Hästens Beds is a Swedish luxury bed manufacturer, located in Köping, Sweden. They have a strong global presence, with Europe being the most mature and proven market. European retailers, called Hästens Partners, are serviced from the central warehouse in Borås which also handles all non-European export to Hästens’ other warehouse facilities in Hong Kong and the United States. As a part of Hästens’ planned growth journey, they are interested in reevaluating their European distribution network from a total cost and delivery service perspective. Hence, the purpose of this master’s thesis is to evaluate alternate distribution network designs in Europe for Hästens to reduce total logistics costs without impairing the delivery service level.  Extensive literature studies and initial interviews were conducted to understand both the theoretical field and the Hästens’ case-specific context. Based on this, three main research questions and a corresponding method resulted in a three-step approach to answer the purpose of the study.  In order to generate network structures and then analyze them, it was first necessary to determine the factors that should be included. Cost functions were created based on curve fitting, based on identified cost drivers for the included cost parameters of warehousing, transportation, and inventory carrying. Furthermore, the customer order lead time was concluded to be very generous. This had the consequence of the distribution lead time not putting any constraints on the network design. Lastly, access to transportation infrastructure, especially a port for handling the non-European export, and the general cost disparity between neighboring regions were concluded to be other important factors for the specific case of Hästens.  Center of gravity analyses based on the identified cost driver for outbound costs, m3-km, were then used to generate 13 candidate warehouse locations. In some cases, these locations were altered to better align with the identified important factors of good access to transportation infrastructure and cost disparity. The most strategically viable combinations of the number and echelons of warehouses could be limited to three combinations, all consisting of a single echelon with one, two, or three warehouses respectively. Therefore, three network optimization scenarios were created, minimizing the total cost of inbound and outbound transportation, which led to the generated network alternatives.  Finally, the total logistics costs were calculated and analyzed for the three alternative structures and a model replica of the current structure by utilizing the cost functions for each included cost parameter. The alternatives were also discussed based on delivery service theory and quantified with regard to distances to Partners. After applying sensitivity analysis and discussing the results’ implications for Hästens, Alternative 2* was formed with warehouses in Borås and Rotterdam. All the alternatives’ total logistics costs and average distances to Partners are quantified below.  [TABLE] As can be seen, the cost savings from Alternative 1 compared with the current network are marginal, and the costs of Alternative 2 and 2* are highly similar. Further, preliminary analysis showed that Alternative 2* would not be economically profitable until at least a 500% increase in European outbound transportation volumes. The conclusion that could be drawn from this was that Hästens is not yet suited to scale up its European distribution network to operate more than one warehouse. However, when future sales volumes allow for it, a European distribution center in Rotterdam could be profitable and provide European customers with greater delivery service.

A novel approach to the gain estimation problem,using a multi-armed bandit formulation, is studied. The gain estimation problem deals with the problem of estimating the largest L2-gain that signal of bounded norm experiences when passing through a linear and time-invariant system. Under certain conditions, this new approach is guaranteed to surpass traditional System Identification methods in terms of accuracy.The bandit algorithms Upper Confidence Bound, Thompson Sampling and Weighted Thompson Sampling are implemented with the aim of designing the optimal input for maximizing the gain of an unknown system. The regret performance of each algorithm is studied using simulations on a test system. Upper Confidence Bound, with exploration parameter set to zero, performed the best among all tested values for this parameter. Weighted Thompson Sampling performed better than Thompson Sampling.

Edge computing, as an approach to leveraging computation capabilities located in different places, is widely deployed in the industry nowadays. With the development of edge computing, many big companies move from the traditional monolithic software architecture to the microservice design. To provide better performance of the applications which contain numerous loosely coupled modules that are deployed among multiple clusters, service routing among multiple clusters needs to be effective. However, most existing solutions are dedicated to static service routing and load balancing strategy, and thus the performance of the application cannot be effectively optimized when network condition changes.To address the problem mentioned above, we proposed a dynamic weighted round robin algorithm and implemented it on top of the cutting edge service mesh Istio. The solution is implemented as a Docker image called RoutingAgent, which is simple to deployed and managed. With the RoutingAgent running in the system, the weights of the target routing clusters will be dynamically changed based on the detected inter-cluster network latency. Consequently, the client-side request turnaround time will be decreased.The solution is evaluated in an emulated environment. Compared to the Istio without RoutingAgent, the experiment results show that the client-side latency can be effectively minimized by the proposed solution in the multicluster environment with dynamic network conditions. In addition to minimizing response time, emulation results demonstrate that loads of each cluster are well balanced. / Edge computing, som ett tillvägagångssätt för att utnyttja beräkningsfunktioner som finns på olika ställen, används i stor utsträckning i branschen nuförtiden. Med utvecklingen av kantdatabasen flyttar många stora företag från den traditionella monolitiska mjukvaruarkitekturen till mikroserviceteknik. För att ge bättre prestanda för de applikationer som innehåller många löst kopplade moduler som distribueras bland flera kluster, måste service routing bland flera kluster vara effektiva. De flesta befintliga lösningarna är dock dedikerade till statisk service-routing och belastningsbalanseringsstrategi, vilket gör att programmets prestanda inte effektivt kan optimeras när nätverksförhållandena ändras.För att ta itu med problemet som nämnts ovan föreslog vi en dynamisk viktad round robin-algoritm och implementerade den ovanpå den avancerade servicenätverket Istio. Lösningen implementeras som en Docker-bild som heter RoutingAgent, som är enkel att distribuera och hantera. Med agenten som körs i systemet ändras vikten av målruteringsklustret dynamiskt baserat på den upptäckta interklusternätets latens. Följaktligen kommer klientsidans begäran om omställningstid att minskas.Lösningen utvärderas i en emulerad miljö. Jämfört med Istio utan agent visar experimentresultaten att klientens latentitet effektivt kan minimeras av den föreslagna lösningen i multicluster-miljö med dynamiska nätverksförhållanden. Förutom att minimera responstid visar emuleringsresultat att belastningar i varje kluster är välbalanserade.

Current moves into a heavily digitalized era has led to a phase where our privacy is being eroded as we hand over our personal data to organizations and their systems. At the same time, the applicable laws to give security to the individuals have failed to incorporate these legal developments. However, in April 2016 the European Union proposed a change to a new regulation called the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The GDPR will be implemented and start to apply in May 2018, thus the main purpose of this study was to investigate how organizations can adapt to changing regulations on how personal data should be stored and managed, and what the key tension points are within specifically closed IT-systems. The goal of the GDPR and this study on its feature implementation is to guarantee the EU citizens their right to privacy. Through an exploratory case study involving an in-depth analysis of two closed IT-systems this study develops a broader understanding on how organizations should adapt their daily businesses in order to be fully compliant with the new bylaws. This study identifies four critical issues which are used to discuss how the new bylaws could affect the EU citizens’ privacy. To accomplish this and open up for further investigation within the field of data privacy laws - four different propositions to modifications were suggested. / Den aktuella övergången till en omfattande digitaliserad tid har lett till en fas där vår integritet går förlorad då vi överlämnar vår personliga information till organisationer och deras system. Samtidigt har de tillämpade datalagarna med syfte att skydda individen misslyckats med att införliva denna utveckling. Därför har den Europeiska Unionen i april 2016 föreslagit en förändring till en ny reglering som får namnet Dataskyddsförordningen. Dataskyddsförordningen kommer blir implementerad och börja gälla i maj 2018 och därav var huvudsyftet med den här studien att undersöka hur organisationer bör anpassa sig till de nya riktlinjerna för hur personlig information bör lagras och hanteras samt vilka spänningspunkterna är för slutna IT-system. Målet med Dataskyddsförordningen och vad den här studien beaktade i dess kommande utförande är att garantera EU-medborgare rätten till sin integritet. Genom att utföra en undersökande fallstudie innehållandes en djupgående analys av två slutna IT-system har den här studien bidragit med en bredare förståelse för hur organisationer bör anpassa sina dagliga verksamhet för att vara helt medgörliga med Dataskyddsförordningen. Studien har identifierat fyra kritiska problem som har legat till grund för att diskutera hur den nya förordningen kommer påverka EU-medborgarnas rätt till sin integritet. För att göra det möjligt samt öppna upp för framtida undersökningar inom ramen för dataskyddslagar föreslogs fyra förslag på generella förändringar.

One of the key areas that have attracted attention in the construction industry today is Structural Health Monitoring, more commonly known as SHM. It is a concept developed to monitor the quality and longevity of various engineering structures. The incorporation of such a system would help to continuously track health of the structure, indicate the occurrence/presence of any damage in real time and give us an idea of the number of useful years for the same. Being a recently conceived idea, the state of the art technique in the field is straight forward - populating a given structure with sensors and extracting information from them. In this regard, instrumenting with too many sensors may be inefficient as this could lead to superfluous data that is expensive to capture and process. This research aims to explore an alternate SHM technique that optimizes the data acquisition process by eliminating the amount of redundant data that is sensed and uses this sufficient data to detect and locate the fault present in the structure. Efficient data acquisition requires a mechanism that senses just the necessary amount of data for detection and location of fault. For this reason Compressive Sensing (CS) is explored as a plausible idea. CS claims that signals can be reconstructed from what was previously believed to be incomplete information by Shannon's theorem, taking only a small amount of random and linear non - adaptive measurements. As responses of many physical systems contain a finite basis, CS exploits this feature and determines the sparse solution instead of the traditional least - squares type solution.As a first step, CS is demonstrated by successfully recovering the frequency components of a simple sinusoid. Next, the question of how CS compares with the conventional Fourier transform is analyzed. For this, recovery of temporal frequencies and signal reconstruction is performed using the same number of samples for both the approaches and the errors are compared. On the other hand, the FT error is gradually minimized to match that of CS by increasing the number of regularly placed samples. Once the advantages are established, feasibility of using CS to detect damage in a single degree of freedom system is tested under unforced and forced conditions. In the former scenario, damage is indicated when there is a change in natural frequency of vibration of the system after an impact. In the latter, the system is excited harmonically and damage is detected by a change in amplitude of the system's vibration. As systems in real world applications are predominantly multi-DOF, CS is tested on a 2-DOF system excited with a harmonic forcing. Here again, damage detection is achieved by observing the change in the amplitude of vibration of the system. In order to employ CS for detecting either a change in frequency or amplitude of vibration of a structure subjected to realistic forcing conditions, it would be prudent to explore the reconstruction of a signal which contains multiple frequencies. This is accomplished using CS on a chirp signal. Damage detection is clearly a spatio-temporal problem. Hence it is important to additionally explore the extension of CS to spatial reconstruction. For this reason, mode shape reconstruction of a beam with standard boundary conditions is performed and validated with standard/analytical results from literature. As the final step, the operation deflection shapes (ODS) are reconstructed for a simply supported beam using CS to establish that it is indeed a plausible approach for a less expensive SHM. While experimenting with the idea of spatio-temporal domain, the mode shape as well as the ODS of the given beam are examined under two conditions - undamaged and damaged. Damage in the beam is simulated as a decrease in the stiffness coefficient over a certain number of elements. Although the range of modes to be examined heavily depends on the structure in question, literature suggests that for most practical applications, lower modes are more dominant in indicating damage. For ODS on the other hand, damage is indicated by observing the shift in the recovered spatial frequencies and it is confirmed by the reconstructed response.

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aus der Einführung: „Infolge des stetigen Bevölkerungswachstums und zunehmender Migrationsbewegungen wird die Baubranche zukünftig mit einer hohen zu bewältigenden Bautätigkeit konfrontiert sein. Dies geht einher mit einer Verknappung endlicher Ressourcen. In Anbetracht dieser Situation werden neue Technologien, die auf ein möglichst leichtes Bauen, die Minimierung des Verbrauchs an fossil erzeugter Energie sowie die vollständige Rezyklierbarkeit der Bauteile abzielen, zwingend notwendig [1]. Insbesondere beim Bauen mit Beton, der neben Wasser der meistverbrauchte Stoff weltweit ist [2], besteht ein dringender Handlungsbedarf, gewichtsreduzierte, emissionsminimierte und sortenrein rezyklierbare Bauteile zu entwickeln....” / from the introduction: „Owing to the steady population growth and increasing migration, the construction industry will be faced with the need to deal with a high level of construction activity coinciding with a global scarcity of fi nite resources. In view of this situation, new construction methods will become imperative in order to make construction as light as possible, while minimizing the consumption of fossil based energy and ensuring the fully recyclability of the components [1]. Most of all, when the construction material being used is concrete – which, together with water, is the material most frequently used around the globe [2] – an urgent need for action exists with regard to the development of components that are weight-reduced, energy-minimized and recyclable....”

Games have been a field of interest for researchin artificial intelligence for decades. As of now, it is over 5years ago an AI for the strategy game Go, AlphaGo, beat worldchampion Lee Sedol 4-1, which was considered to be an enormousmilestone for AI. Our goal is to make an AI that can play theclassic strategy board game Stratego at a competent level. Thisis achieved by making the AI learn by repeatedly playing againstitself to figure out what strategy to use in various situations byusing CFR - counterfactual regret minimization. According toour experiments, we were able to accomplish our goal in makinga Stratego AI that could play at a sophisticated level for a smallerversion of the game. We concluded that it was able to play betterthan an amateur human player. / Spel har varit ett intresseområde inomutvecklingen av artificiell intelligens i årtionden. Det är redanfem år sedan AlphaGo slog världsmästaren Lee Sedol i Go 2016,vilket betraktas vara ett stort steg för utvecklingen av AI. Vårtmål är att skapa en AI som kan spela strategispelet Stratego på en kompetent nivå. Detta kommer att implementeras genom att AI:n spelar mot sig själv en stor mängd gånger och uppdaterarsin strategi baserat på konceptet CFR counterfactual regretminimization. Enligt våra experiment lyckades vi med vårt mål i att skapa en kompetent Stratego AI för en mindre version avStratego. Vår uppfattning är att den spelar bättre än en människapå amatörnivå. / Kandidatexjobb i elektroteknik 2021, KTH, Stockholm

Many problems involving decision making withimperfect information can be modeled as extensive games. Onefamily of state-of-the-art algorithms for computing optimal playin such games is Counterfactual Regret Minimization (CFR).The purpose of this paper is to explore the viability of CFRalgorithms on the board game Stratego. We compare differentalgorithms within the family and evaluate the heuristic method“imperfect recall” for game abstraction. Our experiments showthat the Monte-Carlo variant External CFR and use of gametree pruning greatly reduce training time. Further, we show thatimperfect recall can reduce the memory requirements with only aminor drop in player performance. These results show that CFRis suitable for strategic decision making. However, solutions tothe long computation time in high complexity games need to beexplored. / Många beslutsproblem med dold informationkan modelleras som spel på omfattande form. En familj avledande algoritmer för att beräkna optimal strategi i sådana spelär Counterfactual Regret Minimization (CFR). Syftet med dennarapport är att undersöka effektiviteten för CFR-algoritmer ibrädspelet Stratego. Vi jämför olika algoritmer inom familjen ochutvärderar den heuristiska metoden “imperfekt minne” för spelabstraktion.Våra experiment visar att Monte-Carlo-variantenExternal CFR och användning av trimning av spelträd kraftigtminskar träningstiden. Vidare visar vi att imperfekt minne kanminska algoritmens lagringskrav med bara en mindre förlust ispelstyrka. Dessa resultat visar att CFR är lämplig för strategisktbeslutsfattande. Lösningar på den långa beräkningstiden i spelmed hög komplexitet måste dock undersökas. / Kandidatexjobb i elektroteknik 2021, KTH, Stockholm