The performances of two D-Wave 2 machines (476 and 496 qubits) and of a 1097-qubit D-Wave 2X were investigated. Each chip has a Chimera interaction graph G. Problem input consists of values for the fields hj and for the two-qubit interactions Ji,j of an Ising spin-glass problem formulated on G. Output is returned in terms of a spin configuration {sj}, with sj = +1 or -1. We generated random spanning trees (RSTs) uniformly distributed over all spanning trees of G. On the 476-qubit D-Wave 2, RSTs were generated on the full chip with Ji,j = -1 and hj = 0 and solved one thousand times. The distribution of solution energies and the average magnetization of each qubit were determined. On both the 476- and 1097-qubit machines, four identical spanning trees were generated on each quadrant of the chip. The statistical independence of the these regions was investigated.

Safety is an important concern within the construction industry.  Many different management strategies exist in the literature, but despite ambitious efforts to improve the safety and prevent accidents, the accident incidence is still unacceptably high. This paper examines the employment of a safety manager in the Swedish construction industry as a strategy to foster a better safety culture, and discusses how the safety manager should approach the project based organisation (PBO). The study uses an abductive approach with an iteration of interviews, observations and a literature study to gain deeper knowledge of the subject. The research comprises a cross sectional interview study of semi-structured interviews to narrate the role of the safety manager accompanied with a short survey. The study is limited to three projects of one Swedish construction company, and a new role not yet established in the company. Furthermore, the study uses a human resource management approach with focus on communities of practice and boundary spanning. The findings report that the safety managers take on a role as a boundary spanning link between well-established but unsynchronized communities of practice. The identified communities are the HR department and the PBOs. Furthermore, the safety manager functions as a “double-sided” boundary spanner, to broke knowledge and support employees to achieve a satisfactory safety culture.  However, the narratives express a present ambiguity and a need to clarify the role and its responsibilities regarding safety in the PBO. The thesis contributes with insights of the safety manager’s practice and discusses how safety knowledge should be transferred between communities of practice in the fragmented PBO and its high level of tacit knowledge. / Arbetsmiljö och säkerhet är ett viktigt ämne inom byggbranschen. Många olika strategier och metoder för att förbättra arbetsmiljön finns också tillgängliga. Trots detta inträffar alltför många olycksfall. Denna studie undersöker strategin att anställa en safety manager i den svenska byggbranschen för att främja en bättre säkerhetskultur samt diskuterar hur en safety manager bör utöva sin profession.  Ett kvalitativt abduktivt arbetssätt har tillämpats där intervjuer och observationer har växlats med litteraturstudier för att erhålla förståelse av ämnet. Studien är en multipel tvärsnittsfallstudie med semistrukturerade intervjuer samt en mindre enkätundersökning. Studien omfattar tre projekt i ett svenskt företag. Det teoretiska perspektivet utgår från, samt begränsas av koncepten human resource management (HRM), communities of practice och boundary spanning.  Resultatet visar att safety managern kan fungera som en boundary role som länkar ihop olika osynkroniserade communities. Det identifieras att effektiv boundary spanning kan ske mellan HR-avdelningen och projektorganisationerna samt mellan produktionsledningen och yrkesarbetarna inom projektorganisationerna. Safety managern blir en double-sided boundary spanner som knowledge broker samt en support för anställda för att främja en god säkerhetskultur. Resultatet visar samtidigt att det råder oklarheter kring rollen och att bland annat ansvarsområden behöver förtydligas för att nå full potential. Studien bidrar med insikter i hur safety manager-rollen uppfattas och hur den fungerar, samt hur den kan förbättras. Vidare bidrar studien med förståelse för hur rollen kan främja kunskapsöverföring avseende arbetsmiljö mellan communities där hög grad av tyst kunskap råder.

Limited literature examines the impact of the displacement of boundary-spanning employees artificial intelligence (AI). Scholars and practitioners appear focused on tangible benefits of AI adoption, and do not seem concerned by any less tangible and possibly untoward implications of worker (particularly boundary-spanning worker) displacement. My dissertation addresses this gap in the literature. In Essay 1, a qualitative study is performed to anchor the research on the appropriate ethnographic setting, the firms where this displacement phenomenon is taking place, by utilizing the Straussian grounded theory approach. The outcome of iterative coding of the first order data collected from the interviews and content analysis is a conceptual framework which amongst other findings shows how the unique competences of boundary-spanning employees and those of AI are best suited for different spectra of interorganizational collaborative activities. In Essays 2 and 3, I investigate major themes that emerged from Essay 1 utilizing quantitative and qualitative research methods in both studies. Initially I test research models using structural equation modelling on practitioner survey data, after which I probe further via focused interviews to better understand the survey results. The two papers allow us to put forth several theoretical and managerial contributions, specifically emphasizing the positive essential role of boundary-spanning employees on supply chain agility and innovation, even as AI displaces workers. These contributions provide insight into the optimal balance of human and artificial intelligence for today's highly dynamic marketplace.

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Although emergency management is established for the purpose of addressing disasters and other major emergencies, I have found that it can be purposefully engineered to also be an assist leader to other agencies and entities during nonemergency periods because the key element of synchrony that enables emergency managers to be effective during an emergency can also be employed during nonemergency periods to assist other departments in a manner that not only delivers a direct benefit to the department but also enhances the emergency preparedness, mitigation, and resiliency efforts of the jurisdiction. Emergency managers can create this performance-enhancing synchrony using boundary spanning functions that bridge the divide that separates stakeholders. Emergency management practitioners are steadfast in their pursuit of methods and practices by which they can be more effective. The recent increase in the frequency and severity of natural disasters is only one example of the ever-growing demands placed upon these professionals. Compounding this development is the fact that the occurrences of natural disasters have outpaced research and theory development regarding how emergency management professionals should prepare for and respond to these events. This research study envisions, proposes, and outlines a framework in which emergency managers function in a broader capacity that could elevate their overall performance and importance to a higher plane than the one on which perhaps most currently operate. / Business Administration/Strategic Management

Le travail que nous développons dans le cadre de cette thèse s'articule autour des problèmes de recherche de structure de recouvrement de graphes sous contrainte sur le degré des sommets. Comme l'arbre de recouvrement couvre les sommets d'un graphe connexe avec un minimum de liens, il est généralement proposé comme solution à ce type de problèmes. Cependant, pour certaines applications telles que le routage dans les réseaux optiques, les solutions ne sont pas nécessairement des sous-graphes. Nous supposons dans cette thèse que la contrainte sur le degré est due à une capacité limitée instantanée des sommets et que la seule exigence sur le recouvrement est sa connexité. Dans ce cas, la solution peut être différente d'un arbre. Nous reformulons ces problèmes de recouvrement en nous appuyant sur une extension du concept d'arbre appelée hiérarchie de recouvrement. Notre objectif principal est de démontrer son intérêt vis-à-vis de l'arbre en termes de faisabilité et de coût du recouvrement. Nous considérons deux types de contraintes sur le degré : des bornes sur le degré des sommets ou une borne sur le nombre de sommets de branchement et cherchons dans les deux cas un recouvrement de coût minimum. Nous illustrons aussi l'applicabilité des hiérarchies en étudiant un problème prenant davantage en compte la réalité du routage optique. Pour ces différents problèmes NP-difficiles, nous montrons, tant sur le coût des solutions optimales que sur la garantie de performance des solutions approchées, l'intérêt des hiérarchies de recouvrement. Ce constat se voit conforté par des expérimentations sur des graphes aléatoires. / The work conducted in this thesis is focused on the minimum spanning problems in graphs under constraints on the vertex degrees. As the spanning tree covers the vertices of a connected graph with a minimum number of links, it is generally proposed as a solution for this kind of problems. However, for some applications such as the routing in optical networks, the solution is not necessarily a sub-graph. In this thesis, we assume that the degree constraints are due to a limited instantaneous capacity of the vertices and that the only pertinent requirement on the spanning structure is its connectivity. In that case, the solution may be different from a tree. We propose the reformulation of this kind of spanning problems. To find the optimal coverage of the vertices, an extension of the tree concept called hierarchy is proposed. Our main purpose is to show its interest regarding the tree in term of feasibility and costs of the coverage. Thus, we take into account two types of degree constraints: either an upper bound on the degree of vertices and an upper bound on the number of branching vertices. We search a minimum cost spanning hierarchy in both cases. Besides, we also illustrate the applicability of hierarchies by studying a problem that takes more into account the reality of the optical routing. For all those NP-hard problems, we show the interest of the spanning hierarchy for both costs of optimal solutions and performance guarantee of approximate solutions. These results are confirmed by several experimentations on random graphs.

Increasing societal demand for automation has led to considerable efforts to control large-scale complex systems, especially in the area of autonomous intelligent control methods. The control system of a large-scale complex system needs to satisfy four system level requirements: robustness, flexibility, reusability, and scalability. Corresponding to the four system level requirements, there arise four major challenges. First, it is difficult to get accurate and complete information. Second, the system may be physically highly distributed. Third, the system evolves very quickly. Fourth, emergent global behaviors of the system can be caused by small disturbances at the component level. The Multi-Agent Based Control (MABC) method as an implementation of distributed intelligent control has been the focus of research since the 1970s, in an effort to solve the above-mentioned problems in controlling large-scale complex systems. However, to the author's best knowledge, all MABC systems for large-scale complex systems with significant uncertainties are problem-specific and thus difficult to extend to other domains or larger systems. This situation is partly due to the control architecture of multiple agents being determined by agent to agent coupling and interaction mechanisms. Therefore, the research objective of this dissertation is to develop a comprehensive, generalized framework for the control system design of general large-scale complex systems with significant uncertainties, with the focus on distributed control architecture design and distributed inference engine design. A Hybrid Multi-Agent Based Control (HyMABC) architecture is proposed by combining hierarchical control architecture and module control architecture with logical replication rings. First, it decomposes a complex system hierarchically; second, it combines the components in the same level as a module, and then designs common interfaces for all of the components in the same module; third, replications are made for critical agents and are organized into logical rings. This architecture maintains clear guidelines for complexity decomposition and also increases the robustness of the whole system. Multiple Sectioned Dynamic Bayesian Networks (MSDBNs) as a distributed dynamic probabilistic inference engine, can be embedded into the control architecture to handle uncertainties of general large-scale complex systems. MSDBNs decomposes a large knowledge-based system into many agents. Each agent holds its partial perspective of a large problem domain by representing its knowledge as a Dynamic Bayesian Network (DBN). Each agent accesses local evidence from its corresponding local sensors and communicates with other agents through finite message passing. If the distributed agents can be organized into a tree structure, satisfying the running intersection property and d-sep set requirements, globally consistent inferences are achievable in a distributed way. By using different frequencies for local DBN agent belief updating and global system belief updating, it balances the communication cost with the global consistency of inferences. In this dissertation, a fully factorized Boyen-Koller (BK) approximation algorithm is used for local DBN agent belief updating, and the static Junction Forest Linkage Tree (JFLT) algorithm is used for global system belief updating. MSDBNs assume a static structure and a stable communication network for the whole system. However, for a real system, sub-Bayesian networks as nodes could be lost, and the communication network could be shut down due to partial damage in the system. Therefore, on-line and automatic MSDBNs structure formation is necessary for making robust state estimations and increasing survivability of the whole system. A Distributed Spanning Tree Optimization (DSTO) algorithm, a Distributed D-Sep Set Satisfaction (DDSSS) algorithm, and a Distributed Running Intersection Satisfaction (DRIS) algorithm are proposed in this dissertation. Combining these three distributed algorithms and a Distributed Belief Propagation (DBP) algorithm in MSDBNs makes state estimations robust to partial damage in the whole system. Combining the distributed control architecture design and the distributed inference engine design leads to a process of control system design for a general large-scale complex system. As applications of the proposed methodology, the control system design of a simplified ship chilled water system and a notional ship chilled water system have been demonstrated step by step. Simulation results not only show that the proposed methodology gives a clear guideline for control system design for general large-scale complex systems with dynamic and uncertain environment, but also indicate that the combination of MSDBNs and HyMABC can provide excellent performance for controlling general large-scale complex systems.