Production automation as a service (PAaaS) is seen as a new trend that enables the possibility to use production automation technologies as a service. The technologies are cloud-based which makes the implementation of production automation more effective and cost-effective. This approach is attractive to the companies that have a limited capital investment. The purpose of this thesis was to analyse and understand the implementation of Production Automation as a Service (PAaaS) in the manufacturing industry. In order to understand its implementation, it is important to know what the drivers and benefits with PAaaS implementation and what challenges there are and how to overcome them for a successful implementation. To provide with a comprehensive answer and conclusion about PAaaS implementation in the manufacturing industry the following research questions was studied:1. What are the drivers and benefits of PAaaS implementation in the manufacturing industry, and what needs does it fulfil?2. What are the challenges of implementing PAaaS in the manufacturing industry, and how can they be overcome for a successful implementation and scale-up?To be able to answer these questions, a qualitative research study based on literature review and interviews was conducted. The combination between the literature and the real-life experience in PAaaS implementation provided a greater understanding of the concept. The aim of the research questions is to provide guidance and recommendation for companies seeking for a successful implementation of PAaaS which leads to improved operational efficiency and the ability to utilise the technological advancement provided through PAaaS. The approach applied in this study has been qualitative research with an abductive research approach. By obtaining data through scientific articles and interviews it was possible to analyse it more in-depth in order to find similarities between them.In conclusion, PAaaS implementation in the manufacturing industry provides with key benefits such as cost-effectiveness, improved flexibility, scalability, productivity, efficiency, and improved product quality. These benefits fulfil several needs of manufacturing companies such as being more flexible and being able to use automated solutions at a lower cost. These needs also act as the drivers for the implementation of PAaaS. The drivers are an important aspect of PAaaS implementation, because without any drive and motivation, there won’t be any implementation of PAaaS that can fulfil a certain need of the company. The drivers and motivation for a PAaaS implementation in the manufacturing industry is the possibility for a business model transformation and the technological advancements that the manufacturer gain with the implementation.In addition, there are key challenges that makes the PAaaS implementation more complex for the manufacturing companies. These challenges are, Integration with legacy systems, internet dependency and lack of expertise and knowledge. To able to achieve a successful implementation, it is important to address the challenges, by addressing these problems it was possible to provide with strategies on how to overcome them. Which lays the foundation for future research about this topic.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationships between the changes in Tennessee Comprehensive Assessment Program (TCAP) scores and the changes in Per Pupil Expenditures (PPE) after the enactment of First to the Top Act of 2010 and the receipt of $501,000,000 in federal Race to the Top (RTTT) grant monies. Half of that money was retained by Tennessee Department of Education (TDOE) for education reform initiatives. The other half was awarded to each Local Education Agency (LEA) according to the Title I formula after TDOE approval of individual Scopes of Work. Reform initiatives included transition to Common Core State Standards, changes to standardized testing, teacher evaluation system reflecting teacher effect partly based on student achievement, changes to tenure, and establishment of an Achievement School District for low-performing schools. Fast-paced reforms and increasing accountability for student achievement and gap closure brought a climate of pressure and tension. Secondary data were readily available on the Tennessee Report Card from TDOE’s website (www.tn.gov/education). Data from each LEA were collected, organized, and analyzed in the areas of PPE; TCAP scores in math, reading/language arts, and science for 2010, 2011, and 2012; and student population. No significant relationships were found between the changes in PPE and the changes in TCAP scores. Significant differences were found between the math scores for Year 1 and Year 2. No significant differences were found between the reading/language arts scores for Year 1. A significant difference was found between the reading/language arts scores from 2010 to 2012. Significant differences were found for the science scores for both time periods; however, Year 1 science scores fell while 2010 to 2012 science scores rose. Mixed results were found when investigating the relationship between PPE and number of students. This study indicates the importance of careful discussions of how school funds are spent, perhaps even more than how much money is spent. Implications for further study might include qualitative investigations of the perceptions of stakeholders at all levels about the climate during the fast-paced reforms. Further study of data for Years 3 and 4 of the grant is also recommended.

This doctoral thesis consists of three essays within the field of economics of information privacy examined through the lens of behavioral and experimental economics. Rapid development and expansion of Internet, mobile and network technologies in the last decades has provided multitudinous opportunities and benefits to both business and society proposing the customized services and personalized offers at a relatively low price and high speed. However, such innovations and progress have also created complex and hazardous issues. One of the main problems is related to the management of extensive flows of information, containing terabytes of personal data. Collection, storage, analysis, and sharing of this information imply risks and trigger usersâ concerns that range from nearly harmless to significantly pernicious, including tracking of online behavior and location, intrusive or unsolicited marketing, price discrimination, surveillance, hacking attacks, fraud, and identity theft. Some users ignore these issues or at least do not take an action to protect their online privacy. Others try to limit their activity in Internet, which in turn may inhibit the online shopping acceptance. Yet another group of users gathers personal information protection, for example, by deploying the privacy-enhancing technologies, e.g., ad-blockers, e-mail encryption, etc. The ad-blockers sometimes reduce the revenue of online publishers, which provide the content to their users for free and do not receive the income from advertisers in case the user has blocked ads. The economics of privacy studies the trade-offs related to the positive and negative economic consequences of personal information use by data subjects and its protection by data holders and aims at balancing the interests of both parties optimising the expected utilities of various stakeholders. As technology is penetrating every aspect of human life raising numerous privacy issues and affecting a large number of interested parties, including business, policy-makers, and legislative regulators, the outcome of this research is expected to have a great impact on individual economic markets, consumers, and society as a whole. The first essay provides an extensive literature review and combines the theoretical and empirical evidence on the impact of advertising in both traditional and digital media in order to gain the insights about the effects of ad-blocking privacy-enhancing technologies on consumersâ welfare. It first studies the views of the main schools of advertising, informative and persuasive. The informative school of advertising emphasizes the positive effects of advertising on sales, competition, product quality, and consumersâ utility and satisfaction by matching buyers to sellers, informing the potential customers about available goods and enhancing their informed purchasing decisions. In contrast, the advocates of persuasive school view advertising as a generator of irrational brand loyalty that distorts consumersâ preferences, inflates product prices, and creates entry barriers. I pay special attention to the targeted advertising, which is typically assumed to have a positive impact on consumersâ welfare if it does not cause the decrease of product quality and does not involve the extraction of consumersâ surplus through the exploitation of reservation price for discriminating activities. Moreover, the utility of personalized advertising appears to be a function of its accuracy: the more relevant is a targeted offer, the more valuable it is for the customer. I then review the effects of online advertising on the main stakeholders and users and show that the low cost of online advertising leads to excessive advertising volumes causing information overload, psychological discomfort and reactance, privacy concerns, decreased exploration activities and opinion diversity, and market inefficiency. Finally, as ad-blocking technologies filter advertising content and limit advertising exposure, I analyze the consequences of ad-blocking deployment through the lens of the models on advertising restrictions. The control of advertising volume and its partial restriction would benefit both consumers and businesses more than a complete ban of advertising. For example, advertising exposure caps, which limit the number of times that the same ad is to be shown to a particular user, general reduction of the advertising slots, control of the advertising quality standards, and limitation of tracking would result in a better market equilibrium than can offer an arms race of ad-blockers and anti-ad-blockers. Finally, I review the solutions alternative to the blocking of advertising content, which include self regulation, non-intrusive ads programs, paywall, intention economy approach that promotes business models, in which user initiates the trade and not the marketer, and active social movements aimed at increasing social awareness and consumer education. The second essay describes a model of factors affecting Internet usersâ perceptions of websitesâ trustworthiness with respect to their privacy and the intentions to purchase from such websites. Using focus group method I calibrate a list of websitesâ attributes that represent those factors. Then I run an online survey with 117 adult participants to validate the research model. I find that privacy (including awareness, information collection and control practices), security, and reputation (including background and feedback) have strong effect on trust and willingness to buy, while website quality plays a marginal role. Although generally trustworthiness perceptions and purchase intentions are positively correlated, in some cases participants are likely to purchase from the websites that they have judged as untrustworthy. I discuss how behavioral biases and decision-making heuristics may explain this discrepancy between perceptions and behavioral intentions. Finally, I analyze and suggest what factors, particular websitesâ attributes, and individual characteristics have the strongest effect on hindering or advancing customersâ trust and willingness to buy. In the third essay I investigate the decision of experimental subjects to incur the risk of revealing personal information to other participants. I do so by using a novel method to generate personal information that reliably induces privacy concerns in the laboratory. I show that individual decisions to incur privacy risk are correlated with decisions to incur monetary risk. I find that partially depriving subjects of control over the revelation of their personal information does not lead them to lose interest in protecting it. I also find that making subjects think of privacy decisions after financial decisions reduces their aversion to privacy risk. Finally, surveyed attitude to privacy and explicit willingness to pay or to accept payments for personal information correlate with willingness to incur privacy risk. Having shown that privacy loss can be assimilated to a monetary loss, I compare decisions to incur risk in privacy lotteries with risk attitude in monetary lotteries to derive estimates of the implicit monetary value of privacy. The average implicit monetary value of privacy is about equal to the average willingness to pay to protect private information, but the two measures do not correlate at the individual level. I conclude by underlining the need to know individual attitudes to risk to properly evaluate individual attitudes to privacy as such.

Freshwater mussels are particularly susceptible to injury from exposure to hazardous substances due to their sessile nature and filter feeding biology. There have been various Natural Resource Damage Assessment and Restoration (NRDAR) cases in the United States involving injury to freshwater mussels due to releases of hazardous substances into rivers and streams. Restoration of mussels in these cases typically involves propagation of mussels at a hatchery facility and their subsequent stocking or release at restoration sites. However, determination of the services lost due to injury to mussel populations and the appropriate level of restoration (and associated costs) to recover those losses has varied among NRDAR cases. Standardized methods would facilitate injury determination and restoration planning for future cases involving injury to mussels. The purpose of this research was to use two of the earliest and largest NRDAR cases (Certus, Inc. and Lone Mountain Processing, Inc. (LMPI)) involving injury to mussels to: 1) determine whether restoration for these cases was sufficient and 2) analyze restoration efforts for application in future NRDAR cases (i.e., lessons learned and development of standardized methods). This study represents the first evaluation of mussel restoration efforts in a NRDAR context. In general, 4.8% to 6.1% of juvenile mussels that excysted from host fishes in the hatchery survived to be eventually released at restoration sites. Further, based on expected survival and recruitment rates of released mussels, monitoring of restoration sites found 43% to 15% of the expected number of mussels. Understanding reasons for this discrepancy between expected and estimated survival is critical for determining the level of restoration success. If released mussels are either establishing and/or recruiting outside of monitoring area but otherwise alive and breeding, then they should count towards successful restoration. In contrast, if released mussels have either high mortality over time or are dying shortly after release, then expected gains from these mussels should not count towards successful restoration. I developed a mussel-specific Resource Equivalency Analysis (REA) for use in future NRDAR cases that compares the loss of services, using Discounted Mussel Years (DMYs) as units, to the expected gain in services from restoration. Applying this analysis to the Certus and LMPI NRDAR cases suggests that mussel restoration was successful (i.e., expected DMYs gained are greater than those lost), even when it was assumed that 75% of released mussels were dying after being released at restoration sites. Finally, a cost analysis of two mussel propagation facilities found that the yearly cost per mussel released at a restoration site ranged from $4.36 to $96.48. The suite of species propagated each year varied. As some species are more difficult to propagate than others, the cost per mussel varied widely. These data will facilitate the determination of restoration costs in future cases. Together, this information provides a starting point for consistently estimating restoration effort and costs for future NRDAR cases involving freshwater mussels. / Doctor of Philosophy / Freshwater mussels provide numerous ecosystem services. Most importantly, they purify large volumes of water, and provide habitat and food for other animals. However, they are highly vulnerable to chemical spills because they cannot move long distances quickly and they are directly exposed to toxic substances if they filter water. There have been many cases in past decades where vulnerable mussel populations were exposed to chemical spills. When these populations are injured, the services they provide are lost until the population can be restored to pre-spill conditions. Restoration of mussel populations usually involves raising juvenile mussels in hatchery facilities and then releasing them in areas where populations were injured. Determining the appropriate level of restoration needed to restore populations has varied widely among cases. A standardized approach would facilitate determination of restoration and restoration costs. I used data from two cases (Certus, Inc. and Lone Mountain Processing, Inc.) where mussel populations were injured due to a chemical spill to: 1) determine whether restoration for these two cases was successful and 2) develop tools and draw insights for use in future cases where mussels are injured. This study represents the first evaluation of restoration success of freshwater mussels in a NRDAR context. On average, 4.8% to 6.1% of juvenile mussels produced at two Virginia hatchery facilities survived to be released at restoration sites. Further, of the mussels released, only 43% to 15% of the expected mussels were found in later years. These "missing" mussels are either leaving and/or breeding outside of their release areas, or they are dying and failing to provide important ecosystem services. Further study is needed to determine the degree to which each of these is the case. I also developed a mussel-specific method of determining how much restoration is needed to provide the amount of ecosystem services as pre-spill conditions (called Resource Equivalency Analysis or REA). Application of REA to these two test cases (Certus, Inc. and Lone Mountain Processing, Inc.), I showed that restoration for these cases was successful, even if as much as 75% of released mussels are dying after being released at restoration sites. Finally, I found that the cost of successfully releasing a mussel ranged from $4.36 to $96.48 per mussel. This information is useful for estimating the cost of restoration plans in future chemical spills that injure freshwater mussels.

No description available.

Water quality is an essential component of vibrant societies and ecosystems. For decades, researchers, managers, and policymakers around the world have struggled to accelerate societal progress while preserving and enhancing water quality and human health. This thesis consists of two studies that I hope will contribute to better understanding, policy, and management. In the first study, I evaluated spatial and temporal patterns in global water quality and their relationship to gross domestic product (GDP) per capita, as a metric of socioeconomic development status. Using global water quality datasets containing over 2.7 million observations, I tested the Environmental Kuznet Curve (EKC) hypothesis, which predicts that environmental degradation is highest at intermediate levels of socioeconomic development. I found that 46% of pollutants persisted at elevated concentrations despite GDP per capita. Because of this, high income countries experience a false sense of water security as water regulation violations are common on a global scale. In the second study, I measured waterborne pathogens in Guayaquil, the largest city in Ecuador. With a population of over 3 million and distinct hydrology from monsoonal rains and estuarine flooding, the Guayaquil metropolitan area faces drinking water and sanitation challenges similar to much of the developing world. I found that 100% of the samples we collected had unsafe total coliform counts. Water pollution is widespread and is a result of careless action. Moving forward, chronic pollution can be prevented with proper legislation that holds governments, companies, and individuals accountable.

京都大学 / 新制・課程博士 / 博士(農学) / 甲第24239号 / 農博第2518号 / 新制||農||1094(附属図書館) / 学位論文||R4||N5410(農学部図書室) / 京都大学大学院農学研究科農学専攻 / (主査)教授 白岩 立彦, 教授 中﨑 鉄也, 教授 那須田 周平 / 学位規則第4条第1項該当 / Doctor of Agricultural Science / Kyoto University / DGAM

Renewable Energy is considered as an effective solution for relieving the energy crisis and reducing the greenhouse gas emissions. It is also be recognized as an important energy resource for power supplying in the next generation power grid{smart grid system. For a long time, the unsustainable and unstable of renewable energy generation is the main challenge to the combination of the renewable energy and the smart grid. The short board on the utilities' remote control caused low-efficiency of power scheduling in the distribution power area, also increased the difficulty of the local generated renewable energy grid-connected process. Furthermore, with the rapid growth of the number of electrical vehicles and the widely established of the fast power charging stations in urban and rural area, the unpredictable power charging demand will become another challenge to the power grid in a few years. In this thesis we propose the corresponding solutions for the challenges enumerated in the above. Based on the architecture of terminal power consumer's residence, we introduce the local renewable energy system into the residential environment. The local renewable energy system can typically support part of the consumer's power demand, even more. In this case, we establish the architecture of the local smart grid community based on the structure of distribution network of the smart grid, includes terminal power consumer, secondary power substation, communication links and sub data management center. Communication links are employed as the data transmission channels in our scheme. Also the local power scheduling algorithm and the optimal path selection algorithm are created for power scheduling requirements and stable expansion of the power supply area. Acknowledging the fact that the information flow of the smart grid needs appropriate communication technologies to be the communication standards, we explore the available communication technologies and the communication requirements and performance metrics in the smart grid networks. Also, the power saving mechanism of smart devices in the advanced metering infrastructure is proposed based on the two-state-switch scheduling algorithm and improved 802.11ah-based data transmission model. Renewable energy system can be employed in residential environment, but also can be deployed in public environment, like fast power charging station and public parking campus. Due to the current capacity of electrical vehicles (EV), the fast power charging station is required not just by the EV drivers, but also demanded by the related enterprises. We propose a upgraded fast power charging station with local deployed renewable energy system in public parking campus. Based on the queueing model, we explore and deliver a stochastic control model for the fast power charging station. A new status called "Service Jumped" is created to express the service state of the fast power charging station with and without the support from the local renewable energy in real-time.

A Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is a distributed collection of resource constrained tiny nodes capable of operating with minimal user attendance. Due to their flexibility and low cost, WSNs have recently become widely applied in traffic regulation, fire alarm in buildings, wild fire monitoring, agriculture, health monitoring, building energy management, and ecological monitoring. However, deployment of the WSNs in difficult-to-access areas makes it difficult to replace the batteries - the main power supply of a sensor node. It means that the power limitation of the sensor nodes appreciably constraints their functionality and potential applications. The use of harvesting components such as solar cells alone and energy storage elements such as super capacitors and rechargeable batteries is insufficient for the long-term sensor node operation. With this thesis we are going to show that long-term operation could be achieved by adopting a combination of hardware and software techniques along with energy efficient WSN design. To demonstrate the hardware power management, an energy scavenging module was designed, implemented and tested. This module is able to handle both alternating current (AC) based and direct current (DC) based ambient sources. The harvested energy is stored in two energy buffers of different kind, and is delivered to the sensor node in accordance with an efficient energy supply switching algorithm. The software part of the thesis presents an analytical criterion to establish the value of the synchronization period minimizing the average power dissipated by a WSN node. Since the radio chip is usually the most power hungry component on a board, this approach can help one to decrease the amount of power consumption and prolong the lifetime of the entire WSN. The following part of the thesis demonstrates a methodology for power consumption evaluation of WSN. The methodology supports the Platform Based Design (PBD) paradigm, providing power analysis for various sensor platforms by defining separate abstraction layers for application, services, hardware and power supply modules. Finally, we present three applications where we use the designed hardware module and apply various power management strategies. In the first application we apply the WSN paradigm to the entertainment area, and in particular to the domain of Paintball. The second one refers to a wireless sensor platform for monitoring of dangerous gases and early fire detection. The platform operation is based on the pyrolysis product detection which makes it possible to prevent fire before inflammation. The third application is connected with medical research. This work describes the powering of wireless brain-machine interfaces.

On fair-weather summer days an intense southerly lake breeze blows across the northern shorelines of Lake Garda (Italy). This wind, known as Ora del Garda, arises regularly in the late morning, and then channels northward into the adjacent Sarca Valley and Lakes Valley, coupling with the local up-valley flow. In the early afternoon, after flowing over an elevated (~400 m high) saddle, the Ora del Garda wind breaks into the Adige Valley north of Trento city; there it flows down on the valley floor, interacting with the local up-valley wind and creating a strongly turbulent flow. The characteristic diurnal cycle of surface meteorological variables determined by the lake-valley coupled circulation is rather well-known, on the basis of climatological analyses of data from surface automatic weather stations operated in the area by local institutions; on the contrary, the valley upper atmosphere structure, i.e. the structure of the atmospheric boundary-layer (ABL), associated with the Ora del Garda development has not yet been investigated. Indeed, in such a complex terrain area, the characterization of the typical structure, spatial variation and depth of the ABL, as well as a sound knowledge of local atmospheric circulation patterns, are of crucial importance for the understanding of the local climate and of air pollution transport and dispersion processes. To meet this lack of knowledge, a series of targeted measurement campaigns, including both intensive surface observations and research flights, were carried out by the Atmospheric Physics Group of the University of Trento in the study area between 1998 and 2001, providing the database for the present work. Five flights of an instrumented motorglider explored specific sections of the valley atmosphere, namely at Lake Garda’s shoreline, in the lower Sarca Valley, in the Lakes Valley, and where the Ora del Garda and the Adige Valley up-valley flow interact. Position, pressure, temperature and relative humidity were measured along spiralling trajectories performed over the above mentioned target areas. Surface observations from a number of weather stations disseminated along the valley floor provided a picture of the diurnal cycles of meteorological quantities determined at the surface by the development of the investigated wind on the flight days. The preliminary processing of the experimental dataset included the application of a suitable procedure to correct airborne temperature data for the time-delay effect induced by the slow-response behavior of the sensor, and required the determination of a proper time constant. The dominant vertical structure of the valley ABL was then deciphered on the basis of vertical “pseudo-soundings” (i.e. mean vertical profiles) of potential temperature and water vapour mixing ratio extracted from airborne data. Shallow mixed layers, surmounted by deeper stable layers, likely to be produced by local subsidence associated with up-slope flows, were detected up-valley. This characteristic pattern is indeed in good accord with ABL structures typically observed in deep Alpine valleys in connection with up-valley winds, as reported in the literature. On the other hand, closer to the lake the potential temperature profile was typically stabilized down to lower heights, due to the onshore advection of colder air from above the water surface. A residual kriging (RK) technique was adopted to map potential temperature fields over 3D high-resolution grids for each explored section of the valley atmosphere, integrating both surface and airborne observations. Exploiting a test-bed database, RK method was preliminarly tested against the interpolation methods commonly used in the literature for mapping airborne data, namely inverse distance, inverse squared distance and natural neighbor methods. The predictive performance of the different methods was assessed by means of a cross-validation procedure, and a critical comparison of the different interpolation results was carried out. Finally, RK resulted the best-performing technique for the specific application. RK-interpolated fields revealed fine-scale local features of the complex ABL thermal structures determined by the Ora del Garda in the study area valleys, revealing at the same time macroscopic features of the thermo-topographically driven wind field, mainly amenable to irregular topography and land cover heterogeneities. In particular, a non-homogeneous penetration of the lake-breeze front across the flat basin facing Lake Garda was detected in the morning, while in the afternoon the presence of a sharp discontinuity in the upper-level vertical stratification, originated by updrafts and downdrafts associated with the lake breeze circulation, was observed. Moreover, a strongly asymmetric potential temperature field, resulting from the contrast between the stable core of the Ora del Garda up-valley flow and an intense up-slope flow layer developing along a bare-rock valley sidewall, was detected in the area of Cavedine Lake in the Lakes Valley. Further up-valley, RK-interpolated fields displayed a thermal structure compatible with the occurrence of a single-cell cross-valley circulation, likely to be originated by asymmetric solar irradiation and by the local valley curvature. The valley curvature was also found to induce a preferential channeling of the up-valley flow along the northwestern sidewall at the valley end, in proximity of the elevated saddle from where the Ora del Garda overflows into the underlying Adige Valley, giving origin to an anomalous, strong katabatic wind that hinders the regular development of the local up-valley wind in the area north of Trento. Here the westerly inflow from the Lakes Valley feeds a denser wedge of potentially cooler air, which forces the local up-valley (i.e. southerly) wind to flow over it. Regridded potential temperature fields provided further insight into this flow pattern, revealing the occurrence in the area of a hydraulic jump structure, due to the blocking exerted on the flow by the eastern Adige Valley sidewall. This induced a pronounced deepening of the local mixed layer, which was likely produced by the highly-turbulent flow conditions that usually develop here following the Ora del Garda outbreak.