Product Development through Co-Creation Communities - General Measures For A Distributed And Agile Planning Preparation in Cross-Company Production

The crises of recent years revealed the vulnerability of our global and linearly aligned value chains, and new concepts are being sought to meet ecological, economic and social demands. The possibility of producing locally at the place of need in adaptable and highly dynamic manufacturing networks is increasingly coming into focus. However, such structures would have to be built up laboriously, whereas an existing network of small and medium-sized enterprises is available in many industrial nations. Cross-Company Production (CCP) in such local networks could help to address the problems mentioned. Another recent phenomenon is the shift of development processes into the digital sphere and its simultaneous opening up to the public. Open development processes can offer considerable advantages by bundling the wisdom of the crowd across company boundaries, however the digital platforms for collaboration do not have their own product capacities. The interaction of Co-Creation Communities (CCC) and Cross-Company Production (CPP) networks could counter this shortcoming. To ensure cost-efficient production and success on the market, an early exchange of knowledge between development and production is targeted in every company through highly standardised processes in the field of Planning Preparation (PP) a subdivision of Operations Planning and Scheduling (OPS). In the new value creation constellation this exchange is limited, as high fluctuation, various developers and numerous companies involved lead to new challenges. In this approach, a meta synthesis of known innovation and product development processes was performed to gain a better understanding of their structure and to identify measures fulfilling the tasks of Planning Preparation (PP). Aligned with the principles of Cooper's Stage-Gate Process a basis of measures is built up. After that each measure is valued according to relevance and involvement for the introduced entities creating an overview of general measures. Finally, the need for a distributed and agile Planning Preparation (PP) is derived

The future of design support: what can we learn from design support experience in the UK, Estonia and Turkey?

This article provides a comparison of design support landscape of three countries: the UK, Estonia and Turkey. The economic and political development patterns and experience of design support within these countries lead to different models of design support. The differences are visible in the levels of support, aims of innovation, available resources and opportunities but also priorities. The way in which these projects/programmes are initiated, operate and sustain themselves vary as well. The article aims to understand the future of design support through looking at the versatile programmes in these countries. It provides a historical background of design support by building on specific programmes in these countries. Based on the knowledge drawn from comparison of histories of support, the paper not only makes suggestions for the development of future of design support models

A manufacturing model to support data-driven applications for design and manufacture

This thesis is primarily concerned with conceptual work on the Manufacturing Model. The Manufacturing Model is an information model which describes the manufacturing capability of an enterprise. To achieve general applicability, the model consists of the entities that are relevant and important for any type of manufacturing firm, namely: manufacturing resources (e.g. machines, tools, fixtures, machining cells, operators, etc.), manufacturing processes (e.g. injection moulding, machining processes, etc.) and manufacturing strategies (e.g. how these resources and processes are used and organized). The Manufacturing Model is a four level model based on a de—facto standard (i.e. Factory, Shop, Cell, Station) which represents the functionality of the manufacturing facility of any firm. In the course of the research, the concept of data—driven applications has emerged in response to the need of integrated and flexible computer environments for the support of design and manufacturing activities. These data—driven applications require the use of different information models to capture and represent the company's information and knowledge. One of these information models is the Manufacturing Model. The value of this research work is highlighted by the use of two case studies, one related with the representation of a single machining station, and the other, the representation of a multi-cellular manufacturing facility of a high performance company

Floating point multiply/add unit for the M-machine node processor

Thesis (M. Eng.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 1996.Includes bibliographical references (p. 177).by Daniel K. Hartman.M.Eng

Pierce the fog of mobile service and advertising adoption

The heightened interest towards mobile service and advertising among academic and industry circles has led to the need to understand the key factors effecting the use, adoption and applicability in the realm of mobile business. This dissertation seeks to contribute to the body of knowledge covering the field of mobile advertising and service adoption. This thesis contributes to the literature by providing some insight to these important areas through a set of qualitative and quantitative studies. More specifically, this study attempts to fill up research gap in the user mobile adoption research, applying theoretical foundations into practical mobile service business cases to find insights to increase adoption rate and revenue. This thesis summarizes the result of survey studies on cross cultural adoption of mobile internet, adoption of mobile service applications and factors affecting mobile advertising. The results of this thesis will serve as guidance for researchers, mobile application developers, operators and device makers. This thesis present several theoretical and practical insights into the position of mobile services and advertising to help researchers and managers better understand critical components and provide ideas for further research in this emerging field of mobile business

Three essays on matching over characteristics

This thesis is divided into three chapters. In the first chapter, I study the use of an alternative method of eliciting preferences in a two-sided, one-to-one matching market. In the second chapter, I analyze this method of eliciting preferences in a two-sided, many-to-one matching setting with different primitives on preferences. Finally, in the third chapter, I use survey data to estimate the effects of information exposure on the reported preferences of the participants with the alternative method of eliciting preferences. Many two-sided matching markets, in practice, are large, complex for the participants and suffer from incomplete information. These features provide challenges for matching theorists, and these challenges are not always well met with traditional matching mechanisms where agents directly submit a ranking of agents on the other side of the market. In Chapter 1, I study one approach to dealing with these challenges that, while used in some real world matching markets, has not received much attention in the literature. I analyze an alternative message space where agents submit some combination of their own characteristics and their preferences over characteristics of other participants instead of directly submitting preference rankings. By doing this, the market designer can elicit preferences without requiring agents to rank each other directly, which is often infeasible in real world applications. Using online dating markets as a motivating example, I study the incentive, mechanism and market design implications of using the alternative message space approach in one-to-one matching markets. I find that for a restricted class of preference rankings, using this approach can decrease the number of binary pieces of information, such as either/or questions, necessary to generate the preference rankings of agents. I quantify a lower bound on the number of such questions that allows for any agent to have his or her true preference ranking generated based on his or her answers. I show that a strategy-proof matching algorithm under direct reporting of preference rankings can extend strategy-proofness into the alternative message space if that message space only asks for either an agent's own characteristics or their desired traits in a partner. I also show how an alternative message space that asks an agent for both aspects can lead to dishonesty, even when used with well-known strategy-proof matching algorithms under direct reporting of preference rankings such as deferred acceptance for the proposing side. I identify the optimal strategy of an agent when the message space cannot generate their true preferences but the mechanism is strategy-proof and discuss the limitations of such a strategy in practice. In the Chapter 2, I shift the focus on understanding the implications of the alternative message space to a two-sided, many-to-one matching market such as centralized public school choice. I also change the primitive of the agents' preferences such that they have preferences directly over the characteristics of other agents, and not the agents themselves as in the first chapter. I discuss the advantages that the alternative message space approach have in markets where there is incomplete information, such as when a student only discovers the characteristics of a subset of schools and thus can only rank those schools if asked to directly submit a ranking. I then study the effects of switching the agents' reports from a traditional matching framework where agents would submit the ranking directly over the schools they have discovered to one in which they instead submit their preferences through the alternative message space. I consider the implications of such a switch with two of the most well-known and widely used matching algorithms, deferred acceptance and the Boston mechanism. I find that any individual agent, if that agent is the only agent asked to switch from one report type to the other and if the matching algorithm is deferred acceptance, will prefer the match he receives by reporting preferences through the alternative message space. I find that if the matching algorithm is the Boston mechanism, the agent may still prefer the outcome from directly submitting his ranking over the subset. I also consider asking all agents to switch simultaneously from one method of eliciting preferences to the other, as if the market designer suddenly implemented an alternative message space in the market. I find that with either matching algorithm, there may be an agent who preferred their outcome prior to the switch, showing that such a switch does not always result in a Pareto improved outcome, even if it may in some cases. Finally, I show that under specific conditions, where each seat at each school is full and where students have preferences on characteristics such that they agree on a common ranking of schools, switching from direct reporting of rankings to the alternative message space will always result in an outcome that is not Pareto comparable to the outcome under direct reporting. I discuss the implications of these results for market designers, especially the likelihood of resistance to changing the report type. I find that while there are benefits to switching, such as reduced need for individual agents to spend resources discovering the characteristics of potential matches, market designers are likely to encounter resistance to such a change and will need to carefully consider asking agents to switch methods. Using an alternative message space where agents submit preferences over characteristics of others allows the market designer to gather information from the agents and use that information on their behalf to generate a preference ranking for them. The designer must decide how much, if any, of this information to share with the agents in the market. In Chapter 3, I collect survey data by randomly assigning respondents to a control group and two treatment groups to test if sharing all or some of the designer's information affects how agents report their preferences over characteristics. In the survey, I use characteristics of potential romantic partners, allowing the first treatment group to see all potential partners and their characteristics, the second to see only some of the potential partners and all of their characteristics and the control group to see no potential partners. The treatment groups are required to rank directly the potential partners they are shown, then asked to give their preferences over the characteristics themselves by answering binary-choice questions about each one and ranking their importance. The control group is only for their preferences over the characteristics. I find that there is some significant evidence, though somewhat weak, that exposing the agents to the information about their potential partners does change how they report their preferences over characteristics. Using an alternative message space that elicits preferences over the characteristics creates a restriction on the set of preference rankings that can be generated for the agents. With my data, I am also able to test if the rankings submitted by the treatment groups fall into the set that satisfies this restriction. I find that overwhelmingly they do not. In fact, only a very small portion of the respondents selected the same most preferred potential partner as was generated by their answers to the questions regarding their preferences over characteristics. While this result in limited in scope by the particular features of the survey, it does offer some suggestive evidence that the restriction on the set of preference rankings that can be generated may be an important one in some markets

An experimental and analytical exploration of the effects of manufacturing parameters on ceramic pot filter performance

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Mechanical Engineering, 2013.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 163-165).Ceramic pot filters (CPF) are a promising low-cost option for household water treatment, providing a barrier of protection against-microbiological contaminants for households with or without reliable piped water supplies. The goal of this thesis is to provide CPF manufacturers with tools to increase their ability to reach performance objectives for CPF flow rate, bacteria removal and strength. This is achieved by experimentally determining relationships between these three aspects of performance and three manufacturing values: percentage rice husk, rice husk size and wall thickness. These relationships are used to run a series of optimizations that result in design recommendations including the recommendation to increase wall thickness to improve bacteria removal and to tightly control rice husk size to maintain consistent flow rates. In addition to the experimental relationships, this author seeks a theoretical explanation of filter performance. Through this process, the author determined that hydraulic head can be increased without decreasing bacteria removal and that incomplete combustion should not be of primary concern to manufacturers. While the results in this study are preliminary, the systematic approach to the CPF design shown here can be used in future studies to further analyze and improve the CPF design.by Amelia Tepper Servi.S.M