Adapting a strategy concerning quality management can be an effective means for organizations striving to enhance the quality which is delivered to its customers. Especially within large infrastructure projects, which concern products with considerable production costs and long technical life spans, tending to issues regarding quality becomes important. The ISO 9000 series offers a quality management standardization framework of which a plurality of organizations have certified themselves as being practitioners. The standard encompasses quality control, quality assurance, and quality improvement as core elements in quality management. The standard also integrates management of requirements as a fundamental part, and a prerequisite, for the quality work in general. Despite the framework supplied by the ISO 9000 series there are still degrees of freedom which introduces risk. By looking at how a certified company has implemented quality management in large infrastructure projects this study is aiming to identify eventual deficiencies within the quality systems employed, and potential measures which can remediate the deficiencies. Qualitative interviews and literature studies are used to form the empirical data.  Although the study confirms substantial quality management is undertaken in such ways the delivered quality appears to be enhanced, some issues emerge. The most comprehensive issue is confirmed as the need of the company to become less dependent on its client’s ability to provide comprehensive set of requirements. Undertaken projects in general could benefit by increasing the abilities within eliciting requirements from stakeholders, which could be achieved by integrating stakeholder analysis into the processes of the company.

This report deals with environmental improvement measures in asphalt production and examines the willingness to invest in environmentally friendly technologies. The main reasons of this paper are that the asphalt industry have a large impact on the environment and the transition to green technologies is slow, and to clarify the opportunities around environmentally friendly asphalt production. The main purpose of this report is to compile relevant knowledge in the improvement of the environmental measures of the asphalt production and thus contribute to a faster reduction of carbon dioxide emissions. The questions covered are: • How has the asphalt been used over time and until? • How does the asphalt industry effect the environment? • What are the technical solutions? • What are the costs of the different technical solutions? • What is the trend for more environmentally friendly asphalt production? The thesis was concluded through literature studies, consultations with people in the asphalt industry and trough several interviews. The results of the report show that there are many different measures to reduce the environmental impacts from asphalt production, and the main challenge for producers is to choose which method is most suitable for their company. The interviews report that the willingness to invest in environmentally improving techniques exists and that the trend to produce more environmentally friendly will increase. Increased requirements and a greater demand for environmentally friendly asphalt production from customers are desired.

For any developing country, infrastructure is at the core of economic growth and development. South Africa has a modern and well-developed transport infrastructure. The air and rail networks are the largest on the continent, and roads in good condition. To this degree of quality and quantity the purpose of this paper is to investigate whether or not public infrastructure investment contributes to economic growth, which is denoted as GDP per capita in this paper. The period of research is from 1960-2017. The Granger Causality method is applied, to find if a causal relationship exists between these two variables. Additionally, a log-log n OLS name of regression regression will beis run to see how variables, other than public infrastructure investment, affect GDP per capita. The endogenous growth theory is used as the main theory, in order to capture the essence of how the government endogenously affects output per capita in an economy. Findings reveal that there is a unidirectional relationship between public infrastructure investment and economic growth in South Africa. The direction of the causal relationship runs from public infrastructure investment to GDP per capita. Additionally, the infrastructure investment is found to be significant in the logged regression.  run. Which could impliesy that it affects economic growth. For further interest, a dummy variable was added in the regression to check whether the structural break in 1994 in South Africa has significantaffects the interpretation of the results.  changes in interpretation of results.This yielded in no significant changes in the results for infrastructure investment and GDP per capita.  (structural break and more important findings) (variables?) (what organisations can use these findings forFurther, Oorganisations and policy makers can use this paper as an indicator of how infrastructure investment plays a role in an economy, especially in developing countries.

Decision Support Tools (DSTs) are commonly utilised within the Asset Management (AM) operations of infrastructure organisations. These manual or computerised tools are used to support decisions about what assets to acquire and how to operate them. Their performance can therefore have significant financial and non-financial implications for a business. Despite their importance, managing the performance of DSTs after implementation has received only limited attention within the literature. The output of this research is a conceptual approach for managing the performance of decision support tools used within an Asset Management context. It encompasses a risk-based DST Performance Management Process and DST Performance Assessment Techniques (the methods for applying the process in an industry setting).The novelty of the approach: (1) Alignment with the fundamental principles of the International Standard for Asset Management, ISO 5500x:2014. Thus, consistency of the management of DSTs with other assets types. (2) A generic process that is tailored to the context of the specific organisation. (3) Consistency with the risk management process (ISO 31000:2009) and meeting the requirements for a quality process defined within the Quality Management Standard (ISO 9000: 2015). (4) A cyclical process design ensuring that the approach, and how the approach is applied within an industry setting, will evolve to reflect the changing environment. A case study and the input of subject matter experts from within National Grid Electricity Transmission was used to both inform and evaluate the conceptual approach design. A semi-structured interview, with a water sector subject matter expert, assesses the transferability of the approach to a wider Asset Management population. The results of the evaluation demonstrate the conceptual approach to be both logical and useable in each context. The future research pathway looks to progress the conceptual approach through to industry adoption.

Civil infrastructure systems form the backbone of modern civilization, providing the basic services that allow society to function. Effective management of these systems requires decision-making about the allocation of limited resources to maintain and repair infrastructure components and to replace failed or obsolete components. Making informed decisions requires an understanding of the state of the system; such an understanding can be achieved through a computational or conceptual system model combined with information gathered on the system via inspections or sensors. Gathering of this information, referred to generally as sensing, should be optimized to best support the decision-making and system management processes, in order to reduce long-term operational costs and improve infrastructure performance. In this work, an approach to optimal sensing in infrastructure systems is developed by combining probabilistic graphical models of infrastructure system behavior with the value of information (VoI) metric, which quantifies the utility of information gathering efforts (referred to generally as sensor placements) in supporting decision-making in uncertain systems. Computational methods are presented for the efficient evaluation and optimization of the VoI metric based on the probabilistic model structure. Various case studies on the application of this approach to managing infrastructure systems are presented, illustrating the flexibility of the basic method as well as various special cases for its practical implementation. Three main contributions are presented in this work. First, while the computational complexity of the VoI metric generally grows exponentially with the number of components, growth can be greatly reduced in systems with certain topologies (designated as cumulative topologies). Following from this, an efficient approach to VoI computation based on a cumulative topology and Gaussian random field model is developed and presented. Second, in systems with non-cumulative topologies, approximate techniques may be used to evaluate the VoI metric. This work presents extensive investigations of such systems and draws some general conclusions about the behavior of this metric. Third, this work presents several complete application cases for probabilistic modeling techniques and the VoI metric in supporting infrastructure system management. Case studies are presented in structural health monitoring, seismic risk mitigation, and extreme temperature response in urban areas. Other minor contributions included in this work are theoretical and empirical comparisons of the VoI with other sensor placement metrics and an extension of the developed sensor placement method to systems that evolve in time. Overall, this work illustrates how probabilistic graphical models and the VoI metric can allow for efficient sensor placement optimization to support infrastructure system management. Areas of future work to expand on the results presented here include the development of approximate, heuristic methods to support efficient sensor placement in non-cumulative system topologies, as well as further validation of the efficient sensing optimization approaches used in this work.

Cílem práce je podat ucelený přehled o aktuálních technologiích sloužících k zajištění dostupnosti IT infrastruktury v podniku. Autor má zkušenosti nejen s konkrétními technologiemi a přístupy k zajištění vyšší odolnosti jednotlivých komponent serveru vůči výpadku (ukládání dat, napájení, řízení toku vzduchu, ochrana paměti, ?) , ale i se softwarovými produkty, které zajistí redundanci celého serveru. Tento přístup byl otestován i v případové studii, kde proběhla analýza stávající situace ve vybrané společnosti a nalezeny funkce poskytované jednotlivými komponentami infrastruktury. Kromě detailního zmapování situace byla nalezena i slabá místa a doporučeno řešení.

Organizations wants to be at the top when it comes to using new technologies in order to retain a strong position on the market and also create innovative and unique service offerings. New technologies put pressure on organizations, that have to answer to its challenges. Blockchain is a new technology that is very well heard of, it is a complicated technology and is in constant development. The purpose of this study is to identify challenges that the blockchain technology brings to organizations as well what opportunities organizations are looking with the technology. There will also be discussions about potential opportunities that arise when organizations overcome the challenges and what the blockchain can contribute to digital services. / Organisationer vill vara ledande inom nya teknologier för att skapa unika tjänsteerbjudande och behålla drivkraft. Nya teknologier sätter press på organisationer som måste besvara dess utmaningar. Blockkedjetekniken är en omtalad teknologi som har fått stor uppmärksamhet de senaste åren, tekniken är komplicerad och i ständig utveckling. Syftet med denna studie är att identifiera utmaningar som blockkedjetekniken medför till organisationer samt vad organisationer ser för möjligheter med tekniken. Det kommer att diskuteras potentiella möjligheter som uppstår när organisationer överkommer utmaningarna och vad tekniken kan bidra med till digitala tjänster. I kombination med tidigare forskning och en kvalitativ studie som utförts hos en organisation som tillhandahåller digitala tjänster och som är intresserade att investera i blockkedjan har utmaningar och möjligheter identifierats.

British electrification began in the 1880s but it was the late 1920s before the 'GridIron' was constructed providing the capacity for uniformly accessible electricity. This enabled electricity to touch people's lives in the intimacy of their own homes, and provided cheaper electricity to workplaces, causing a shift from local suppliers to national coordination. Consequences for pollution, its visual impact on rural and urban landscapes, and an unparalleled and rapid intrusion on property rights were considered at the time. It was these effects that were the most controversial, although the damage through fossil fuels was arguably much greater with hindsight. The provision of electricity across the whole country took decades and was subject to exogenous pressures and was influenced by individuals, institutions and innovations. Electrification generally, and the Grid in particular has received scant attention from historians, especially regarding its environmental and social impacts and the fuel it consumed. This work tells the story of electricity as a commodity; initially sold by hundreds of individual companies operating generating stations providing a local electrical supply, and how this slowly transformed into a nationally coordinated system. The Grid, a vast network of towers and cables, transmitted bulk electricity generated by large power stations burning enormous quantities of coal. This work considers how this affected the environments in which people lived and worked and how these changes impacted the 'natural' environment. This work has only just begun to explore the changes that electricity brought spatially and how it impacted lifestyles and working methods. It explores how change was negotiated by actors and considers 'unintentional conservation', brought about by a drive to continuously improve efficiency and which occurred before the need for such environmental protection was well understood.

An outgrowth of the recent “infrastructural turn” in the humanities, this dissertation explores ways in which emerging flushing infrastructures of the nineteenth century—specifically toilets, sewers, and wastewater treatment systems—rearranged the coordinates of human experience in the modern, developed world. The idea that flushing technologies and techniques contribute to a process of technogenesis—a process of technical exteriorization that is beyond human control but which nevertheless contributes to the evolution of human consciousness— offers a foundational perspective for this study. While flushing technologies and techniques have powerfully enhanced certain human capabilities, they have also affected humanity in a number of problematic ways. This project examines how an expansive flushing media complex emerged in the United States, and traces some of the cultural, environmental and psychical consequences of these developments. Central to this dissertation’s argument is the idea that specific technical circumstances have had the effect of diminishing people’s comfort with, and understanding of, waste processes. In the end, it argues that the ubiquitous flushing technologies that permeate the developed world have perpetuated a culture of forgetting. In the broadest sense, this dissertation is a media-theoretical exploration of the concept of flushing, and it adopts a theoretical lens that has been developed through cultural techniques scholarship of the past few decades. This body of research works to break down and rebuild conventional understandings of media and culture, and seeks to better understand the ways in which medial technologies shape social and cognitive orders. At the theoretical level, this dissertation works to extend the reach of media studies. In addition to conventional media like books, newspapers, TV, radio, film, and the internet, this view of media encompasses any substance or process that effectively mediates—that is, functions as a medium. At the stylistic level, this project answers the call for alternative and experimental modes of dissertorial expression. Blending academic, essayistic, and journalistic strategies, this work walks a precarious line between creative writing and scholarly discourse. Such boundary pushing aims to encourage future stylistic innovation within the academy.

On Friday October 21st, 2016, there was a large-scale hack of an Internet domain hosting provider that took several websites including Netflix, Amazon, Reddit, and Twitter offline. Dyn, a cloud-based Internet Performance Management company, announced at 9:20AM ET that it resolved an attack that began at 7AM ET that day. However, another attack happened at 11:52AM ET. The attacks raised concern among the public and directed our attention towards Internet security. This also revealed the precariousness of Internet infrastructure. The infrastructure being used today is opaque, unregulated, and incontestable. Municipally provided public utilities are built without any transparency; thus, we do not expect failure from those systems. For instance, the Flint, Michigan water crisis raised issues of water infrastructure. Not only did the crisis spark talks about the corrosion of pipes, but also larger societal issues. Flint, a poor, largely African American community, became a victim of environmental racism—a type of discrimination where communities of color or low-income residents are forced to live in environmental dangerous areas. In order for myself and the larger public to understand this opaque system, we need to understand the infrastructure and how it works. With regards to Internet infrastructure, I focus on data centers, where there are backup servers, batteries and generators built into the architectural landscape in case of failure. There is a common held thought that overshadows the possibility of imminent technological failure—it cannot happen. This sort of thinking influences other modes of our daily lives: individuals building concrete bomb shelters underground for the apocalypse, stocking food, but not preparing for data breakdown. The consciousness of loss is further perpetuated by technology and its life expectancy. Clouded Space: Internet Physicality attempts to explore the unexceptional infrastructure of the Internet and how it exists right beneath our feet. That in itself is not very cloud-like. The work questions integrity of our infrastructure as much as environmental issues, highlighting the questionable relationship we have with data and our inclination to backup data to protect ourselves from failure. This is a relatively new topic and the challenges are not well understood. There seem to be cracks in the foundation, and though they are not yet obvious, they appear to be widening.