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From one year to another an intuitive feeling has grown stronger. That feeling tells us that poor traceability is the underlying reason for many of the problems that the software industry struggles with today. This thesis was carried out to see if this was true and if so investigate how traceability was related to the problems in today's software industry. In order to do this we have taken two different approaches. The first approach has been to try to establish if there exist support for this claim in existing literature. In the second approach we have tried to do the same thing by performing our own empirical study. Within this empirical study we have interviewed some project managers and some developers in order to find out which problems that are perceived by the software community as the most troublesome ones when it comes to software development. Finally we have created a conceptual framework for increased traceability and then investigated if whether or not this framework could provide a good foundation for tackling the problems identified in literature as well as the problems discovered within the empirical study.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to discover how management information models provide organizations that have the will to perform sustainable, with a tool that gives them knowledge and practical guidance to reach sustainability and avoid the practice of greenwashing as a result. Therefore, the research question is: How can management information models serve as a tool to improve the sustainability performance and reduce the practice of greenwashing of an organization? Methods The authors approached this research from a balanced and pragmatic view. The primary data in the research is collected with a qualitative approach in the form of semi-structured interviews. The interviews are conducted with respondents from Swedish organizations in different sectors in order to increase the reliability of the study. The respondents are responsible for sustainability and management information models in their organizations. Findings The results present the need to enhance management information models by including the sustainability elements economic, social and environmental, also called the Triple Bottom Line (Elkington 1999). An evolution of the Balanced Scorecard (Kaplan & Norton 1996) is needed to reach a management information models that improves the sustainability performance. In addition, this study shows the importance of including a knowledge section in such models. Also, it is of high importance to place the measured outcomes of sustainability in context in order to provide insight in the true impact of the sustainability performance of the organization. Implications The implications of this research consists of three theoretical implications and three practical implications. The three theoretical implications include the three core elements of a sustainability model, simplification of complex knowledge especially on the knowledge performance and prescribing only the essential elements of a model. The three practical implications exists of dividing the implementation into phases, ensure responsibility of sustainability on a high management level and integrate sustainability into culture. KeywordsSustainability; greenwashing; management information models; contextsustainability; knowledge.

There is an increasing demand for the exchange of important product and manufacturing information in a computer interpretable way. Large manufacturing companies are dependent on having access to the necessary information electronically. If they do not get information about their manufacturing resources from their vendors, they will buy their resources elsewhere, or they will have to create the information themselves. In the end, the cost of the manufactured products will increase to accommodate the cost increase from having to create, integrate, and maintain this information. In order to solve this problem, the use of international standards for product data is required. One area where such a standard is required is the area of cutting tools. This thesis describes the requirements for an international standard for the representation and exchange of cutting tool information and the resulting information model together with necessary reference data. The representation of cutting tool information using an international standard requires a generally applicable information model which is used together with a reference data library. The reference data provides the explicit, unambiguous concepts necessary for successful information exchange. ISO 13399, the international standard that is the result of this research project, uses P-Lib (ISO 13584) to define its reference data. To successfully use P-Lib in this way, requires some basic assumptions to be made, since P-Lib is originally developed for component catalogs. As a result of the chosen representation technique, the standard is capable of accommodating current and future developments of cutting tools, e.g. multi function tools. / QC 20100901

Traditionally risk management is associated with identification, evaluation and prioritization of risks. Nonetheless, communication of the risks to the parties involved is of the utmost importance. By providing more complete and easy to perceive information regarding potential hazard impacts and economic losses, risk analysis output increases risk awareness and helps make risk-informed decisions. At present, in the field of civil engineering three-dimensional (3D) models are almost exclusively used for the design of structures. The presence of 3D and Virtual Reality (VR) technologies in risk analysis is extremely scarce. At the same time, there are potential advantages these technologies can provide to risk analysis and communication: the virtual 3D environment can emulate physical space and relationships between elements of the system, time-dependent simulations of hazard propagation, and awareness of physical dimensions of elements and their interconnection can be integrated. This work is concerned with the way to communicate risks associated with building systems to decision-makers by visualizing them on a 3D model of construction and through simulation in a VR environment. For this purpose, the Almonte Power Plant in Mississippi Mills, Ontario, is analyzed as a case study. It is a small scale hydropower plant that is at risk of flooding, being located close to the Mississippi River. The last large scale flood in this region occurred in April 2019. The novel methodology is applied to the aforementioned case study and further experiments are performed to test the sensitivity of the model to various parameters. The parameters of interest are flow rate and the degree of dependency between elements. Risk scores are obtained and evaluated as a function of flow rates and duration from the onset of flooding. The change in the degree of dependency between various elements of the electrical system allows an illustration of the importance of expert judgement of those dependencies. / Graduate / 2021-05-20

This panel paper aims at initiating discussion at the Second International Workshop on Energy Data Management (EnDM 2013) about the important research challenges within Energy Data Management. The authors are the panel organizers, extra panelists will be recruited before the workshop.

This thesis reports on research focuses on how to deal with the fact that the organization and processesof today’s health and social care are becoming ever more complex as a consequence of societal trends, including an aging population and an increased reliance on care at home. The overall research goal is to suggest ways in which IT-based solutions can enable and leverage collaboration and coordination insituations where a co-morbid patient is subject to care delivered simultaneously by several different professionals and organizations. Patient-centered care is defined as quality health and social care achieved through a partnership between informed and respected patients, their families, and coordinated health and social care teams who conduct care activities according to jointly determined care plans. Against a background of several years of research on patient-centered collaborative care using adesign science approach, using techniques such as focus groups, interviews, and document studies, the author of the thesis has further pursued the work in a project named CoCare. Results show that the care required in aging societies is both a social and a technical challenge. Meeting this challenge will require a redesign of today's health and social care processes in order to focus more clearly on patient needs and values, and poses demands on information services allowing to share knowledge of the patient’s health and social situation among involved care providers. An important aspect of the increased complexity is that a single patient may need care from several autonomous care providers in parallel, particularly patients with co-morbidities. This clearly requires effective coordination of care activities, which poses further demands on information services to support this task. A set of issues involving patient-centered collaborative care is identified and analyzed. The thesis introduces the notions of the Patient-Centered Care Process (PCCP) and a conglomeration of suchprocesses. A conglomeration comprises a set of PCCPs that concern the same patient, that are overlapping in time, and that share the overall goal of improving and maintaining the health and socialwell-being of the patient. The PCCP is inspired by the well-known PDCA cycle and comprises the four phases of assessing the patient situation (ASSESS), planning care activities (PLAN), performingcare activities (DO) and following up care (CHECK) for the patient. Based on a number of key standards, such as HL7, HISA and CONTsys, the thesis introduces a Patient-Centered Information Model (PCIM). A set of information services, together constituting a Coordination Hub, is proposed. The information services aim to help formal as well as informal carers (including the patient) inconducting care according to the PCCP The thesis contributes to a deeper understanding of care processes and suggests ways to achieve patient-centered collaborative care that better contributes to creating value for the patient as an individual.

This research is focused on helping engineers design better systems by supporting their decision making. When engineers design a system, they have an almost unlimited number of possible system alternatives to consider. Modern systems are difficult to design because of a need to satisfy many different stakeholder concerns from a number of domains which requires a large amount of expert knowledge. Current systems engineering practices try to simplify the design process by providing practical approaches to managing the large amount of knowledge and information needed during the process. Although these methods make designing a system more practical, they do not support a structured decision making process, especially at early stages when designers are selecting the appropriate system architecture, and instead rely on designers using ad hoc frameworks that are often self-contradictory. In this dissertation, a framework for performing architecture exploration at early stages of the design process is presented. The goal is to support more rational and self-consistent decision making by allowing designers to explicitly represent their architecture exploration problem and then use computational tools to perform this exploration. To represent the architecture exploration problem, a modeling language is presented which explicitly models the problem as an architecture selection decision. This language is based on the principles of decision-based design and decision theory, where decisions are made by picking the alternative that results in the most preferred expected outcome. The language is designed to capture potential alternatives in a compact form, analysis knowledge used to predict the quality of a particular alternative, and evaluation criteria to differentiate and rank outcomes. This language is based on the Object Management Group's System Modeling Language (SysML). Where possible, existing SysML constructs are used; when additional constructs are needed, SysML's profile mechanism is used to extend the language. Simply modeling the selection decision explicitly is not sufficient, computational tools are also needed to explore the space of possible solutions and inform designers about the selection of the appropriate alternative. In this investigation, computational tools from the mathematical programming domain are considered for this purpose. A framework for modeling an architecture selection decision in mixed-integer linear programming (MIP) is presented. MIP solvers can then solve the MIP problem to identify promising candidate architectures at early stages of the design process. Mathematical programming is a common optimization domain, but it is rarely used in this context because of the difficulty of manually formulating an architecture selection or exploration problem as a mathematical programming optimization problem. The formulation is presented in a modular fashion; this enables the definition of a model transformation that can be applied to transform the more compact SysML representation into the mathematical programming problem, which is also presented. A modular superstructure representation is used to model the design space; in a superstructure a union of all potential architectures is represented as a set of discrete and continuous variables. Algebraic constraints are added to describe both acceptable variable combinations and system behavior to allow the solver to eliminate clearly poor alternatives and identify promising alternatives. The overall framework is demonstrated on the selection of an actuation subsystem for a hydraulic excavator. This example is chosen because of the variety of potential architecture embodiments and also a plethora of well-known configurations which can be used to verify the results.

Rapporten har ett fokus på Byggnads Informations Modeller (BIM), ett IT-tekniskt verktyg och arbetssätt som har vuxit fram i byggbranschen alltmer under de senaste åren. Hur detta IT-verktyg används hos medelstora byggentreprenadföretag redovisas i denna rapport.Syftet med rapporten är att verka positivt på utvecklingen mot effektivare och resurssnålare arbetsprocesser inom byggbranschen genom att bidra med kunskap om hur användandet av BIM ser ut bland dessa företag, varför det ser ut som det gör, ifall BIM behövs och vad som kan förändra läget i någon riktning.Metodarbetet har bestått av litteraturstudier och intervjuundersökningar.Arbetet inleddes med studier av rapporter och texter relaterade till BIM och intervjuer med representanter för ledande branschföretag inom bygg samt ett par branschorganisationer med inriktning på BIM. Därefter följde ytterligare litteraturstudier med inriktning på förändring och förändringsarbete och enkät och intervjuteknik. Arbetet ledde fram till olika grundteser och förklaringsmodeller som låg till grund för och utformade de intervjufrågor som ställdes vid huvudintervjuerna med elva medelstora byggentreprenadföretag.Huvudintervjuerna gav ett resultat som visade att företagen generellt sett såg på BIM som något positivt, med fördelar såsom lättare kommunikation och som ett hjälpmedel att minska fel i produktionen. Resultatet visade även att det fanns utmaningar såsom mjukvarukompabilitet och en beroendeproblematik mellan projektets involverade parter som innebar att för att tekniken ska kunna ge fördelar måste alla parter använda tekniken.Förklaringarna till det låga användandet bland medelstora byggentreprenadföretag var flera, vanligast var brist på krav från beställarna. Förklaringarna var också avsaknad av behov, kostsamma investeringar, konkurrerande målsättningar, kompabilitetsproblem med mjukvaror och avsaknad av kunskap om BIM.För att gynna en större användning föreslås att tekniska hinder elimineras genom standardisering och utveckling av arbetssättet och mjukvaran rörande BIM, det föreslås också att konkurrerande målsättningar elimineras genom kunskapsspridning om BIM i branschen, både hos entreprenörerna, -för att främja god utbildning så att personalen vill arbeta med tekniken, och hos beställare, -så att de börjar efterfråga BIM och därigenom ger tekniken konkurrensfördelar. / The report has a focus on Building Information Models (BIM), an IT-technical tool- and workmethod that have emerged increasingly in the construction industry in recent years. How this IT tool is used in medium-sized building construction companies is presented in this report.The purpose of the report is to promote positive development towards more efficient and resource-efficient work processes in the construction industry by providing knowledge on how the use of BIM exists among these companies, why it is the way it is, if BIM is needed and what can change the current status in any direction.The work-method has consisted of literature studies and interview surveys.The work began with studies of reports and texts related to BIM and interviews with representatives of leading construction industry companies and a couple of industry organizations with focus on BIM. This was followed by continued literary studies focused on change and change management, survey and interview techniques. This work led to various basic theories and explanatory models as the basis for and the design of the interview questions asked at the main interviews.The main interviews was conducted with eleven medium-sized building construction companies and gave a result that showed that companies generally looked at BIM as something positive with advantages such as easier communication and as a means to reduce errors in production. The result also brought some light to the fact that there existed challenges like software compatibility and dependency between the parties involved in the project, which means that for the technology to be able to provide wanted benefits all parties involved have to use the workmethod.The reasons for the low usage among medium sized construction contractors was several, the most common was the lack of demands of the clients. The reasons were also the absence of need, costly investments, competing objectives, compatibility issues with software and lack of knowledge of BIM.In order to promote a greater usage of BIM it is proposed that the technical obstacles are eliminated through standardization and development of the processing method and software, it is also proposed that the competing objectives are eliminated by spreading and increasing knowledge of BIM in the industry, both amongst entrepreneurs, -to promote good staff training so that the staff will want to work with the technology, and amongst construction clients, -so that they start asking for BIM and thereby provide the technology with a competitive edge.

Arbetsdispositionsplanen (APD-plan) är en central metod för planering av byggarbetsplatser och stöd för platsledningens beslutsfattande. Idag är stödet nästan uteslutande manuellt arbete även om det görs med digitala verktyg och uppdatering av APD-planen uteblir.  Denna studie syftar till att undersöka möjligheterna för att automatisera överföringen av information från en 360-graders hjälmkamera på en byggarbetsplats till en digital APD-plan integrerad med byggnadsinformationsmodeller (BIM). Målet med studien är att undersöka hur informationen från en hjälmkamera kan kopplas till digitala verktyg såsom APD-planer och BIM-modeller samt hur denna information kan användas som stöd för platsledningen på byggarbetsplatsen genom kontinuerlig uppdatering av APD-planen.  Studien baseras på en fallstudie som innefattar datainsamling i form av bilder och videor från byggarbetsplatsen, intervjuer med personer med erfarenhet och kunskap inom byggbranschen samt observationer från fältstudie. En litteraturstudie presenteras också, där teori kopplad till examensarbetets syfte och frågeställning används som grund för analys, diskussion och slutsatser.  För att uppnå syftet och målen med studien besvaras följande forskningsfrågor:  Hur uppdateras och används APD-planer i dagsläget inom byggsektorn?  Vilka utmaningar och svårigheter är förknippade med automatiserad överföring av information från hjälmkameror till APD-planer?  Vilka fördelar och nackdelar medför användningen av en 360-graders hjälmkamera som verktyg för automatiserad uppdatering av APD-planer och integrering med BIM-modeller?  Utifrån litteraturstudien och genomförda intervjuer uppdateras APD-planer i nuläget manuellt genom att APD-ansvarig genomför inspektioner ute på arbetsplatsen. Denna metod är tidskrävande och uppdateringar tenderar att utebli på grund av tidsbrist.  Resultatet av fallstudien indikerar att insamlad data från byggarbetsplatsen automatiskt kunde överföras till APD-planen men inspektionen för att samla in data krävde manuellt utförande. APD-planen uppdaterades manuellt genom att jämföra insamlade data från byggarbetsplatsen och sedan uppdatera APD-planen utifrån dessa förändringar.  Utvecklad metod skapar förutsättningar för en smidare och effektiv uppdateringsprocess av APD-planen. APD-ansvarig kan utföra uppdateringar digitalt utan fysisk närvaro på platsen. Med metoden kan APD-planer uppdateras frekvent där senaste information finns tillgänglig i smartphones för samtliga involverade i projektet. Nackdelen med utvecklad metod är att manuell uppdatering krävs där vidare forskning är nödvändig för att automatisera uppdateringen. Formatet av insamlat material medförde att en automatiserad uppdatering uteblev eftersom materialet inte kunde kopplas samman med APD-modellen utan enbart jämföras. Om formatet av insamlat material skulle kunna omvandlas till modeller eller placeras ovanpå befintliga modeller skulle en automatiserad uppdatering av APD-planen vara genomförbar. / The Construction Site Utilization Plan (CSUP) is a central method for planning construction sites and support for site management's decision-making. Today, the support is almost exclusively manual work, even if it is done with digital tools, updating the CSUP tends to be absent.  This study aims to investigate the possibilities of automating the transfer of information from a 360-degree helmet camera on a construction site to a digital CSUP model integrated with building information models (BIM). The goal of the study is to investigate how the information from a helmet camera can be connected to digital tools such as CSUP and BIM models and how this information can be used to support site management on the construction site through continuous updating of the CSUP.  The study is based on a case study that includes data collection in the form of images and videos from the construction site, interviews with people with experience and knowledge in the construction industry, and observations from field studies. A literature study is presented as well, where theory linked to the aim and question of the thesis is used as a basis for analysis, discussion and conclusions.  In order to achieve the aim and objectives of the study, the following research questions are answered:  How are CSUPs currently updated and used in the construction sector?  What are the challenges and difficulties associated with automated transmission of information from helmet cameras to CSUPs? What are the advantages and disadvantages of using a 360-degree helmet camera as a tool for automated updating of CSUPs and integration with BIM models?  Based on the literature study and conducted interviews, CSUPs are currently updated manually by the CSUP manager carrying out inspections at the construction site. This method is time consuming and updates tend to fail due to lack of time.  The results of the case study indicate that data collected from the construction site could be automatically transferred to the CSUP but the inspection to collect the data required manual execution. The CSUP was manually updated by comparing collected data from the construction site and then updating the CSUP based on these changes.  The developed method creates the conditions for a smoother and more efficient updating process of the CSUP. CSUP managers can carry out updates digitally without physical presence on site. With the method, CSUPs can be updated frequently where the latest information is available on smartphones for everyone involved in the project. The disadvantage of the developed method is that manual updating is required where further research is necessary to automate the updating. The format of collected material meant that an automated update was not possible because the material could not be connected to the CSUP model but only compared. If the format of collected material could be converted into models or placed on top of existing models, automated updating of the CSUP would be feasible.