Information technology and electronics firms from Taiwan Province of China in the United Kingdom: Emerging trends and implications

This article examines the modal choices, key activities and motivations of non-dominant information technology and electronics firms from Taiwan Province of China in the United Kingdom, against the backdrop of recent trends in the global economy. Its main findings include the limited prospects of the sample firms' evolution into manufacturing activity in the United Kingdom and the increasing importance of inter-firm logistics collaboration. Among the key policy implications discussed in the article are: the need for appropriate measures to support the United Kingdom's positioning as a gateway to, and a preferred base for intelligence gathering on, other European markets; the need for "high-wage" advanced economies to capitalize upon their not-easily-replicable location-specific advantages (e.g. reputable research-anddevelopment clusters; substantial domestic market) in targeting foreign direct investment in the research and development, design and sales-related areas; and the importance of a more balanced investment attraction strategy that actively targets major global players (and their capacity to attract secondary inward investment) without compromising support for indigenous growth companies. Future research should pay greater attention to the intra-regional, rather than intra-country, context of firms' evolution in international markets

Managing engineering design in complex supply chains

The trend towards organising design, development and manufacture via supply chains, rather than predominantly in-house, poses major challenges for design management. Procurement methods based on adversarial competitive tendering are generally unsuited to complex engineering products requiring strong design and development coordination. Literature on ‘supplier partnerships’ has largely overlooked the implications for managing design and development. This paper reports the results of a major project that focuses upon this issue, concentrating on practical case studies – from British Rail, Netherlands Railways, Rolls Royce and British Coal – that involve the management of ‘devolved’ engineering design by large business organisations. A spectrum of approaches from in-house to fully devolved design is described. It is concluded that there does not appear to be a single best approach for managing devolved design, but that appropriate approaches for an organisation depend on its location in the supply chain and its ability to manage organisational change

Contracting Service for Industrial Internet

Internet of things (IoT) is an emerging vision of a world, where machines can communicate with each other and with people. Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is a subset of IoT applications used for industrial purposes. Since this vision is relatively new, current IIoT applications do not follow communication standards. Although, many standards have recently been proposed, however none of them are widely accepted. Moreover, all of the device management platforms are proprietary, thus restricting interoperability. This thesis proposes a new web platform for management of devices in terms of access control. To choose the appropriate standard many standards were studied and presented, such as World Wide Web Consortium - Web of Things (W3C WOT) and Light-Weight Machine to Machine (LWM2M). Requirements for this platform were gathered by carefully examining the use cases of smart industrial machines. The underlying principles for the platform is the division of tasks among user groups, e.g., manufacturer and customer. For instance, manufacturers responsibility is to add machines to the platform and assign them to customers; Customer is tasked with defining who has access to their machines by manipulating policies. This web platform was developed and evaluated in line with the requirements and based on LWM2M and Policy Based Communications research

Avoiding the rating bounce : why rating agencies are slow to react to new information

Rating agencies state that they take a rating action only when it is unlikely to be reversed shortly afterwards. Based on a formal representation of the rating process, I show that such a policy provides a good explanation for the empirical evidence: Rating changes occur relatively seldom, exhibit serial dependence, and lag changes in the issuers’ default risk. In terms of informational losses, avoiding rating reversals can be more harmful than monitoring credit quality only twice per year

Flexibility of industrial product service systems: An assessment based on concept modelling

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Iowa Department of Corrections Annual Performance Report, 2004

Iowa Department of Corrections Annual Performance Report FY 200

Market power in the Victorian retail energy market

According to the Australian Energy Market Commission (AEMC), the objectives of energy retail market competition are to give customers the opportunity to choose among competing retailers and to deliver efficient prices and services.1 In neoclassical economic theory, effective competition is desirable because it allocates resources efficiently and maintains pressure on market participants to deliver efficient prices to consumers. The Victorian retail energy market is designed to work competitively with the informed choices of consumers placing competitive constraints on price and restricting inefficient market outcomes. Unlike other Australian retail energy markets, Victorian retail prices are not subject to a regulated price cap

Market and Economic Modelling of the Intelligent Grid: End of Year Report 2009

The overall goal of Project 2 has been to provide a comprehensive understanding of the impacts of distributed energy (DG) on the Australian Electricity System. The research team at the UQ Energy Economics and Management Group (EEMG) has constructed a variety of sophisticated models to analyse the various impacts of significant increases in DG. These models stress that the spatial configuration of the grid really matters - this has tended to be neglected in economic discussions of the costs of DG relative to conventional, centralized power generation. The modelling also makes it clear that efficient storage systems will often be critical in solving transient stability problems on the grid as we move to the greater provision of renewable DG. We show that DG can help to defer of transmission investments in certain conditions. The existing grid structure was constructed with different priorities in mind and we show that its replacement can come at a prohibitive cost unless the capability of the local grid to accommodate DG is assessed very carefully.Distributed Generation. Energy Economics, Electricity Markets, Renewable Energy