Today's supply chains face increasing volatility on many fronts. From the shop-floor where machines break and suppliers fail to the boardrooms where unanticipated price inflation erodes profi tability. Turbulence is the new normal. To remain competitive and weather these (daily) storms, supply chains need to move away from an effi ciency mindset towards a resilience mindset. For over a little more than a decade industry and academia have awakened to this reality. Academic literature and case studies show that there is no longer a shortage of resilience strategies and designs. Unfortunately, industry still lacks the tools with which to assess and evaluate the effectiveness of such strategies and designs. Without the ability to quantify the benefi t it is impossible to motivate the cost. This thesis adds one piece to the puzzle of quantifying supply chain vulnerability. Speci fically, it focussed on supply chains within urban areas. It addresses the question: "How does a supply chain's network design (internal con figuration) and its dependence on the underlying road network (external circumstances) make it more or less vulnerable to disruptions of the road network?" Multilayered Complex Network Theory (CNT) held promise as a modelling approach that could capture the complexity of the dependence between a logical supply chain network and the physical road network that underpins it. This approach addressed two research gaps in complex network theory applications. In the supply chain arena CNT applications have reaped many benefi ts but the majority of studies regarded single-layer networks that model only supply chain relations. There were no studies found where the dependence of supply chain layers on underlying physical infrastructure was modelled in a multilayered manner. Road network applications offered many more multilayered applications but these primarily focussed on passenger transport, not freight transport. The first artefact developed in the thesis was a multilayered complex network formulation representing a logical (supply chain) layer placed on a physical (road infrastructure) layer. The individual layers had predefi ned network characteristics and on their own could not hint at the inherent vulnerability that the system as a whole might have. From the multilayered formulation, the collection of shortest paths emerged. This is the collection of all shortest path alternatives within a network. The collection of shortest paths is the unique fingerprint of each multilayered network instance. The key to understanding vulnerability lies within the characteristics of the collection of shortest paths. Three standard supply chain network archetypes were de fined namely the Fully Connected (FC), Single Hub (SH) and Double Hub (DH) archetypes. A sample of 500 theoretical multilayered network instances was generated for each archetype. These theoretical instances were subjected to three link-based progressive targeted disruption simulations to study the vulnerability characteristics of the collection of shortest paths. Two of the simulations used relative link betweenness to prioritise the disruptions while the third used the concept of network skeletons as captured by link salience. The results from these simulations showed that the link betweenness strategies were far more effective than the link salience strategy. From these results three aspects of vulnerability were identifi ed. Redundancy quantifi es the number of alternative shortest paths available to an instance. Overlap measures to what degree the shortest path sets of an instance overlap and have road segments in common. Effi ciency step-change is a measure of the magnitude of the "shock" absorbed by the shortest paths of an instance during a disruption. For each of these aspects one or more metrics were defi ned. This suite of vulnerability metrics is the second artefact produced by the thesis. The design of the artefacts itself, although novel, was not considered research. It is the insights derived during analysis of the artefacts' performance that contributes to the body of knowledge. Link-based progressive random disturbance simulations were used to assess the ability of the vulnerability metrics to quantify supply chain vulnerability. It was found that none of the de fined vulnerability aspects are good stand-alone predictors of vulnerability. The multilayered nature and random disturbance protocol result in vulnerability being more multi-faceted than initially imagined. Nonetheless, the formulation of the multilayered network proved useful and intuitive and even though the vulnerability metrics fail as predictors they still succeed in capturing shortest path phenomena that would lead to vulnerability under non-random protocols. To validate the fi ndings from the theoretical instances, link-based random disturbance simulations were executed on 191 case study instances. These instances were extracted from real-life data in three urban areas in South Africa, namely Gauteng Province (GT), City of Cape Town (CoCT) and eThekwini Metropolitan Municipality (ET). The case study instances showed marked deviations from the assumptions underlying the theoretical instances. Despite these differences, the multilayered formulation still enables the quanti fication of the relationship between supply chain structure and road infrastructure. The performance of the vulnerability metrics in the case study corroborates the findings from the theoretical instances. Although the suite of vulnerability metrics was unsuccessful in quantifying or predicting vulnerability in both the theoretical and case study instances, the rationale behind their development is sound. Future work that will result in more effective metrics is outlined in this thesis. On the one hand the development of a more realistic disruption strategy is suggested. Road network disruptions are neither completely random nor specifi cally targeted. Important segments with greater tra ffic loads are more likely to be disrupted, but the reality is that disruptions such as accidents, equipment failure or road maintenance could really occur anywhere on the network. A more realistic disruption strategy would lie somewhere on the continuum between targeted and random disruptions. Other future work suggests the refi nement of both artefacts by incorporating link weights in both the logical and physical layers. An unanticipated fi nding from this thesis is that future research in the fi eld may be expedited if theory-building emanates from real-life empirical networks as opposed to theoretically generated networks. Expanding the scope of the case study, characterising the true network archetypes found in practice and increasing the number of case study samples is a high priority for future work. / Thesis (PhD)--University of Pretoria, 2018. / National Research Foundation of South Africa (Grant UID: 105519). Partial funding of doctoral research. / Industrial and Systems Engineering / PhD / Unrestricted

Nous assistons aujourd’hui à un développement continu et rapide du Web Structuré, dans lequel les documents (les pages Web) ne sont plus composés que du texte non structuré mais sont centrés sur les données, présentant des contenus structurés et des objets complexes. Ces pages Web sont générées le plus souvent de façon dynamique à partir d’une base de données accessible via des formulaires (Web caché), et sont organisées selon une structure régulière et prédéfinie. Les plates-formes de recherche actuelles ne permettent d’obtenir que des pages en utilisant des méthodes traditionnelles de recherche par des mots-clés, qui sont inadaptées pour interroger le Web structuré. En effet, la recherche par mots-clés est sémantiquement pauvre et ignore les liens structurels existant entre les différents contenus des objets complexes (ex. dans une page Web d’un site commercial, constituée d’une liste de livres, les entités élémentaires “titre” et “auteur” composant chaque “livre” sont présentées selon une disposition qui illustre leurs relations. De nouveaux moyens de recherche sur le Web sont donc nécessaires, pour permettre à l’utilisateur de cibler des données complexes avec une sémantique précise. L’objectif de cette thèse est de fournir des algorithmes efficaces pour l’extraction et la recherche des objets structurées (un livre, un concert de musique, etc.) de façon automatique, à l’aide de méthodes adaptées allant au-delà de la recherche par mots-clés. Nous avons proposé une approche d’interrogation du Web en deux étapes, qui permet à l’utilisateur de décrire le schéma des objets ciblés, de façon souple et précise. Les deux problématiques principales adressées sont : (1) la sélection de sources Web structurées les plus pertinentes pour un schéma fourni par l’utilisateur (c-à-d, contenant les objets, instances de ce schéma), et (2) la construction de wrappers (extracteurs) pour l’extraction des objets complexes ciblés à partir des sources sélectionnées, en exploitant la régularité des structures des pages et la sémantique des données. Notre approche est générique, dans le sens où elle nŠest pas spécifique à des sources ou des objets d’un domaine particulier. Elle a été implantée (système ObjectRunner) et testée sur des sources Web appartenant à des domaines variés. Les résultats obtenus montrent, en particulier, une pertinente élevée au niveau de la sélection de sources et un gain significatif au niveau de la qualité de l’extraction par rapport aux approches existantes. / We are witnessing in recent years a steady growth of the so-called structured Web, in which documents (Web pages) are no longer quasi-textual, but are data-centric, presen-ting structured content, complex objects. Such schematized pages are often generated dynamically by means of formatting templates over a database, possibly using user input via forms (hidden Web). The current Web search platforms allow only to retrieve Web pages by traditional keyword search methods, which are not adapted to query the structured Web. Indeed, keyword search is semantically poor and ignores the existing structural links between various components of complex objects (e.g., in a commercial Web site page, providing book lists, the atomic entities “title” and “author” forming each “book” are displayed in a way that illustrates their relationship. New ways of searching the Web are thus required, in order to enable users to target complex data, with a clear semantics. The main aim of this thesis is to provide effective algorithms for extracting and retrieving structured objects (e.g., a book, a music concert, etc.) automatically, using adapted methods rather going beyond the keyword search ones. We propose a two-phase querying approach of the Web, which allows users to first describe the schema of the targeted objects, in a flexible, lightweight and precise manner. The two main problems we address are : (1) the selection of the most relevant structured Web sources with respect to the schema provided by the user (i.e., containing objects, instances of this schema), and (2) the construction of wrappers for extracting the targeted complex objects from the selected sources, leveraging both the regularity of the pages and the semantics of the data. Our approach is generic, in the sense that it can be applied to any domain and schema for complex objects. It has been implemented in the ObjectRunner system, and tested extensively. The experimental results show high source-selection relevance and significant improvements over existing techniques in terms of extraction precision.

No description available.

This project is a new type of game center in the "game paradise" Akihabara, Tokyo. In Japan, anime, cosplay, Game industry and virtual world have developed very mature and attractive, while in the reality society, most people are under great pressure. Those lead to the Otaku culture, refer to people like to stay at home, obsessed with virtual world and avoid the real social activities. Game and game center tend to become negative things in many ways. So in this project I want to add new fun circulations in the building, and create new games which help people have better interaction with spaces, to encourage those "negative""lazy" gamer to go out to look around the real world.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.