating and inspecting unknown structures in unfamiliar environments.  Through theoretical developments, extensive simulations and experimental validations, this thesis contributes to the advancement of the state-of-the-art in visual inspection with autonomous robots. Moreover, the findings extend current capabilities of autonomous agents in the field of space exploration as well as in disaster response and complex infrastructure inspection.

Ångest och depression är stora folkhälsoproblem, symtomöverlappen är betydande och samsjukligheten hög. Efterfrågan på verksamma behandlingar är stor och behandlingsresurserna är begränsade. Transdiagnostiska behandlingsmetoder, såsom Unified protocol (UP), har utvecklats för sådana emotionella tillstånd med syfte att angripa underliggande gemensamma vidmakthållande mekanismer. Syftet med denna studie var att undersöka effekten av UP i gruppformat på en allmänpsykiatrisk mottagning för ett relativt oselekterat patientunderlag. Studien är av inomgruppsdesign där det primära utfallet mäts i symtomskattning avseende depression och ångest, samt sekundära utfallsmått i form av självskattad funktionsnivå och livskvalitet. Mätning har skett före och efter avslutad behandling. Samtliga deltagarna (N=29) hade antingen en ångest- och/eller en depressionsdiagnos. Majoriteten (45%) av deltagarna hade två samtidiga psykiatriska diagnoser. Deltagarna hade en medelålder på 28.3 år och majoriteten var kvinnor (83%), 16 av deltagarna fullföljde behandlingen och genomgick före- och eftermätning och därav inkluderades i analysen. Ett parat t-test mellan primära utfall för självskattad depression och ångest visade inga signifikanta skillnader och endast små effektstorlekar på symptomskattningen. Däremot kunde en statistiskt signifikant minskning av upplevd funktionsnedsättning med stor effektstorlek påvisas efter behandling. Även en trend för ökad livskvalitet med medelstor effektstorlek kan visas. För samtliga utfallsmått minskade tydligt andelen deltagare som skattade svår allvarlighetsgrad på respektive mätinstrument utifrån symtombörda, upplevd funktionsnedsättning respektive nedsatt livskvalitet. Resultaten talar för användandet av UP i gruppformat som behandling inom specialistpsykiatrin. / Anxiety and Depressive disorders are commonly occurring in the population. There is a high symtom overlap and a high rate of comorbidity between these conditions. There is a great demand for effective treatments and treatment resources are limited. Transdiagnostic psychological treatment like Unified protocol (UP), are designed to address these kinds of emotional disorders by targeting shared mechanism maintaining symptoms. The aim of the present study is to investigate the effectiveness of UP applied in group format delivered for a heterogeneous group of patients in mental health service. The study is a within subject design where primary outcome is measured in depressive and anxiety symptoms and secondary outcome is measured in self-rated functional impairment and quality of life. Self-reported symptoms were measured before and after treatment. All participants (N=29) had either a depressive and/or an anxiety disorder, the majority of the participants (45%) had one additional clinical diagnosis. The participants had an average age of 28.3 years and were primarily female (83%), 16 of the participants completed the treatment and had pre- and post-treatment measure and were therefore included in the analyses. A paired t-test between primary outcome in self-reported depressive and anxiety symptoms, could not detect any significant differences and only small effect size on measured symptoms. However self-rated functional impairment decreased significantly with a large effect size. A trend for improved quality of life with moderate effect size was detected. The proportion of participants who rated high levels of depression- and anxiety symptoms, high degree of functional impairment and low quality of life decreased clearly. These findings support the use of UP applied in group as a treatment in mental health service.

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Hydraulic fracturing plays an important role in increasing production rate in tight reservoirs. The performance of the reservoir after fracturing can be observed from the productivity index. This parameter is dependent on the fracture geometry; height, length and width. Unified fracture design (UFD) offers a method to determine the fracture dimensions providing the maximum productivity index for a specific proppant amount. Then, in order to achieve the maximum productivity index, the treatment schedules including the amount of liquid and proppant used for each stage must be determined according to the fracture dimensions obtained from the UFD. The proppant number is necessary for determining the fracture geometry using the UFD. This number is used to find the maximum productivity index for a given proppant amount. Then, the dimensionless fracture conductivity index corresponding to the maximum productivity index can be computed. The penetration ration, the fracture length, and the propped fracture width can be computed from the dimensionless fracture conductivity. However, calculating the proppant number used in UFD requires the fracture height as an input. The most convenient way to estimate fracture height to input to the UFD is to assume that the fracture height is restricted by stress contrast between the pay zone and over and under-lying layers. In other words, the fracture height is assumed to be constant, independent of net pressure and equal to the thickness of the layer which has the least minimum principal stress. However, in reality, the fracture may grow out from the target formation and the height of fracture is dependent on the net pressure during the treatment. Therefore, it is necessary to couple determination of the fracture height with determination of the other fracture parameters. In this research, equilibrium height theory is applied to rigorously determine the height of fracture. Solving the problem iteratively, it is possible to incorporate the rigorous fracture height determination into the unified fracture design.

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A indústria de desenvolvimento de software está em constante evolução e em busca de novos desafios, como por exemplo: novas tecnologias, linguagens de programação e estratégias para aumentar a produtividade no desenvolvimento. Com o passar do tempo, essa evolução desejada tem se concretizado, em especial com o surgimento de conceitos como Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) e Model-Driven Development (MDD). Nesse contexto, ganha importância a reutilização de software, por exemplo por meio do uso de serviços que facilitam a interoperabilidade entre diferentes sistemas. Ambientes de desenvolvimento de software, em especial ambientes de reúso de software, poderiam se adequar à arquitetura SOA para facilitar a disponibilização de serviços a outros ambientes, promovendo sua integração e aumentando a possibilidade de reúso. Após um levantamento bibliográfico sobre ambientes integrados de reúso que utilizassem serviços para permitir o compartilhamento de recursos, percebeu-se que os trabalhos nessa direção são poucos. Ao mesmo tempo, observou-se que para integração de sistemas por meio de serviços é necessário criar camadas de acesso às entidades dos sistemas que compartilharão informações. A implementação desses serviços de forma manual é repetitiva e sujeita a erros, principalmente por programadores que não estão familiarizados com SOA. Por outro lado, diagramas de classes em UML (Unified Modeling Language) são de amplo conhecimento por parte de desenvolvedores e estão em um nível de abstração que é suficientemente detalhado para permitir a derivação de serviços de acesso às suas classes. Desta forma, para atender uma demanda crescente de sistemas que precisam oferecer serviços para possibilitar sua integração com outros sistemas, este mestrado tem por objetivo promover a geração automatizada de código de serviços por meio de transformações de modelo para texto, em que o modelo de entrada é um diagrama de classes derivado da UML e os serviços gerados cobrem operações básicas do tipo CRUD. O gerador resultante foi validado por meio de duas provas de conceito e mostrou-se adequado para cumprir os objetivos estabelecidos, visto que o desenvolvedor trabalha com um modelo em alto nível de abstração, não precisando conhecer os detalhes inerentes à implementação dos serviços. / The software development industry is constantly evolving and looking for challenges, such as: new technologies, programming languages and strategies to increase developers productivity. During the course of time, this required evolution has been concretized, especially with the emergency of concepts such as Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Model-Driven Development (MDD). In this context, software reuse gains importance, for example through the use of services that ease the interoperability of different systems. Software development environments, in special reuse environments, could be adapted to the SOA architecture to ease the availability of services to other environments, thus promoting its integration and possibility of reuse. After a literature review about integrated reuse environments that use services to allow resources sharing, it has been observed that there are only a few works in this direction. At the same time, it was observed that for system integration through services it is required to create an access layer for the system entities that share information. The manual implementation of these services is repetitive and error prone, especially for programmers who are not familiar with SOA. On the other hand, UML (Unified Modeling Language) class diagrams are widely known by developers and are at a level of abstraction that is sufficiently detailed to allow the derivation of access services to their classes. Thus, to meet a growing demand for systems that need to provide services to enable its integration with other systems, this masters dissertation aims to promote the automated generation of service code through transformations from model to text, where the input model is a class diagram derived from UML, and the generated services cover the basic CRUD operations. The resulting generator has been validated through two proofs of concepts and was adequate to meet the stated objectives, as the developer works with a model in a high abstraction level, and does not need to know the details related with the service implementation.