Supply Chain Management (SCM) aims to synchronize the requirements of customers with the flow of materials from suppliers, in order to satisfy the needs of the customers as costefficiently as possible. This has become a difficult task due to several developments in the market, such as increased competition, increased demand variability, increased product variety, increased amounts of customer-specific products, and shortening product life cycles. These developments, due in part to globalization, provide additional management challenges and new practices in which supply chains are designed and managed, and can eventually make the difference between companies staying competitive or not. The overall purpose of this thesis is to investigate how complexity and globalization affect supply chain design and operations. The main emphasis has been on producing descriptive results of the studied phenomenon. This research involves five case studies covering international transportation structures used in SCM, the selection of supply chain strategies in different business environments, and the role of information systems and technology in achieving the objective of SCM. In this thesis it has been concluded that in order to cope with increasingly complex and fragmented markets companies need more differentiated transportation structures, modes, and supply chains. Furthermore, to effectively manage this, information systems and advanced decision support tools are required. In addition, this thesis has shown that current taxonomies for supply chain strategy selection are too simplistic due to three major problems: they mediate that it is a question of choosing one supply chain strategy for the entire company, they regard markets as rather homogeneous, and they link each supply chain strategy to a specific business context. Instead, it has been concluded that in order to better satisfy differing customer needs in various markets it is increasingly necessary to develop a differentiated supply chain strategy by utilizing different manufacturing and delivery strategies concurrently. Thus, a need exists for new taxonomies for supply chain strategy selection which recognize that the markets are becoming more fragmented and complex, that customer preferences differ across customer/market segments, and that there is a need to differentiate the supply chain strategy. This thesis also highlights several requirements of a differentiated supply chain strategy. Firstly, extended supply chain collaboration is required, since a differentiated supply chain strategy will involve more supply chain partners than a traditional supply chain strategy. Secondly, there is a need for more transportation mode alternatives, particularly intermodal, both in supply and distribution operations, due to the fact that differentiation requires diversity. In this thesis, intermodal landbridge freight services are highlighted as one interesting avenue, which could potentially facilitate a more differentiated supply chain strategy. Thirdly, more integrated information systems are needed along with decision support tools. This study illustrates that agent based modeling appears to be an interesting method for developing realistic decision support tools in the context of complex supply chains. An interesting aspect for further research is to investigate how different manufacturing and delivery strategies can be used concurrently in international supply chains. Moreover, there are several requirements and opportunities of a differentiated supply chain strategy, and these have to be investigated further

How can we apply mathematical notions of complexity and emergence to music, and how can these mathematical ideas then inspire new musical works? Using Steve Reich's Clapping Music as a starting point, we look for emergent patterns in music by considering cases where a piece's complexity is significantly different from the total complexity of each of the individual parts. Definitions of complexity inspired by information theory, data compression, and musical practice are considered. We also consider the number of distinct musical pieces that could be composed in the same manner as Clapping Music. Finally, we present a new musical compositions to demonstrate some of these ideas.

In the 21st century, transdisciplinary approaches to research and problem solving rooted in complexity theory and complex systems methodologies offer hope for understanding and solving previously intractable problems. However, in the face of daunting modern challenges like a broken health care system, growing social and economic inequity, and climate change, the knowledge and skills required to understand and ultimately solve problems across interdependent complex systems are distinctly lacking in our collective practice. The underlying premise of this study is that if modern society is to deal effectively with interconnected challenges across ecological, social, political, and economic systems, our education system must prepare students to grapple with complexity. This research expands upon previously identified core complex systems knowledge, skills, and dispositions to contribute rich description to a working definition of the term systems literacy, develop a theory of how one becomes systems literate, and offer access points for educators entering the world of complexity. The study employed complexity-informed grounded theory methods including data from semi-structured interviews with complex systems scholars and educators across a wide range of academic disciplines. Additional data was gleaned from texts and online resources produced by systems educators and complexity scholars. The three resulting journal articles were designed to consolidate much of what is known about complex systems into a package that is useful for educators, school leaders, and other stakeholders. Together, these articles contribute to an understanding of how curricula and instruction might better emphasize the dynamic nature of interdependent complex systems and the agency of individuals and collectives to innovate, engage in authentic problem solving, and participate in actively preserving and reshaping the world in which we live.

A recently suggested algorithm for recursive partitioning of statistical models (Zeileis, Hothorn and Hornik, 2005), such as models estimated by maximum likelihood or least squares, is evaluated in practice. The general algorithm is applied to linear regression, logisitic regression and survival regression and applied to economical and medical regression problems. Furthermore, its performance with respect to prediction quality and model complexity is compared in a benchmark study with a large collection of other tree-based algorithms showing that the algorithm yields interpretable trees, competitive with previously suggested approaches. / Series: Research Report Series / Department of Statistics and Mathematics

This thesis, and the accompanying portfolio of pieces, is concerned with investigating practical and theoretical meeting points between improvisation and composition. Such meeting points are evaluated alongside a consideration of ‘freedom’ in improvised music, for which a frame is drawn from George Lewis’s concepts of the ‘Afrological’ (placing emphasis on expression of the ‘self’) and ‘Eurological’ (in which the ‘self’ is explicitly avoided). It is suggested that a reconciliation of these two extremes might be found in a compositional ‘creative displacement’, which might change an improviser’s environment in unforeseen ways and thus stimulate explorations of expressive novelty. Three different compositional approaches to ‘creative displacement’ are investigated: through fixed notation, through electronic real-time notation, and through leadership in a workshop setting. In each case compositional experiments will be undertaken and documented, detailing the creation and realisation of the pieces included in the accompanying portfolio. A terminology for the theoretical consideration of these approaches will draw on theories of complex systems, the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, and various socio-musicological models such as those of Steven Feld and Charles Keil. Through an evaluation of the portfolio compositions in rehearsal and performance, this thesis will conclude that a reconciliation of Lewis’s ‘Afro’ and ‘Eurological’ can be found through the external application of limitations to improvisational creativity. Such constraints will be described as ‘creatively displacing’ if they provoke a performer towards an exploration of novel expressive approaches. In order to achieve this in practice, limitations must be carefully judged with regard to their degree of abstraction, the manner of their presentation and the nature of their notation; it will be suggested that the presence of a leader is vital in achieving this. These conclusions will lead to a questioning of conventional ideas of improvisation and leadership, and suggest a re-evaluation of indeterminacy within notation.

Keywords: entanglement, complexity, entropy, measurement In chapter 1 the basic principles of communication complexity are introduced. Two-party communication is described explicitly, and multi-party communication complexity is described in terms of the two-party communication complexity model. The relation to entropy is described for the classical communication model. Important concepts from quantum mechanics are introduced. More advanced concepts, for example the generalized measurement, are then presented in detail. In chapter 2 the di erent measures of entanglement are described in detail, and concrete examples are provided. Measures for both pure states and mixed states are described in detail. Some results for the Schmidt decomposition are derived for applications in communication complexity. The Schmidt decomposition is fundamental in quantum communication and computation, and thus is presented in considerable detail. Important concepts such as positive maps and entanglement witnesses are discussed with examples. Finally, in chapter 3, the communication complexity model for quantum communication is described. A number of examples are presented to illustrate the advantages of quantum communication in the communication complexity scenario. This includes communication by teleportation, and dense coding using entanglement. A few problems, such as the Deutsch-Jozsa problem, are worked out in detail to illustrate the advantages of quantum communication. The communication complexity of sampling establishes some relationships between communication complexity, the Schmidt rank and entropy. The last topic is coherent communication complexity, which places communication complexity completely in the domain of quantum computation. An important lower bound for the coherent communication complexity in terms of the Schmidt rank is dervived. This result is the quantum analogue to the log rank lower bound in classical communication complexity. / Prof. W.H. Steeb

Thesis advisor: Marilyn Cochran-Smith / Professional development is widely viewed as a key lever for school change. Each year, federal and state governments pour billions of dollars into developing teachers, while researchers seek to identify which professional development programs are most effective. However, even as consensus has been growing in the research and policy communities about what constitutes high-quality professional development, teachers continue to vary greatly in what and how much they learn through such programs. There is no theory of teacher learning that explains this variation. In this dissertation—a comparative case study of two teachers from the same school who were participating in the same professional development initiative —I used complexity theory as a lens to understand teacher learning as a complex system. The intention was to develop causal explanations of teacher learning that accounted for the interactions between a particular teacher, a particular school, and a particular professional development. Data analysis revealed that whether, what, and how the teachers learned through professional development was contingent upon learning conditions that resulted from three intersecting systems: the teacher, the school, and the professional development. Although they were colleagues, the two teacher participants experienced professional development under different learning conditions, resulting in different learning outcomes; one teacher changed little, while the other ultimately transformed some of her beliefs and classroom practices. I found seven structural elements, across the three system levels, that shaped the system of teacher learning. Based on my analysis, I propose an analytic framework that can be used to analyze the conditions within and the interactions between the three systems. By offering a new means to analyze professional development through a complexity lens, this study contributes to a broader understanding of teacher learning. There are also important implications for designing and selecting professional development that will meet the needs of individual teachers in specific school contexts. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2018. / Submitted to: Boston College. Lynch School of Education. / Discipline: Teacher Education, Special Education, Curriculum and Instruction.

Thesis advisor: Howard Straubing / The use of computer programs to automatically solve logic puzzles is examined in this work. A typical example of this type of logic puzzle is one in which there are five people, with five different occupations and five different color houses. The task is to use various clues to determine which occupation and which color belongs to each person. The clues to this type of puzzle often are statements such as, ''John is not the barber,'' or ''Joe lives in the blue house.'' These puzzles range widely in complexity with varying numbers of objects to identify and varying numbers of characteristics that need to be identified for each object. With respect to the theoretical aspects of solving these puzzles automatically, this work proves that the problem of determining, given a logic puzzle, whether or not that logic puzzle has a solution is NP-Complete. This implies, provided that P is not equal to NP, that, for large inputs, automated solvers for these puzzles will not be efficient in all cases. Having proved this, this work proceeds to seek methods that will work for solving these puzzles efficiently in most cases. To that end, each logic puzzle can be encoded as an instance of boolean satisfiability. Two possible encodings are proposed that both translate logic puzzles into boolean formulas in Conjunctive Normal Form. Using a selection of test puzzles, a group of boolean satisfiability solvers is used to solve these puzzles in both encodings. In most cases, these simple solvers are successful in producing solutions efficiently. / Thesis (BS) — Boston College, 2009. / Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: College Honors Program. / Discipline: Computer Science.

There are as many perspectives in designing as there have been instances in which it has occured. In each instance, constraints will have invariably arisen in various forms, to the extent that designing and constraints are considered to be an inherently natural pairing. In addition, they are both affected by the challenges of complexity, amongst many others, which is especially compounded by an increasingly significant shift towards interdisciplinary methods and means of working. This has been in response to the influences and implications with regards to the integrated elements of sustainability and sustainable development. To this effect, the body of research effort presented in this thesis searches for a simpler perspective towards designing, to which constraint-based thinking can be applied. It explores the implications of interdisciplinarity in the context of sustainability and sustainable development. It also considers an example of design-based process within the built environment that is inclusive of multiple disciplines and therefore not only interdisciplinary, but also affected by complexity. In response to these instances of complex interdisciplinary designing, this thesis contributes an exploration of constraint-based thinking and the consideration of an approach which uses design objectives as optimisation constraints, from which a methodology has been created. Furthermore, this thesis demonstrates constraints as useful in understanding, especially in the context of problem structures and their respective design spaces. As a form of constraint, optimisation objectives are also presented in this thesis as a means of exposing and handling complexity when applied as constrained optimisation for focusing designing efforts. Above all, this thesis advocates the use of constraint-based thinking and simplicity towards enhancing and supporting designing process.

O adolescente, ao se deparar com o adoecimento pelo câncer, se vê diante de um grande desafio que desencadeia grandes transformações em sua vida. As limitações impostas pela doença alteram a rotina dos adolescentes que se veem forçados a se submeter a um tratamento agressivo e doloroso e a se adaptar às restrições tanto de atividades quanto de relacionamentos. O objetivo da presente investigação é compreender como se configura o cuidado do adolescente com câncer, articulando as perspectivas dos adolescentes, familiares e da equipe de saúde, no contexto de um hospital de nível terciário de atenção, e apontar elementos que se aproximam e se distanciam de um cuidado que considere a complexidade humana. Foi utilizada a abordagem metodológica qualitativa, com fundamentação nas ideias acerca do pensamento complexo, tratado por Edgar Morin, pensador francês, que defende a necessidade de um modo de pensar multidimensional, em consonância com a complexidade da realidade. Participaram do estudo 12 adolescentes (com idade entre 12 e 18 anos), 14 familiares (dois pais, nove mães e três irmãos) além de 37 profissionais (15 médicos, quatro alunos do sexto ano de medicina, seis enfermeiras, cinco auxiliares de enfermagem, uma técnica de enfermagem, duas assistentes sociais, dois psicólogos, uma terapeuta ocupacional e duas nutricionistas). A entrevista e a observação foram utilizadas para a coleta de dados. A análise compreensiva dos dados foi desenvolvida buscando preservar a sua característica multidimensional, mediante a articulação dos diferentes sujeitos, considerando as distintas perspectivas, envolvidas no contexto do estudo, bem como o conjunto e suas relações, reconhecendo a complexidade do todo. Foram construídas três temáticas, inter-relacionando os dados empíricos com o referencial teórico proposto: a dialógica racionalidade-afetividade, a dialógica vida-morte e a dialógica indivíduoequipe- instituição no cuidado do adolescente com câncer. Considerando a questão do cuidado do adolescente com câncer como um fenômeno complexo que envolve múltiplas dimensões (indivíduos em um momento peculiar de seu desenvolvimento, com demandas específicas, inseridos em uma unidade familiar e social, vivenciando uma doença grave que os aproxima cotidianamente de uma equipe de profissionais com diferentes formações e diversos enfoques no cuidado), cabe construir práticas de cuidar condizentes com a complexidade da condição humana. Deste modo, cabe integrar a racionalidade técnica com a realidade vivida que comporta também a afetividade, a religiosidade, a angústia existencial e a possibilidade da criação, algumas das condições próprias do sujeito humano. / When faced with cancer, adolescents are confronted with a big challenge that leads to great transformations in their lives. The limitations the disease imposes alter the adolescents\' routine, who are forced to submit to an aggressive and painful treatment and to adapt to restrictions in their activities and relationships. This research aims to understand care delivery to adolescents with cancer, articulating the perspectives of adolescents, relatives and the health team in the context of a tertiary care hospital, as well as to appoint elements that approach and get away from care that takes into account human complexity. A qualitative methodological approach was used, based on the ideas of complex thinking according to the French thinker Edgar Morin, who defends the need for a multidimensional way of thinking, in line with the complexity of reality. Study participants were 12 adolescents (between 12 and 18 years old), 14 relatives (two fathers, nine mothers and three siblings), besides 37 professionals (15 physicians, four sixth-year medical school students, six nurses, five nursing auxiliaries, one nursing technician, two social workers, two psychologists, one occupational therapist and two nutritionists). Interview and observation were used for data collection. Comprehensive data analysis was developed in the attempt to preserve its multidimensional nature, through the articulation among different subjects, considering the distinct perspectives involved in the study context, as well as the collective picture and its relations, acknowledging the complexity of the whole. Three themes were constructed, interrelating empirical data with the proposed theoretical framework: the rationality-affectivity dialogue, the life-death dialogue and the individual-team-institution dialogue in care for adolescents with cancer. Considering care delivery to adolescents with cancer as a complex phenomenon, involving multiple dimensions (individuals at a peculiar moment in their development, with specific demands, inserted in a family and social unit, experiencing a severe disease, which every data approximates them to a professional theme with different backgrounds and various care foci), care practices should be constructed that are in line with the complexity of the human condition. Thus, technical rationality should be integrated with the experience reality, which also includes affectivity, religiosity, existential anguish and the possibility of creation, which are some of the conditions characteristic of human beings.