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- Liu, Yu
(author)
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Integrating life cycle assessment into simulation-based decision support
- 2022
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Licentiate thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Increasing marketing and legislative requirements put heavy demands on the environmental performance of future transportation solutions. The resulting need to reduce total environmental impacts presents both challenges and opportunities to the transport sector as a whole, including the automotive industry. Life cycle assessment (LCA) is commonly used to evaluate environmental performance in the automotive industry. However, the static nature of LCAlimits its usefulness for capturing dynamic environmental consequences in the manufacturing and operational phase. This thesis proposes a simulation-based approach to LCA that addresses this problem. Selected real-world case studies demonstrate the potential of the approach in both vehicle production processes and end-user applications. The work was preceded by a comprehensive review of the potential benefits and challenges of using simulation-based LCA in production processes. This review laid the foundation for the development and implementation of this method inthe automotive industry. Two real-world case studies demonstrate its value. The first was a waste collection case study in which LCA was integrated in an existing simulation-based decision support tool to optimize the company’s activities froma life cycle environmental impact perspective. A simultaneously developed simulation-based LCA model of an iron foundry production line extended the applicability of the method with a proposed decision support interpretation approach. The study shows that data and information from both simulation model and LCA databases can be integrated and utilized in the developed simulation-based LCA method. This allows different systems with different configurations to be combined to assess the relevant parameters, and eventually to provide information about overall environmental impacts to decision makers to improvethe environmental sustainability of the automotive industry.
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| 2. |
- Galozy, Alexander, 1991-
(author)
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Data-driven personalized healthcare : Towards personalized interventions via reinforcement learning for Mobile Health
- 2021
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Licentiate thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Medical and technological advancement in the last century has led to the unprecedented increase of the populace's quality of life and lifespan. As a result, an ever-increasing number of people live with chronic health conditions that require long-term treatment, resulting in increased healthcare costs and managerial burden to the healthcare provider. This increase in complexity can lead to ineffective decision-making and reduce care quality for the individual while increasing costs. One promising direction to tackle these issues is the active involvement of the patient in managing their care. Particularly for chronic diseases, where ongoing support is often required, patients must understand their illness and be empowered to manage their care. With the advent of smart devices such as smartphones, it is easier than ever to provide personalised digital interventions to patients, help them manage their treatment in their daily lives, and raise awareness about their illness. If such new approaches are to succeed, scalability is necessary, and solutions are needed that can act autonomously without costly human intervention. Furthermore, solutions should exhibit adaptability to the changing circumstances of an individual patient's health, needs and goals. Through the ongoing digitisation of healthcare, we are presented with the unique opportunity to develop cost-effective and scalable solutions through Artificial Intelligence (AI).This thesis presents work that we conducted as part of the project improving Medication Adherence through Person-Centered Care and Adaptive Interventions (iMedA) that aims to provide personalised adaptive interventions to hypertensive patients, supporting them in managing their medication regiment. The focus lies on inadequate medication adherence (MA), a pervasive issue where patients do not take their medication as instructed by their physician. The selection of individuals for intervention through secondary database analysis on Electronic Health Records (EHRs) was a key challenge and is addressed through in-depth analysis of common adherence measures, development of prediction models for MA and discussions on limitations of such approaches for analysing MA. Furthermore, providing personalised adaptive interventions is framed in the contextual bandit setting and addresses the challenge of delivering relevant interventions in environments where contextual information is significantly corrupted. The contributions of the thesis can be summarised as follows: (1) Highlighting the issues encountered in measuring MA through secondary database analysis and providing recommendations to address these issues, (2) Investigating machine learning models developed using EHRs for MA prediction and extraction of common refilling patterns through EHRs and (3) formal problem definition for a novel contextual bandit setting with context uncertainty commonly encountered in Mobile Health and development of an algorithm designed for such environments.
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| 3. |
- Johansson, Mattias, 1975
(author)
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Value creation and the challenge of joining forces: Evidence from open innovation and mergers and acquisitions
- 2022
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Licentiate thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Value creation is pivotal for organizational survival, growth, and competitiveness. The topic has attracted a growing interest from scholars looking for new ways to analyze how firms create value for themselves and their stakeholders. The means of value creation involve a wide array of strategies, tools, and forms of interaction. Focusing on the challenges of joining forces, this thesis explores two commonly used practices in collaboration with others to create value: mergers and acquisitions (M&A) and open innovation (OI). Both practices are highly complex. Despite the common use, they often fail to deliver the intended outcome, for example, in terms of synergies, complementarities, and increased efficiency. This thesis consists of two empirical papers and an introductory chapter. The themes discussed in each of the enclosed papers investigates value creation and the challenges of joining forces with other organizations. Paper 1 introduces a novel business model lens to study post-merger integration in M&As. This study combines firm-level case study research (in the European material handling industry) on business models and M&A to explore how differences in business models affect value creation and synergy realization during postmerger integration. The case evidence suggests that business model congruence – the fit between merging business models, achieved through the careful stitching of business model components into a value-creating system – is a critical factor impacting post-merger integration. Paper 2 focuses on OI and explores the challenges to successful value creation in partnerships between large and small firms. Based on field studies and interview data, I uncover distinct challenges that large and small firms experience and what tactics can be used to address such challenges. This thesis contributes to the understanding of what impacts value creation when organizations join forces through M&A and OI. Emphasizing two common collaborative strategies with a novel theoretical approach allowed me to investigate the mechanisms for value creation at a more granular level than previously examined. The combined theme of the thesis adds to M&A, OI and strategic management literature by providing relevant insights on the impact of interorganizational relations and organizational differences on collaborative strategies. By integrating business models into the M&A literature, I expand the concept of strategic fit, offering an opportunity to rethink how synergies are created. My approach of focusing on OI partnerships between large and small firms contributes to the understanding of how value is created in a collaborative context by identifying how large and small firms engage in collaboration with very different perspectives and capabilities. Factors that, if not mitigated, hamper the relationship and intended value creation, respectively. Having identified these relational challenges, I present remedies that seek to establish mutual trust from the start of the partnership. By contributing to a new understanding of common strategies for creating value in collaboration with others, I derive implications for strategic similarity, synergy realization, and OI.
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