Technical innovation in industrial production

New techniques in manufacturing, popularly referred to as mechanization and automation, have been a preoccupation of social and economic theorists since the industrial revolution. A selection of relevant literature is reviewed, including the neoclassical economic treatment of technical change. This incorporates alterations to the mathematical production function and an associated increase in the efficiency with which the factors of production are converted into output. Other work emphasises the role of research and development and the process of diffusion, whereby new production techniques are propagated throughout industry. Some sociological writings attach importance to the type of production technology and its effect on the organisational structure and social relations within the factory. Nine detailed case studies are undertaken of examples of industrial innovation in the rubber, automobile, vehicle components, confectionery and clothing industries. The old and new techniques are compared for a range of variables, including capital equipment, labour employed, raw materials used, space requirements and energy consumption, which in most cases exhibit significant change with the innovation. The rate of output, labour productivity, product quality, maintenance requirements and other aspects are also examined. The process by which the change in production method was achieved is documented, including the development of new equipment and the strategy of its introduction into the factory, where appropriate. The firm, its environment, and the attitude of different sectors of the workforce are all seen to play a part in determining the motives for and consequences which flow from the innovations. The traditional association of technical progress with its labour-saving aspect, though an accurate enough description of the cases investigated, is clearly seen to afford an inadequate perspective for the proper understanding of this complex phenomenon, which also induces change in a wide range of other social, economic and technical variables.

Automation, rationalisation and concentration : a case study in the British chemical industry

This thesis is based upon a case study of the adoption of digital, electronic, microprocessor-based control systems by Albright & Wilson Limited - a UK chemical producer. It offers an explanation of the company's changing technology policy between 1978 and 1981, by examining its past development, internal features and industrial environment. Part One of the thesis gives an industry-level analysis which relates the development of process control technology to changes in the economic requirements of production . The rapid diffusion of microcomputers and other microelectronic equipment in the chemical industry is found to be a response to general need to raise the efficiency of all processes, imposed by the economic recession following 1973. Part Two examines the impaot of these technical and eoonomic ohanges upon Albright & Wilson Limited. The company's slowness in adopting new control technology is explained by its long history in which trends are identified whlich produced theconservatism of the 1970s. By contrast, a study of Tenneco Incorporated, a much more successful adoptor of automating technology, is offered with an analysis of the new technology policy of adoption of such equipment which it imposed upon Albright & Wilson, following the latter's takeover by Tenneco in 1978. Some indications of the consequences by this new policy of widespread adoptions of microprocessor-based control equipment are derived from a study of the first Albright & Wilson plant to use such equipment. The thesis concludes that companies which fail to adopt rapidly the new control technology may not survive in the recessionary environment, the long- established British companies may lack the flexibility to make such necessary changes and that multi-national companies may have an important role jn the planned transfer and adoption of new production technology through their subsidiaries in the UK.

Evaluating the impact of institutional logic on the corporate Internet reporting by Egyptian listed companies

This study explores the institutional logic(s) governing the Corporate Internet Reporting (CIR) by Egyptian listed companies. In doing so, a mixed methods approach was followed. The qualitative part seeks to understand the perceptions, believes, values, norms, that are commonly shared by Egyptian companies which engaged in these practices. Consequently, seven cases of large listed Egyptian companies operating in different industries have been examined. Other stakeholders and stockholders have been interviewed in conjunction with these cases. The quantitative part consists of two studies. The first one is descriptive aiming to specify whether the induced logic(s) from the seven cases are commonly embraced by other Egyptian companies. The second study is explanatory aiming to investigate the impact of several institutional and economic factors on the extent of CIR, types of the online information, quality of the websites as well as the Internet facilities. Drawing on prior CIR literature, four potential types of logics could be inferred: efficiency, legitimacy, technical and marketing based logics. In Egypt, legitimacy logic was initially embraced in the earlier years after the Internet inception. latter, companies confronted radical challenges in their internal and external environments which impelled them to raise their websites potentialities to defend their competitive position; either domestically or internationally. Thus, two new logics emphasizing marketing and technical perspectives have emerged, in response. Strikingly, efficiency based logic is not the most prevalent logic driving CIR practices in Egypt as in the developed countries. The empirical results support this observation and show that almost half of Egyptian listed companies 115 as on December 2010 possessed an active website, half of them 62 disclosed part of their financial and accounting information, during December 2010 to February 2011. Less than half of the websites 52 offered latest annual financial statements. Fewer 33(29%) websites provided shareholders and stock information or included a separate section for corporate governance 25 (22%) compared to 50 (44%) possessing a section for news or press releases. Additionally, the variations in CIR practices, as well as timeliness and credibility were also evident even at industrial level. After controlling for firm size, profitability, leverage, liquidity, competition and growth, it was realized that industrial companies and those facing little competition tend to disclose less. In contrast, management size, foreign investors, foreign listing, dispersion of shareholders and firm size provided significant and positive impact individually or collectively. In contrast, neither audit firm, nor most of performance indicators (i.e. profitability, leverage, and liquidity) did exert an influence on the CIR practices. Thus, it is suggested that CIR practices are loosely institutionalised in Egypt, which necessitates issuing several regulative and processional rules to raise the quality attributes of Egyptian websites, especially, timeliness and credibility. Beside, this study highlights the potency of assessing the impact of institutional logic on CIR practices and suggests paying equal attention to the institutional and economic factors when comparing the CIR practices over time or across different institutional environments in the future.

Legitimacy building strategies in conditions of discretionary legal enforcement:a logic of social action approach

The present study explores strategies used to legitimize the transfer of organizational practices in a situation of institutional upheaval. We apply the logic of social action (Risse, 2000) to analyze the effectiveness of consequence-based action and communication-based action, in terms of higher coordination, lower conflict, and overall higher economic performance. Consequence-based legitimation is obtained by using a system of distributor incentives tied to performance of specific tasks, while communicative legitimation can be achieved by recommendations and warnings. Our setting is an export channel to European emerging economies. Our results indicate that in the absence of legitimacy, as manifested in discretionary legal enforcement, consequence-based legitimation is more effective than communicative legitimation in reducing conflict, increasing coordination, and ultimately in improving the performance of the export dyad. © 2014 Elsevier Inc.

Frontline employees' collaboration in industrial service innovation:routes of co-creation's effects on new service performance

From a Service-Dominant Logic (S-DL) perspective, employees constitute operant resources that firms can draw to enhance the outcomes of innovation efforts. While research acknowledges that frontline employees (FLEs) constitute, through service encounters, a key interface for the transfer of valuable external knowledge into the firm, the range of potential benefits derived from FLE-driven innovation deserves more investigation. Using a sample of knowledge intensive business services firms (KIBS), this study examines how the collaboration with FLEs along the new service development (NSD) process, namely FLE co-creation, impacts on service innovation performance following two routes of different effects. Partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) results indicate that FLE co-creation benefits the NS success among FLEs and firm’s customers, the constituents of the resources route. FLE co-creation also has a positive effect on the NSD speed, which in turn enhances the NS quality. NSD speed and NS quality integrate the operational route, which proves to be the most effective path to impact the NS market performance. Accordingly, KIBS managers must value their FLEs as essential partners to achieve successful innovation from an internal and external perspective, and develop the appropriate mechanisms to guarantee their effective involvement along the NSD process.

Systems Analysis: the Structure-and-Purpose Approach Based on Logic-linguistic Formalisation

Systems analysis (SA) is widely used in complex and vague problem solving. Initial stages of SA are analysis of problems and purposes to obtain problems/purposes of smaller complexity and vagueness that are combined into hierarchical structures of problems(SP)/purposes(PS). Managers have to be sure the PS and the purpose realizing system (PRS) that can achieve the PS-purposes are adequate to the problem to be solved. However, usually SP/PS are not substantiated well enough, because their development is based on a collective expertise in which logic of natural language and expert estimation methods are used. That is why scientific foundations of SA are not supposed to have been completely formed. The structure-and-purpose approach to SA based on a logic-and-linguistic simulation of problems/purposes analysis is a step towards formalization of the initial stages of SA to improve adequacy of their results, and also towards increasing quality of SA as a whole. Managers of industrial organizing systems using the approach eliminate logical errors in SP/PS at early stages of planning and so they will be able to find better decisions of complex and vague problems.

Towards probabilistic synchronization of local controllers

The traditional use of global and centralised control methods, fails for large, complex, noisy and highly connected systems, which typify many real world industrial and commercial systems. This paper provides an efficient bottom up design of distributed control in which many simple components communicate and cooperate to achieve a joint system goal. Each component acts individually so as to maximise personal utility whilst obtaining probabilistic information on the global system merely through local message-passing. This leads to an implied scalable and collective control strategy for complex dynamical systems, without the problems of global centralised control. Robustness is addressed by employing a fully probabilistic design, which can cope with inherent uncertainties, can be implemented adaptively and opens a systematic rich way to information sharing. This paper opens the foreseen direction and inspects the proposed design on a linearised version of coupled map lattice with spatiotemporal chaos. A version close to linear quadratic design gives an initial insight into possible behaviours of such networks.

Market definition in industrial high-technology markets

This dissertation analyzes how marketers define markets in technology-based industries. One of the most important strategic decisions marketers face is determining the optimal market for their products. Market definition is critical in dynamic high technology markets characterized by high levels of market and technological uncertainty. Building on literature from marketing and related disciplines, this research is the first in-depth study of market definition in industrial markets. Using a national, probability sample stratified by firm size, 1,000 marketing executives in nine industries (automation, biotechnology, computers, medical equipment and instrumentation, pharmaceuticals, photonics, software, subassemblies and components, and telecommunications) were surveyed via a mail questionnaire. A 20.8% net response rate yielding 203 surveys was achieved. The market structure-conduct-performance (SCP) paradigm from industrial organization provided a conceptual basis for testing a causal market definition model via LISREL. A latent exogenous variable (competitive intensity) and four latent endogenous variables (marketing orientation, technological orientation, market definition criteria, and market definition success) were used to develop and test hypothesized relationships among constructs. Research questions relating to market redefinition, market definition characteristics, and internal (within the firm) and external (competitive) market definition were also investigated. Market definition success was found to be positively associated with a marketing orientation and the use of market definition criteria. Technological orientation was not significantly related to market definition success. Customer needs were the key market definition characteristic to high-tech firms (technology, competition, customer groups, and products were also important). Market redefinition based on changing customer needs was the most effective of seven strategies tested. A majority of firms regularly defined their market at the corporate and product-line level within the firm. From a competitive perspective, industry, industry sector, and product-market definitions were used most frequently.

A pedagogia industrial da FIEMG: um estudo sobre o pensamento empresarial a partir da revista vida industrial (1961-1974)

The present research results of the studies and debates inherent in PhD in Education at the Graduate Program in Education at the Federal University of Uberlândia, belonging to the Research Line "Politics and Knowledge in Education." This thesis aims to analyze the contradictory meaning of education as training human history, specifically educational representative under the logic of the industrial business associated FIEMG (Federation of Industries of the State of Minas Gerais) in the context 1961-1974. This definition is justified by the historical fact that it was a period marked by the cyclical crises of capital and their impacts in the final phase of the industrialization process in Brazil: it starts with one of the apexes of economic growth in the country , driven by national developmental , continues with a severe political crisis in 1966 , also impacting the economic sphere, and finally, with the constant quest for economic stability even under high prices, hatch the factors that led to the Brazilian economy to the context of the "Economic Miracle". For this, it was necessary to link the debate between education and work from the perspective of historical materialism and dialectical their subsidies theoretical-methodological and epistemological. In the first chapter, we designed a "State of the art" category "human formation", conceived as a process of education and history, from the Marxist assumptions, aiming at the reconstruction of concepts and meanings of which is the formation of workers in contradictory logic, the bias of comprehensive training and the prospect of capital accumulation. Then, in the second chapter, we present a review about industrialization, the industrial business and its development perspective 1961-1974. The third chapter was established on a contextualization of the state and its peculiarities, the industrial business and its proposed development both nationally and at the state (Minas Gerais). Finally, in the fourth chapter, was organized dialogue with the sources, from a historical survey of the shares of the industrial business with an emphasis on education, which converged in a pedagogy industrial consolidation in line with the political and economic conditions specific period from 1961 to 1974. It has mailing bibliographic reference business thinking expressed in the concreteness of training workers and industry of Minas Gerais, in agreement with the demands of work and training of mining companies. The thesis of this study is the defense that the corporate actions which constituted pedagogy industrial concepts were articulated to political and economic development in Brazil, since the discipline to work imposed by such conceptions met the human worker training geared to the accumulation the general capital and industrial capital in particular. Establish, therefore, different logics, the state level, the scope of private foreign capital and domestic private capital, which came up the process of capital accumulation, loading, contradictorily, the possibilities of building the human beyond capital, or a teaching job.

Electronic Redesign of an Industrial Lift

This project, realized at the company ABER Ltd, describes the process followed for the developing of an electronic control system for a hydraulic elevator. The previous control system was based on relay logic, and the company wanted to change it to a microcontroller based technology. To do so, different approaches were studied and finally the selected technology for the development was the Raspberry Pi. After, the software needed for all the elevator types was developed, and the interface hardware was selected. In the end, several test were made to adjust the software and the hardware and to prove the good operation of the system.

Use of Products and Systems for Scientific and Technical College Education and Development for Industrial

Have been less than thirty years since a group of graduate students and computer scientists working on a federal contract performed the first successful connection between two computers located at remote sites. This group known as the NWG Network Working Group, comprised of highly creative geniuses who as soon as they began meeting started talking about things like intellectual graphics, cooperating processes, automation questions, email, and many other interesting possibilities 1 . In 1968, the group's task was to design NWG's first computer network, in October 1969, the first data exchange occurred and by the end of that year a network of four computers was in operation. Since the invention of the telephone in 1876 no other technology has revolutionized the field of communications over the computer network. The number of people who have made great contributions to the creation and development of the Internet are many, the computer network a much more complex than the phone is the result of people of many nationalities and cultures. However, remember that some years later in 19732 two computer scientists Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerft created a more sophisticated communication program called Transmission Control Protocol - Internet Protocol TCP / IP which is still in force in the Internet today.

El pulso urbano-industrial de O Porriño

En el planteamiento de la presente disertación, se tienen en consideración las premisas sobre los orígenes de la ciudad, su influencia industrial y su resolución a través de la Teoría de la Lógica Social del Espacio como herramienta de trabajo para los análisis sobre los planes urbanos propuestos para el municipio a estudio, su historia y para la elaboración de propuestas de interacción futuras. Inicialmente, la propuesta surge de la importancia de las vías de comunicación, como elemento creador urbano, es decir, de una determinada infraestructura, la calle-carretera como el “eje” de consolidación de la ciudad, donde se realizan la mayoría de recorridos o flujos en este caso, ejemplificado en la villa de Porriño. El urbanismo pos-moderno, hasta finales de 1970 e inicios de 1980, no abordaba una articulación entre social y técnica, una ciencia de lucha de clases. En este contexto, en 1984, Bill Hillier y Julienne Hanson escriben “La Lógica Social del Espacio” donde argumentan que los movimientos o flujos obedecen a una lógica racional, según la cual, cualquier desplazamiento es llevado a cabo por el menor recorrido y, por tanto, el urbanismo influye en esos flujos. La configuración urbana genera condiciones de accesibilidad y da origen a una diferenciación espacial jerarquizada con conceptos como la conectividad, integración y segregación en un espacio influenciado y construido por la dinámica social. De este modo, la Teoría de la Sintaxis Espacial describe la configuración del trazado urbano y las relaciones entre el espacio público y privado a través de medidas cuantitativas, las cuales permiten entender aspectos importantes del sistema urbano como la accesibilidad y la distribución y usos del suelo consolidado. Por tanto, en la teoría existe una correlación establecida entre las propiedades de los elementos presentados, espacio y sociedad, de modo que cada elemento incumbe al otro y no existiría sin su presencia, siendo fundamental para la definición de la forma. Esta herramienta, Space Syntax, busca la integración del espacio en la ciudad, mediante un análisis y una evaluación a diversas escalas en la red urbana, con una correcta distribución de los espacios, sus usos y las vías de transporte o comunicación necesarios para llegar a los diferentes lugares de la ciudad. La realización de la investigación se centrará en el análisis de la infraestructura viaria en el municipio de Porriño y sus regiones colindantes a lo largo del período histórico analizado, centrándose en tres momentos históricos, 1956, 1986 y la actualidad 2015, debido a los vuelos fotogramétricos de dichas etapas. Así, se obtendrán las respectivas mediciones correspondientes a través del programa informático Depthmap, las cuales se contrarrestarán y compararán entre sí en cada etapa analizada y entre los propios años examinados, para lograr obtener las consideraciones establecidas a lo largo del estudio en cuanto a la influencia comunicativa de los flujos de interacción social en el entorno urbano definido y la respectiva lucha de los sectores industriales y residenciales. En conclusión, se pretende la justificación del origen de la ciudad a través de la comparación sus vías, las cuales fueron fomentadas por el comercio e industria para su creación, dotando así a la industria del dominio del espacio para satisfacer sus necesidades, creando y ampliando su área de intervención, la cual puede ser analizada y tratada no sólo independientemente, sino en el conjunto urbano en el que se sitúa, Porriño.

Design and Development of Network Monitoring Strategies in P4-enabled Programmable Switches

Network monitoring is of paramount importance for effective network management: it allows to constantly observe the network’s behavior to ensure it is working as intended and can trigger both automated and manual remediation procedures in case of failures and anomalies. The concept of SDN decouples the control logic from legacy network infrastructure to perform centralized control on multiple switches in the network, and in this context, the responsibility of switches is only to forward packets according to the flow control instructions provided by controller. However, as current SDN switches only expose simple per-port and per-flow counters, the controller has to do almost all the processing to determine the network state, which causes significant communication overhead and excessive latency for monitoring purposes. The absence of programmability in the data plane of SDN prompted the advent of programmable switches, which allow developers to customize the data-plane pipeline and implement novel programs operating directly in the switches. This means that we can offload certain monitoring tasks to programmable data planes, to perform fine-grained monitoring even at very high packet processing speeds. Given the central importance of network monitoring exploiting programmable data planes, the goal of this thesis is to enable a wide range of monitoring tasks in programmable switches, with a specific focus on the ones equipped with programmable ASICs. Indeed, most network monitoring solutions available in literature do not take computational and memory constraints of programmable switches into due account, preventing, de facto, their successful implementation in commodity switches. This claims that network monitoring tasks can be executed in programmable switches. Our evaluations show that the contributions in this thesis could be used by network administrators as well as network security engineers, to better understand the network status depending on different monitoring metrics, and thus prevent network infrastructure and service outages.

Effective procedure for the optimization of the linear controller in an industrial drive for a nonlinear mechanism

Il progetto di tesi è incentrato sull’ottimizzazione del procedimento di taratura dei regolatori lineari degli anelli di controllo di posizione e velocità presenti negli azionamenti usati industrialmente su macchine automatiche, specialmente quando il carico è ad inerzia variabile in dipendenza dalla posizione, dunque non lineare, come ad esempio un quadrilatero articolato. Il lavoro è stato svolto in collaborazione con l’azienda G.D S.p.A. ed il meccanismo di prova è realmente utilizzato nelle macchine automatiche per il packaging di sigarette. L’ottimizzazione si basa sulla simulazione in ambiente Matlab/Simulink dell’intero sistema di controllo, cioè comprensivo del modello Simulink degli anelli di controllo del drive, inclusa la dinamica elettrica del motore, e del modello Simscape del meccanismo, perciò una prima necessaria fase del lavoro è stata la validazione di tali modelli affinché fossero sufficientemente fedeli al comportamento reale. Il secondo passo è stato fornire una prima taratura di tentativo che fungesse da punto di partenza per l’algoritmo di ottimizzazione, abbiamo fatto ciò linearizzando il modello meccanico con l’inerzia minima e utilizzando il metodo delle formule di inversione per determinare i parametri di controllo. Già questa taratura, seppur conservativa, ha portato ad un miglioramento delle performance del sistema rispetto alla taratura empirica comunemente fatta in ambito industriale. Infine, abbiamo lanciato l’algoritmo di ottimizzazione definendo opportunamente la funzione di costo, ed il risultato è stato decisamente positivo, portando ad un miglioramento medio del massimo errore di inseguimento di circa il 25%, ma anche oltre il 30% in alcuni casi.

Automated service provisioning in programmable network infrastructures

Modern networks are undergoing a fast and drastic evolution, with software taking a more predominant role. Virtualization and cloud-like approaches are replacing physical network appliances, reducing the management burden of the operators. Furthermore, networks now expose programmable interfaces for fast and dynamic control over traffic forwarding. This evolution is backed by standard organizations such as ETSI, 3GPP, and IETF. This thesis will describe which are the main trends in this evolution. Then, it will present solutions developed during the three years of Ph.D. to exploit the capabilities these new technologies offer and to study their possible limitations to push further the state-of-the-art. Namely, it will deal with programmable network infrastructure, introducing the concept of Service Function Chaining (SFC) and presenting two possible solutions, one with Openstack and OpenFlow and the other using Segment Routing and IPv6. Then, it will continue with network service provisioning, presenting concepts from Network Function Virtualization (NFV) and Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC). These concepts will be applied to network slicing for mission-critical communications and Industrial IoT (IIoT). Finally, it will deal with network abstraction, with a focus on Intent Based Networking (IBN). To summarize, the thesis will include solutions for data plane programming with evaluation on well-known platforms, performance metrics on virtual resource allocations, novel practical application of network slicing on mission-critical communications, an architectural proposal and its implementation for edge technologies in Industrial IoT scenarios, and a formal definition of intent using a category theory approach.