Monitoimipystysorvin NC- ohjelmoinnin kehittäminen CAM käyttöönotolla

Diplomityön tavoitteena oli tehostaa venttiilipesien koneistuksessa käytettävän monitoimipystysorvin NC - ohjelmointia CAM - ohjelman käyttöönotolla. Tutkimus on osa laajempaa kokonaisuutta liittyen koneistusalihankinnan kehittämiseen ja yrityksen kilpailukyvyn ylläpitoon ja parantamiseen liiketoiminta-alueella, jolla on tällä hetkellä hyvät kasvunäkymät. Tavoite rajattiin yritykseen jo aiemmin hankitun WinCAM - ohjelman päivittämiseen ja hyödyntämiseen monitoimipystysorvin NC - ohjelmoinnissa. Tutkimuksen käytännön tavoitteena oli selvittää CAM - ohjelmoinnin käyttömahdollisuudet, sekä luoda CAM - ohjelmistoon pohjautuva, räätälöity NC - ohjelmointikonsepti pilottikohteeseen. Tutkimuksen kokeellisen osuuden muodostivat tällöin nykyisen tuotannon ongelmakohtien löytäminen, koneen ohjelmointitarpeiden kartoitus,sekä menetelmäkehitys. Tutkimuksen päämääränä oli tuotannon tasolla käytettävä järjestelmä, jolla koneen ohjelmointi olisi mahdollista myös vähemmällä konekohtaisella kokemuksella. Nykyisen toimintatavan ongelmina olivat yhtenäisen NC - ohjelmointikäytännön puute, niin valmiiden ohjelmien käytössä kuin uusienkin ohjelmien tekemisessä. Tähän olivat syynä NC - ohjauksen heikko käytettävyys erityisesti sorvauksen osalta. Nämä tekijät yhdistettynä monitoimityöstökoneessa tarvittavaan koordinaatiston hallintaan vaikeuttivat ohjelmointia. Työntekijäkohtaiset erot NC - ohjelmien käytössä, sekä laadultaan vaihtelevat valuaihiot aiheuttivat tuotannon läpäisyaikaan merkittävää vaihtelua. Siten myös koneen kuormituksen säätely oli vaikeaa. Uuden ohjelmointikonseptin toteutuksessa pidettiin etusijalla hyvää käytettävyyttä, sekä uuden menetelmän aukotonta liittymistä olemassa oleviin tuotantojärjestelmiin. Ohjelmointikonseptin toteutuksessa, osaperheestä haettiin selkeästi parametroitaviksi soveltuvat työvaiheet, jotka voitiin hallita yleiskäyttöisillä aliohjelmilla. Tuotteiden muidengeometrioiden hallintaan laadittiin geometriakirjasto, jota voitiin käyttää tavanomaisen graafisen ohjelmoinnin pohjana. Vanhaa toimintatapaa ja diplomityön aikana kehitettyä CAM - ohjelmointijärjestelmää vertailtiin perustuen NC - ohjelmien tehokkuuteen, jota tarkasteltiin saman työvaiheen työstöaikaan perustuen. Tämän lisäksi tärkeän tuloksen muodostavat myös kvalitatiivisetseikat, jotka liittyvät ohjelmointiympäristön käytettävyyteen. CAM - ohjelmoinnin kehittäminen ja käyttöönotto pilottikohteessa sujui pääosin hyvin ja laaditunsuunnitelman mukaisesti. Aiemmin hankalasti ohjelmoitavat työvaiheet, kuten erilaisten laippatasopintojen ja reikäpiirien ohjelmointi muutettiin makrokäyttöön soveltuviksi. Sorvauksessa ongelmia aiheuttaneen tiivistelilan koneistukseen sovellettiin graafista ohjelmointia. Koko tuotannon mittakaavassa NC - ohjelmoinninosuus oli kuitenkin vähäinen, mistä johtuen koneen tuottavuuteen ei tutkimuksenajanjaksolla voitu vaikuttaa. Sen sijaan tuotannon sujuvuuteen oleellisesti vaikuttavaa työtekijöiden 'hiljaisen tiedon' määrää voitiin vähentää vakioimalla ohjelmointia ja siirtämällä tehokkaiksi havaitut menetelmät ohjelmointijärjestelmään.

Strategisen tuotteen materiaalitoimittajan valintaprosessi

Työn tavoitteena on esittää strategisen tuotteen toimittajan valintaprosessi. Tavoitteena on esittää valintaprosessin eri vaiheet ja niissä huomioitavat asiat sekä eri vaiheisiin sovellettavia menetelmiä ja työkaluja.Valintaprosessi alkaa tarpeen määrittämisellä, joka käsittää sekä tuotteen ominaisuuksien että toimittajasuhteen kuvaamisen. Strategisten tuotteiden kohdalla tavoitteena on useimmiten pitkäaikainen yhteistyömuoto valitun toimittajan kanssa. Tarpeen määrittämisen jälkeen etsitään eri lähteistä, kuten erilaisista kaupallisista hakemistoista, internetistä, ammattijulkaisuista sekä henkilökohtaisten kontaktien avulla, potentiaalisia toimittajia, joista luodaan ehdokaslista. Seuraavana on vuorossa sovellettavien valintakriteerien määrittäminen. Tyypillisesti tarkastellaan ainakin toimittajan taloudellista tilannetta, laatua, tuotantoa, kuljetusta, palvelua ja raportointia ja tiedonvälitystä. Tämän jälkeen suoritetaan ensimmäinen seulonta, jossa karsitaan epäsopivimmat ehdokkaat pois prosessin jatkovaiheista. Tarvittavia tietoja voidaan hankkia kirjallisten kyselyiden sekä puhelin- ja henkilöhaastatteluiden avulla. Yksityiskohtaisessa arvioinnissa suoritetaan perusteellinen toimittajien vertailu aikaisemmin valittujen valintakriteerien mukaan. Toimittajan yksityiskohtaiseen arviointiin on tarjolla erilaisia menetelmiä, kuten luokiteltu arviointi, painotettu pistearviointi ja kustannussuhdearviointi. Neuvotteluihin valitaan tyypillisesti muutama sopivin toimittaja ja neuvotteluiden jälkeen on pystyttävä valitsemaan sopivin toimittaja tai vaihtoehtoisesti pari toimittajaa, joiden kesken sopimus jaetaan.

Operational Reliability Analysis of a Three-Tiered Thin-Client ERP-system in an International Corporate Environment

Internationalization and the following rapid growth have created the need to concentrate the IT systems of many small-to-medium-sized production companies. Enterprise Resource Planning systems are a common solution for such companies. Deployment of these ERP systems consists of many steps, one of which is the implementation of the same shared system at all international subsidiaries. This is also one of the most important steps in the internationalization strategy of the company from the IT point of view. The mechanical process of creating the required connections for the off-shore sites is the easiest and most well-documented step along the way, but the actual value of the system, once operational, is perceived in its operational reliability. The operational reliability of an ERP system is a combination of many factors. These factors vary from hardware- and connectivity-related issues to administrative tasks and communication between decentralized administrative units and sites. To accurately analyze the operational reliability of such system, one must take into consideration the full functionality of the system. This includes not only the mechanical and systematic processes but also the users and their administration. All operational reliability in an international environment relies heavily on hardware and telecommunication adequacy so it is imperative to have resources dimensioned with regard to planned usage. Still with poorly maintained communication/administration schemes no amount of bandwidth or memory will be enough to maintain a productive level of reliability. This thesis work analyzes the implementation of a shared ERP system to an international subsidiary of a Finnish production company. The system is Microsoft Dynamics Ax, currently being introduced to a Slovakian facility, a subsidiary of Peikko Finland Oy. The primary task is to create a feasible base of analysis against which the operational reliability of the system can be evaluated precisely. With a solid analysis the aim is to give recommendations on how future implementations are to be managed.

Luottamuksen rooli ja rakentuminen organisaation sisäisten yksiköiden välisessä yhteistyössä

Tämä tutkielma tarkastelee luottamuksen roolia organisaation sisäisessä yhteistyössä. Tavoitteena on tutkia niitä mekanismeja, joiden avulla luottamuksen ilmenemistä sisäisessä yhteistyössä voidaan vahvistaa. Toiseksi työ tarkastelee sitä, onko luottamus yhteystyössä henkilöityvää vai ei-henkilöityvää. Koska luottamusta on pääsääntöisesti tutkittu yrityskontekstissa, työn kolmantena tavoitteena on tarkastella sitä, vaikuttavatko kuntaorganisaation erityispiirteet luottamuksen ilmenemiseen yksiköiden välisessä yhteistyössä. Tämän laadullisen tutkimuksen teoreettinen osuus toteutettiin kirjallisuuskatsauksena. Tutkimuksen empiirisenä aineistona käytettiin narratiiveja, jotka olivat kuntaorganisaation keskijohdolta kerättyjä tarinoita. Aineiston analysointiin käytettiin sisällönanalyysin menetelmiä. Tutkimuksen tuloksena voidaan todeta, että luottamus on perusedellytys toimivalle yhteistyösuhteelle ja se rakentuu hyvin pitkälle käyttäytymisen ja kommunikoinnin kautta. Luottamus yhteistyössä ilmenee hyvin usein ei-henkilöityvänä luottamuksena, jolloin se kohdistuu siihen yksikköön, minkä kanssa yhteystyötä tehdään. Kuntaorganisaation erityispiirteillä ei ole merkittävää roolia luottamuksen ilmenemisessä yhteistyössä, vaikka virkamiehen virkavastuu onkin tarinoista nähtävissä.

A three dimensional study of heat transfer in a supercritical circulating fluidized bed combustor

From the boiler design point of view, it is imperative to know and understand the operation of the boiler. Since comprehensive measurement of a large furnace is impossible, the furnace can be modeled in order to study its behavior and phenomena. This requires the used model to be validated to correspond with the physical furnace behavior. In this thesis, a three dimensional furnace model is validated to match a bituminous coal utilizing, supercritical once-through circulating fluidized bed combustor based on measurement data. The validated model is used for analyzing the furnace heat transfer. Other heat transfer analysis methods are energy balance method based on tube surface temperature measurements and a method based on measured temperature difference between the tube crest and the fin. The latter method was developed in the thesis using Fluent-software. In the theory part, literature is reviewed and the fundamental aspects of circulating fluidized bed are discussed. These aspects are solid particle behavior in fluidization known as hydrodynamics, behavior of fuel and combustion and heat transfer. Fundamental aspects of modeling are also presented.

Applications of graph transformation in tools for domain-specific modeling languages

The use of domain-specific languages (DSLs) has been proposed as an approach to cost-e ectively develop families of software systems in a restricted application domain. Domain-specific languages in combination with the accumulated knowledge and experience of previous implementations, can in turn be used to generate new applications with unique sets of requirements. For this reason, DSLs are considered to be an important approach for software reuse. However, the toolset supporting a particular domain-specific language is also domain-specific and is per definition not reusable. Therefore, creating and maintaining a DSL requires additional resources that could be even larger than the savings associated with using them. As a solution, di erent tool frameworks have been proposed to simplify and reduce the cost of developments of DSLs. Developers of tool support for DSLs need to instantiate, customize or configure the framework for a particular DSL. There are di erent approaches for this. An approach is to use an application programming interface (API) and to extend the basic framework using an imperative programming language. An example of a tools which is based on this approach is Eclipse GEF. Another approach is to configure the framework using declarative languages that are independent of the underlying framework implementation. We believe this second approach can bring important benefits as this brings focus to specifying what should the tool be like instead of writing a program specifying how the tool achieves this functionality. In this thesis we explore this second approach. We use graph transformation as the basic approach to customize a domain-specific modeling (DSM) tool framework. The contributions of this thesis includes a comparison of di erent approaches for defining, representing and interchanging software modeling languages and models and a tool architecture for an open domain-specific modeling framework that e ciently integrates several model transformation components and visual editors. We also present several specific algorithms and tool components for DSM framework. These include an approach for graph query based on region operators and the star operator and an approach for reconciling models and diagrams after executing model transformation programs. We exemplify our approach with two case studies MICAS and EFCO. In these studies we show how our experimental modeling tool framework has been used to define tool environments for domain-specific languages.

Military crisis management in the next decade (2020-2030) : inducing consent or relying on compliance?

The most outstanding conceptual challenge of modern crisis management is the principle of consent. It is not a problem only at the operational level - it challenges the entire decision-making structures of crisis management operations. In post-cold war times and especially in the 21st century, there has been a transition from peacekeeping with limited size and scope towards large and complex peace operations. This shift has presented peace operations with a dilemma. How to balance between maintaining consent for peace operations, whilst being able to use military force to coerce those attempting to wreck peace processes? To address such a dilemma, this research aims to promote understanding, on what can be achieved by military crisis management operations (peace support operations) in the next decade. The research concentrates on the focal research question: Should military components induce consent or rely on the compliance of conflicting parties in crisis management operations of the next decade (2020 – 2030)? The focus is on military – political strategic level considerations, and especially on the time before political decisions to commit to a crisis management operation. This study does not focus on which actor or organisation should intervene. The framework of this thesis derives from the so called ‘peacebuilding space’, the scope of peace operations and spoiler theory. Feasibility of both peace enforcement and peacekeeping in countering future risk conditions are analysed in this framework. This future-orientated qualitative research uses the Delphi-method with a panel of national and international experts. Citation analysis supports identification of relevant reference material, which consists of contemporary literature, the Delphi-questionnaires and interviews. The research process followed three main stages. In the first stage, plausible future scenarios and risk conditions were identified with the Delphi-panel. In the second stage, operating environments for peace support operations were described and consequent hypotheses formulated. In the third stage, these hypotheses were tested on the Delphi-panel. The Delphi-panel is sufficiently wide and diverse to produce plausible yet different insights. The research design utilised specifically military crisis management and peace operations theories. This produced various and relevant normative considerations. Therefore, one may argue that this research; which is based on accepted contemporary theory, hypotheses derived thereof and utilising an expert panel, contributes to the realm of peace support operations. This research finds that some degree of peace enforcement will be feasible and necessary in at least the following risk conditions: failed governance; potential spillover of ethnic, religious, ideological conflict; vulnerability of strategic chokepoints and infrastructures in ungoverned spaces; as well as in territorial and extra-territorial border disputes. In addition, some form of peace enforcement is probably necessary in risk conditions pertaining to: extremism of marginalised groups; potential disputes over previously uninhabited and resource-rich territories; and interstate rivalry. Furthermore, this research finds that peacekeeping measures will be feasible and necessary in at least risk conditions pertaining to: potential spillover of ethnic, religious, ideological conflict; uncontrolled migration; consequences from environmental catastrophes or changes; territorial and extra-territorial border disputes; and potential disputes over previously uninhabited and resource-rich territories. These findings are all subject to both generic and case specific preconditions that must exist for a peace support operation. Some deductions could be derived from the research findings. Although some risk conditions may appear illogical, understanding the underlying logic of a conflict is fundamental to understanding transition in crisis management. Practitioners of crisis management should possess cognizance of such transition. They must understand how transition should occur from threat to safety, from conflict to stability – and so forth. Understanding transition is imperative for managing the dynamic evolution of preconditions, which begins at the outset of a peace support operation. Furthermore, it is pertinent that spoilers are defined from a peace process point of view. If spoilers are defined otherwise, it changes the nature of an operation towards war, where the logic is breaking the will of an enemy - and surrender. In peace support operations, the logic is different: actions towards spoilers are intended to cause transition towards consent - not defeat. Notwithstanding future developments, history continues to provide strategic education. However, the distinction is that the risk conditions occur in novel futures. Hence, lessons learned from the past should be fitted to the case at hand. This research shows compelling evidence that swaying between intervention optimism and pessimism is not substantiated. Both peace enforcement and peacekeeping are sine qua non for successful military crisis management in the next decade.

Leadership in the mobile smartphone market

The mobile telecommunications industry has been going through an enormous revolution, especially after mid-1990 when smartphones were introduced to the market. As a consequence, the smartphone market’s dynamism is requesting companies to operate differently in the way they do business. After a long period occupying the leader position in the smartphones manufacturers’ rank, Nokia was outperformed by Apple and Samsung during 2011 and since then has been on the third place. Nevertheless, Nokia is battling for regaining the leadership in such a competitive and high-velocity growing market and that is what this research is about. This research covers the competitive and strategic forces that shape dynamic industries whereas the main purpose is to elucidate the main factors that contribute to a company’s above-average performance and ultimately determine its leadership in the mobile smartphone market. Therefore, this exploratory qualitative research was conducted as a desk research, which utilized various secondary sources of data in the knowledge area of strategic management such as theories about competitive advantages and dynamic capabilities of firms, innovation, and strategy. This research is enriched with a case study about Nokia: how the company has been organizing its corporate structure to support the strategies and hence how it has been competing in the smartphone market is analyzed, taking into account many contemporary data sources, including market analysts’ and business experts’ opinions. As a result of the classic literature exploration and the case study assay, a framework for deeper analysis of the competitiveness of firms in dynamic markets was developed. The conclusion that emerged from this research is that the success of a firm results from the interplay of various factors. To regain the leader position in the mobile smartphone market is a challenging task that requires Nokia to reinvent its core strategy for taking charge of the smartphones’ industry transformation through for example the adoption of the open innovation concept. It is imperative that Nokia designs and implement a breakthrough strategy as well as embraces the uncertainty of the smartphone market competition as an opportunity for discontinuous innovation development with the ultimate goal of recovering the leadership.

Strategic external deployment of intellectual assets

Globalization, pervasiveness of technology and ICT, and the buildup of information societies and policies have lead to a growing abundance of knowledge and highly educated labour supply that is distributed widely. These changes have shifted the foundation of competitiveness to valuable knowledge resources which are now distributed widely across the globe, across actors in the value chain and across educated individuals in multiple organizations. Against this backdrop, the paradigm of open innovation (OI) has emerged as a new response to managing the increased amount of boundary-spanning knowledge flows in and out of the innovation process. The outbound mode of open innovation, that is to say the external exploitation of knowledge assets outside of the firm’s own products and services, has been the less-researched aspect of the concept and so far typically seen as concerning the outlicensing of unused technological assets to generate additional revenue. Given that open innovation is essentially a framework for the holistic structuring and management of crossboundary knowledge flows to improve a firm’s innovative performance, a close integration to corporate strategy seems imperative in order to fully benefit from it. Integrating open innovation to strategy leads to elevating its role from a fringe activity to a central innovation management issue that needs to be systematically managed. Building a structure that allows effective management necessitates linking open innovation activities to each phase of the innovation process. Previously, the connection between outbound OI and the earlier stages of innovation has not been studied. The thesis finds that connecting outbound OI to the entire innovation process of the firm, including the fuzzy front end of innovation, is critical for attaining strategic objectives and to the successful implementation and management of the activity. The practical purpose for the research is to enable companies to fully utilize their potential for outbound open innovation and to be able to implement and manage it from a strategic standpoint.

Interpreting marine benthic ecosystem functioning in coastal waters: validating the biological trait concept

Coastal areas harbour high biodiversity, but are simultaneously affected by rapid degradations of species and habitats due to human interactions. Such alterations also affect the functioning of the ecosystem, which is primarily governed by the characteristics or traits expressed by the organisms present. Marine benthic fauna is nvolved in numerous functions such as organic matter transformation and transport, secondary production, oxygen transport as well as nutrient cycling. Approaches utilising the variety of faunal traits to assess benthic community functioning have rapidly increased and shown the need for further development of the concept. In this thesis, I applied biological trait analysis that allows for assessments of a multitude of categorical traits and thus evaluation of multiple functional aspects simultaneously. I determined the functional trait structure, diversity and variability of coastal zoobenthic communities in the Baltic Sea. The measures were related to recruitment processes, habitat heterogeneity, large-scale environmental and taxonomic gradients as well as anthropogenic impacts. The studies comprised spatial scales from metres to thousands of kilometres, and temporal scales spanning one season as well as a decade. The benthic functional structure was found to vary within and between seagrass landscape microhabitats and four different habitats within a coastal bay, in papers I and II respectively. Expressions of trait categories varied within habitats, while the density of individuals was found to drive the functional differences between habitats. The findings in paper III unveiled high trait richness of Finnish coastal benthos (25 traits and 102 cateogries) although this differed between areas high and low in salinity and human pressure. In paper IV, the natural reduction in taxonomic richness across the Baltic Sea led to an overall reduction in function. However, functional richness in terms of number of trait categories remained comparatively high at low taxon richness. Changes in number of taxa within trait categories were also subtle and some individual categories were maintained or even increased. The temporal analysis in papers I and III highlighted generalities in trait expressions and dominant trait categories in a seagrass landscape as well as a “type organism” for the northern Baltic Sea. Some initial findings were made in all four papers on the role of common and rare species and traits for benthic community functioning. The findings show that common and rare species may not always express the same trait categories in relation to each other. Rare species in general did not express unique functional properties. In order to advance the understanding of the approach, I also assessed some issues concerning the limitations of the concept. This was conducted by evaluating the link between trait category and taxonomic richness using especially univariate measures. My results also show the need to collaborate nationally and internationally on safeguarding the utility of taxonomic and trait data. The findings also highlight the importance of including functional trait information into current efforts in marine spatial planning and biomonitoring.

The many faces of strikes : attitudes towards industrial action by labour, management and human resources

Strikes provide a current, fresh but also a seldom-addressed issue to study from economic sciences perspective. This study provides to filling this research gap by trying to identify attitudes towards strikes that can be found inside organizations. The research problem this study then sets out to answer is: “What kinds of attitudes exist inside organizations towards industrial actions and how attitudes vary between labour, management and human resources?” This study has been planned with a view to test how qualitative attitudinal research, as a method, is suited to studying a phenomenon such as strike. At the heart of this research approach lies an assumption linked to rhetoric social psychology, that attitude is a phenomenon that can be identified in argumentation. For this research 10 semi-structured interviews in 4 organizations were conducted utilizing statements and pictures as stimulants for discussion. The material was transcribed and analysed following the two levels, categorical and interpretive, demanded by the chosen method. Altogether five attitudes were discovered; three of them negative, one indifferent and one positive by nature. The negative attitudes of unfairness, failure and personification towards strikes represented the side of strikes that was perhaps the most anticipated, portraying the contradictions between employees and employer. The attitude of ordinariness, which portrayed indifference, and the positive attitude of change however, were more unanticipated findings. They reflect shared understanding and trust between conflict parties. The utilization of qualitative attitudinal approach to study strikes was deemed successful. The results of this study support prior literature on workplace conflicts for example in regards of the definition of conflict and typologies conflicts. In addition the multifaceted nature of strikes can be perceived as one statement supported by this study. It arises in the nature of the attitudes, the diversity of discussion themes during the interviews as well as in the extent of possible theories to apply.

Providing Discourse Services for Researchers in a Repository Setting

Poster at Open Repositories 2014, Helsinki, Finland, June 9-13, 2014

Metarefleksiiviset toimijat kaivavat maata modernin alta

Kirjallisuusarvostelu

Sensor communication in Smart cities and regions: An efficient IoT-based remote health monitoring system

Recent advances in Information and Communication Technology (ICT), especially those related to the Internet of Things (IoT), are facilitating smart regions. Among many services that a smart region can offer, remote health monitoring is a typical application of IoT paradigm. It offers the ability to continuously monitor and collect health-related data from a person, and transmit the data to a remote entity (for example, a healthcare service provider) for further processing and knowledge extraction. An IoT-based remote health monitoring system can be beneficial in rural areas belonging to the smart region where people have limited access to regular healthcare services. The same system can be beneficial in urban areas where hospitals can be overcrowded and where it may take substantial time to avail healthcare. However, this system may generate a large amount of data. In order to realize an efficient IoT-based remote health monitoring system, it is imperative to study the network communication needs of such a system; in particular the bandwidth requirements and the volume of generated data. The thesis studies a commercial product for remote health monitoring in Skellefteå, Sweden. Based on the results obtained via the commercial product, the thesis identified the key network-related requirements of a typical remote health monitoring system in terms of real-time event update, bandwidth requirements and data generation. Furthermore, the thesis has proposed an architecture called IReHMo - an IoT-based remote health monitoring architecture. This architecture allows users to incorporate several types of IoT devices to extend the sensing capabilities of the system. Using IReHMo, several IoT communication protocols such as HTTP, MQTT and CoAP has been evaluated and compared against each other. Results showed that CoAP is the most efficient protocol to transmit small size healthcare data to the remote servers. The combination of IReHMo and CoAP significantly reduced the required bandwidth as well as the volume of generated data (up to 56 percent) compared to the commercial product. Finally, the thesis conducted a scalability analysis, to determine the feasibility of deploying the combination of IReHMo and CoAP in large numbers in regions in north Sweden.