Transport networks have to provide carriers with time-efficient alternative routes in case of disruptions. It is, therefore, essential for transport network planners and operators to identify sections within the network which, if broken, have a considerable negative impact on the networks performance. Research on transport network analysis provides lots of different approaches and models in order to identify such critical sections. Most of them, however, are only applicable to mono-modal transport networks and calculate indices which represent the criticality of sections by using aggregated data. The model presented, in contrast, focuses on the analysis of intermodal transport networks by using a traffic micro simulation. Based on available, real-life data, our approach models a transport network as well as its actual traffic participants and their individual decisions in case of a disruption. The resulting transport delay time due to a specific disruption helps to identify critical sections and critical networks, as a whole. Therefore, the results are a valuable decision support for transport network planners and operators in order to make the infrastructure less vulnerable, more attractive for carriers and thus more economically sustainable. In order to show the applicability of the model we analyse the Austrian intermodal transport network and show how critical sections can be evaluated by this approach. (authors' abstract)

published_or_final_version / abstract / Civil Engineering / Master / Master of Philosophy

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Sammanfattning: Vi står inför en tid med stora pensionsavgångar, endast under 2011 kommer 124 000 svenskar att fylla 65 år. Då äldre anställda ofta innehar mycket kunskap efter lång erfarenhet inom en organisation finns en risk att kunskapen följer med dem när de slutar till följd av en pensionering. Med denna studie önskar vi kunna bidra med en större förståelse för betydelsen av en tydligt utarbetad pensionerings- och kunskapsledningsstrategi för en organisation då dessa stora pensionsavgångar väntar. Vi önskar även bidra med en ökad medvetenhet om kunskapsledningens relevans i organisationer, och att denna medvetenhet bör finnas hos alla anställda och inte endast vara individspecifik. Syftet med denna studie var att kartlägga och analysera det personliga nätverket runt en nyckelperson i en organisation för att kunna utvärdera nätverkets roll i bevarandet av kunskap vid nyckelpersonens pensionering samt identifiera kunskapsbevarande faktorer. Studien genomfördes som en kvalitativ fallstudie där både intervjuer och dagböcker användes för att samla in det empiriska materialet. Studien genomfördes på ekonomiavdelningen på Linköpings kommun där den snart pensionerade ekonomidirektören och hans närmsta nätverk undersöktes. Utifrån det empiriska materialet genomfördes en nätverksanalys med avseende på individers samspel, roller och kunskapsutbyte i nätverket. Studiens resultat visar att ett nätverk som arbetat tillsammans under en lång tid har delat kunskap och utvecklat en gemensam kunskapsbas, som till viss del kan förhindra en kunskapsförlust vid en nyckelpersons pensionering. Dock kan en nyckelpersons insikter, systemkunnande och plats i organisationens historia som uppnåtts genom lång erfarenhet aldrig fullständigt ersättas. Studiens resultat visar även att en individs tidiga insikt om potentiell kunskapsförlust vid pensionering och motivation att dela med sig av kunskap bidrar till att förminska kunskapsförlusten. / We are facing a time with a great amount of retirements, as many as 124 000 Swedish people will retire only during 2011. Experienced people possess much knowledge and when employees leave an organization due to retirement they often leave with what they know. With this study we wish to contribute with a greater understanding of the importance of a clearly stated knowledge management strategy in an organization for the scenario when employees retire. We also wish to increase the awareness of the relevance of knowledge management in organizations, and underline that this awareness should exist among all the employees and not only be bound to specific individuals. The purpose of this study was to identify and analyze the personal network of a key figure in an organization, to be able to evaluate if this network could help in preserving knowledge in the organization when the key figure retires and identify knowledge-preserving factors. The study was conducted as a qualitative case study where interviews and diaries were used to assemble the empirical material. The study was conducted at the department of business administration at Linköpings kommun, where the soon retired manager and his personal network were studied. A network analysis was carried out in order to study the roles, the interactions and the exchange of knowledge in the network. The findings of the study indicate that a network can prevent a certain knowledge loss due to a long working experience together where knowledge has been shared and hence a knowledge base has been obtained. However, the insights, the understandings and the place in the history of the organization achieved through experience can never be fully replaced. The findings also imply that the early individual insight of a potential knowledge loss due to retirement and the individual motivation of sharing knowledge contribute to a reduced knowledge loss.

Abstract As online social network services are becoming one of the dominant media channels the importance of disseminating messages through them is of high importance for governments, organizations, companies etc. The online social network services are several and changes rapidly as they grow and evolve. Being networks, the services give the user the tools to send, as well as receive text and information. This proposes us with yet another obstacle in communication via online social network services since sender and receiver merges together. Online social network services and the Blogosphere, which essentially also is a network, exist in the context of Web 2.0. The crucial feature of Web 2.0 is to a large degree the harnessing of collective intelligence i.e. the collection of individual knowledge and information. Many of the tools and sites within Web 2.0 are therefore of a network structure, hence further stressing the importance to communicate via networks in general. Network Analysis is the discipline through which we can see and understand the larger patterns of networks. In this thesis I have looked into three key concepts of Network Analysis; Weak Links, Growth and Preferential Attachment. I have found that we can use the knowledge of Network Analysis to disseminate messages via online social network services since it provides us with the raw structures of how networks tend to grow, and how messages tend to disseminate. Title: Web 2.0 and Network Society – PR and Communication: The Challenge of Online Social Networks Number of pages: 34 Author: Max Tandefelt Tutor: Else Nygren Course: Media and Communication Studies C Period: HT 07 University: Division of Media and Communication, Department of Information Science, Uppsala University. Purpose/Aim: Facilitate message dissemination through online social network services, as they are becoming one of the dominant media channels Material/Method: Network Analysis Main results: I have presented crucial concepts of Network Analysis that can be used for message dissemination via online social network services Keywords: Online Social Network Services, Network Analysis, Web 2.0, Message Dissemination

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Community, a notion transversal to all areas of Social Network Analysis, has drawn tremendous amount of attention across the sciences in the past decades. Numerous attempts to characterize both the sociological embodiment of the concept as well as its observable structural manifestation in the social network have to this date only converged in spirit. No formal consensus has been reached on the quantifiable aspects of community, despite it being deeply linked to topological and dynamic aspects of the underlying social network. Presenting a fresh approach to the evaluation of communities, this thesis introduces and builds upon the cohesion, a novel metric which captures the intrinsic quality, as a community, of a set of nodes in a network. The cohesion, defined in terms of social triads, was found to be highly correlated to the subjective perception of communitiness through the use of a large-scale online experiment in which users were able to compute and rate the quality of their social groups on Facebook. Adequately reflecting the complexity of social interactions, the problem of finding a maximally cohesive group inside a given social network is shown to be NP-hard. Using a heuristic approximation algorithm, applications of the cohesion to broadly different use cases are highlighted, ranging from its application to network visualization, to the study of the evolution of agreement groups in the United States Senate, to the understanding of the intertwinement between subjects' psychological traits and the cohesive structures in their social neighborhood. The use of the cohesion proves invaluable in that it offers non-trivial insights on the network structure and its relation to the associated semantic.

Establishing online communities of practice is an important part of the knowledge translation process in the modern healthcare system, but these online communities are new entity that is inherently different from traditional communities of practice that are dependent on existing social structures. The objective of this thesis is to combine communication analysis and content analysis to delve deeper into the communications within an online community to try and determine how online communities exist, and how that information can be leveraged to improve online knowledge translation. Using a novel approach this project will map the contents of online conversations to a structured medical lexicon (MeSH), and then use the inherent relationships of that lexicon to calculate term, user and thread similarities within an online community. These similarities, combined with connection analysis results, will provide a much deeper understanding of how online communities function. The methods developed here will then be tested on two separate mailing lists, the Pediatric Pain Mailing List (PPML) and SURGINET, a mailing list of general surgeons.

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