Infrastructure is a common word used to express the basic equipment and structures that are needed e.g.  for a country or organisation to function properly. The same concept applies in the field of computer science, without infrastructure one would have problems operating software at scale. Provisioning and maintaining infrastructure through manual labour is a common occurrence in the "iron age" of IT. As the world is progressing towards the "cloud age" of IT, systems are decoupled from physical hardware enabling anyone who is software savvy to automate provisioning and maintenance of infrastructure. This study aims to determine how a generic environment can be created for applications that can run on Unix platforms and how that underlying infrastructure can be provisioned effectively. The results show that by utilising OS-level virtualisation, also known as "containers", one can deploy and serve any application that can use the Linux kernel in the sense that is needed. To further support realising the generic environment, hardware virtualisation was applied to provide the infrastructure needed to be able to use containers. This was done by provisioning a set of virtual machines on different cloud providers with a lightweight operating system that could support the container runtime needed. To manage these containers at scale a container orchestration tool was installed onto the cluster of virtual machines. To provision the said environment in an effective manner, the principles of infrastructure as code (IaC) were used to create a “blueprint" of the infrastructure that was desired. By using the metric mean time to environment (MTTE) it was noted that a cluster of virtual machines with a container orchestration tool installed onto it could be provisioned under 10 minutes for four different cloud providers.

This thesis evaluates different controllers for traction control on an electric forklift truck and has been done in cooperation with Toyota Material Handling Manufacturing Sweden. The need for a traction control system has increased with the introduction of lithium-ion batteries replacing the older lead-acid batteries, reducing the battery weight and therefore the downward force on the driving wheel increasing the risk for slip. The forklift truck was modelled using Simulink and validated by experiment. Different possible control strategies were investigated and three were chosen for implementation in simulation. These were controllers based on Model Following Control, Maximum Transmissible Torque Estimation and Sliding Mode Control. Model Following Control makes use of a nominal model to compare actual wheel speed values with nominal wheel speed values to determine if slip is occurring, Maximum Transmissible Torque Estimation makes use of a closed-loop disturbance observer to compute the maximum transmissible torque possible without inducing slip and using it as a limitation on the input signal, and Sliding Mode Control uses different functions to \say{slide} along a sliding surface to stay around a specific slip value. All three controller types were developed both as speed controlled and torque controlled. All of the controllers could reduce slip heavily in simulation. The Maximum Transmissible Torque Estimation controller reduced slip the most and kept oscillations at a minimum, but was not as responsive as the others to driver commands. The conclusion was that the controller of choice would depend on the working environment of the forklift truck. In a low friction environment where slip is expected to occur often, the Maximum Transmissible Torque Estimation controller is advisable, while the other two would be a better choice for environment with low slip occurrence. The use of torque control, while often better with regards to decreasing slip, could not be advised due to a perceived increase in implementation cost.

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