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We are now faced with new social problems of deteriorating sense of community and a disjointed society that is generated by the Modern city paradigms. To tackle these new problems does not mean the complete restoration of the old system. It should mean a new typology that reflects the traditional system in an innovative way. By mixing the old buildings with the new ones through the injection of new communication platforms that encourage communication among people from different cultures and backgrounds, a more well-balanced society will be the new model for the future.

Experiments with a water/ethanol mixture are performed to determine the internal heat transfer rate of a concentric tray HIDiC and its characteristics. The experimental setup is tested at different process conditions, while measuring intercolumn heat transfer. The process parameters varied are column operating pressure and steam pressure. The results are presented and discussed with regard to temperature difference, overall heat exchange coefficient, and heat exchange rate. The models for the overall heat transfer coefficient are validated. Recommendations for upcoming experiments with the concentric tray HIDiC are done.

Planning and designing mobile telephone networks is a complicated process, which involves large amounts of money. The TIGER tool is under development at TNO ICT. The tool calculates the spatial traffic grids, which are one of the input data sets for mobile telephone network planning tools. The input data for the TIGER tool consists of the distribution of the potential users of the mobile telephone network. The distribution of the traveling users is only available at low detail and this data set has to be matched with the detailed road and railroad data set. The match of both data sets should be optimized and an indication of the reliability and accuracy of the matches has to be given. In order to perform this task properly the follwing research question has been formulated. Find the best match between generalized, low detailed schematic links and the more detailed road and railroad network and give an indication of reliability and accuracy of the results. This graduation project has been executed in two ways. First an eximanation of related researchers on the topic of matching multiple representations of street data sets has been performed. Second, different variants of solution definitions have been implemented. The results have finally been compared in order to give an indicaation of the reliability and accuracy. This best variant has the highest matching rate of all of the implemented variants, determined by comparing the results of the variants mutually. The variant generalizes the matching route of the travelers with the Douglas-Peucker line simplificatin algorithm. The number of vertices that are left gives an indication of the smoothness of the route, which i sone of the characteristics of the input data set containing the distribution of the travelers.

A citation in an academic text provides the reader with exact publication information to uniquely identify and locate a scholarly resource for further study. In the domain of academic research, citations are a key part of linking discrete pieces of knowledge. As opposed to the natural language mostly used in academic texts, bibliographic applications are typically based on structured publication information and therefore usually rely on the quality and completeness of automatically extracted citation metadata. However, the results from automatic Citation Metadata Extraction approaches are often unreliable. Moreover, the extracted citation metadata is only a small part of the relevant metadata that is available spread across the internet. In this thesis, we propose an approach and a supporting software component capable of enriching citation metadata with relevant bibliographic data from sources on the web. For the evaluation of the approach, we have designed a quality measure to express the quality of enriched references as a number. Based on this measure we have assessed the quality of the enriched references of BibMix to be 0.72.

Implementation of the context-guided design as a major tool for high-rise integration with the city, street level and its daily life.

Researchers and practitioners explain that in traditional collaborations between housing associations and contractors, there is a difference in culture, a lack of trust and ill collaboration. In combination with the economic crisis, the climate change and the more demanding end users, this demands a change in the way parties cooperate. Supply chain integration is used as a method to eliminate the problems that exist in the traditional collaboration. However, most supply chain integrations are still premature and there is insufficient information about what the experiences of the experts are regarding successes and problems related to the FLOTIQ aspects. These FLOTIQ aspects stand for Finance, Learning, Organization, Time, Information and Quality. This research combines and compares information of literature with the experiences of practitioners via a questionnaire and case study research. The questionnaire analyzed two populations: respondents with and with no experience in order to determine ‘which experiences do experts in supply chain integration have regarding successes and problems related to the FLOTIQ management aspects?’. For both successes and problems, the experts have different experiences per aspect. The most common successes are: transparency, client satisfaction and efficiency. The most frequent problems are: bad communication, unclear goals and expectations and personal gain first. Successes are repeated in two thirds of the time, but so are the problem, leading to unnecessary insufficiencies. Parties are making some improvements in their process, but there is no clear distinction between the respondent with and with no experience, which strongly gives the impression that parties are conduction an upgrade of a building team, instead of performing supply chain integration. The most relevant recommendations is to have horizontal and vertical communication between colleagues, to monitor and evaluate the project based on preset KPi’s and to actively learn from the information derived from these evaluations.

The purpose of this thesis is to integrate the geophysical data gathered along side a future road construction site. The gathered data consists of: surface elevation data, CPT”s and several types of electrical and geoelectrical measurements. The data has been integrated both in a qualitative and in a quantitative way. For the qualitative integration the visibility of known geological features has been checked and compared for the different types of data. The quantitative integration involved the kriging of the cone resistance measured by several CPT’s. While this thesis was carried out it became clear that visual correlation and integration was the only option to integrate the data.

In this thesis we present the database security mechanism and Web services implementation for the Ibidas system. The security mechanism restricts access to data by source per user. Web services provide an interface to call Ibidas methods and share data from and with other applications. We will see the need for the features presented, how they are implemented and the choices which were made during implementation. Furthermore we will show an example of the use of the Web services using the Taverna workbench application to solve a typical situation a researcher could face. We conclude this thesis with a discussion regarding our implementation and some future work indications.

In this thesis we present the database security mechanism and Web services implementation for the Ibidas system. The security mechanism restricts access to data by source per user. Web services provide an interface to call Ibidas methods and share data from and with other applications. We will see the need for the features presented, how they are implemented and the choices which were made during implementation. Furthermore we will show an example of the use of the Web services using the Taverna workbench application to solve a typical situation a researcher could face. We conclude this thesis with a discussion regarding our implementation and some future work indications.

This thesis describes the design and implementation of RDF Gears, a data integration framework for the Semantic Web. The RDF Gears Language combines the Semantic Web technologies with the Nested Relational Algebra. It provides an expressive Domain Specific Language for the development of workflows integrating RDF data with other sources. It allows Semantic Web developers and researchers to work on new, domain specific algorithms without wasting time on the implementation details of data transformation, storage and optimization. A web-based user interface is presented to create RGL workflows that are visualized with a graphical syntax. An execution engine is developed to function as a workflow interpreter. It implements aggressive pipelining, lazy evaluation and other optimizations. A comparison with the Silk Framework shows that this first implementation is already quite efficient.

A review on the socio-spatial integration and empowerment of (arriving) migrants and other disadvantaged groups in urban restructuring plans in the Netherlands.

In recent years, a lot of initiatives were taken to improve the collaboration between actors in the Architecture, Engineering and Construction industry. ‘Integration’ seems to be amongst the most used aims to enhance collaboration in these initiatives. To achieve integration, one might distinguish between integration of process and product. This paper reports a quantitative study into the relationship between process requirements based on the collaborative design process and the level of integration of the architectural and climate design of a building. This study continues previous work of Prins and Kruijne (2011). Their definition of design integration is reformulated and their set of twelve criteria has been re-examined and adapted. This research provides evidence as of how to operationalize integration, as a ‘soft’ architectural quality. Through a questionnaire the design process of 168 projects was analysed focusing on several process requirements in terms of intensity of collaboration and the very nature of the collaboration of architects and climate installation engineers. Using logistic regression modelling, three process requirements (i.e. the moment of involvement of the engineer during the project, the architect as project manager during the initiative phase, and the ambition of the client) were found to significantly explain the level of integration of the architectural and climate installation design of projects. These requirements emphasise the importance of the initiative phase of the project in relation to the finally obtained level of product integration.

The use of power electronics is growing extensively in applications such as the automotive field, lighting, power supplies, motor drives, etc. The ultimate goal is to make power electronics as transparent to the final user as possible, which means little extra cost, use of existing space and little or no extra thermal management. This sets very stringent requirements on power electronics concerning performance, cost and size. It has been recognized that the physical construction of power electronic converters represents one of the main frontiers in fulfilling these ever-increasing requirements. This thesis deals with improving the physical implementation of power electronic converters by increasing the level of integration through the use of multifunctional parts. A systematic approach to integration and packaging, on the basis of power electronic converters construction parts and functions that the parts perform, is introduced. Methods of reducing the number of construction parts in the converter by integrating the functionality of several parts into one are devised. This includes not only electrical and thermal (functional) parts but also non-electrical (packaging) parts, since packaging parts represent a large portion of the total number of parts in a converters assembly. Furthermore, technologies that can be used to implement these methods in converters are reviewed. The integration methods and technologies are merged into an algorithm that maps the design of the fundamental functions (electrical and thermal) onto the design of physical parts. Lastly, a tool for choosing the optimal solution among different construction technology options derived in the introduced algorithm is presented.

Feasibility study for the Commission of the European Communities, Directorate-Genera! for Employment, Industrial Relations and Social Affairs

To explore the question whether a promising concept that supports a UAV operator in separating the UAV from other traffic, also has potential benefits for Air Traffic Control, an identification and analysis of possibilities to add the conflict probing function to an existing Air Traffic Control system, the Multi-Aegis Site Emulator, was performed. The surveillance sensor type was a decisive aspect in this conversion, due to stringent requirements on position and velocity accuracy for effective conflict probing. Based on the results it was concluded that, within certain constraints, the envisioned implementation was technically feasible. For the implementation, a system-independent platform is designed with connectivity and data presentation designed independently from MASE. The proposed system architecture comprises a separate, stand-alone computer which captures the ATC display and uses a video overlay to add the conflict probes. To compute the location of the conflict areas, a real-time feed of track information is required, which was available in Eurocontrol´s ASTERIX standard at the Royal Netherlands Air Force Air Operations Control Station Nieuw Milligen. Integration and testing with a recorded and a live air picture on the MASE were successfully performed, which led to Technology Readiness Level 6.

Building on the experience built up from the management of more than 30 integration project, the objective of this research as been to improve the post-acquisition HR integration approach of Philips New Venture Integration, based on a gap analysis between the current model approach actual HR integration processes employed during the integration of acquisitions. Opportunities for improvement of the HR integration approach are proposed with respect to the definition of HR integration objectives and the implementation of HR integration activities As the field of post-acquisition integration is very broad, initial research themes are developed by both internal and external interviews. Because the NVI HR Integration model is a mature model which has been used and improved over the last five years, the internal interviews serve to quickly focus on the most pressing issues, whereas the external interviews provide an out-of-the-box view which might provide solutions to problems which Philips has not yet been able to solve. The action research method is used for this research with the aim of positively affecting organizational change, by developing the improved HR Integration approach together with the persons involved in the actual integration of acquisitions. Action research is a cyclical process that consists of five distinct phases of (1) Diagnosing (2) Action Planning, (3) Action taking, (4) Evaluation and (5) Specifying Learning. Due to the limited time, this research is based on one single cycle. Based on the results of this single cycle it can be concluded that the Philips NVI post-acquisition integration model incorporates many of the concepts of the process-perspective on socio-cultural integration discussed in academic literature. Both the perspectives of task integration and human integration are both clearly represented in the post-acquisition integration model. Using the action research method I have been able to outline opportunities for improvement in order to better match the planning, management and execution of the HR integration approach with the intended results. The inherent complexity of the M&A integration process, and the heterogeneity between deals, make it difficult to develop generalizable conclusions when comparing many different acquisitions, without the risk of over-generalizing and oversimplifying these acquisitions. By using a qualitative approach, this research allows to investigate a single approach in depth. The resulting conclusions shed new light on certain existing paradoxes within the academic literature on post-acquisition integration, and although these insights are not statistically generalizable, they might serve as a starting point for improved understanding of the performance of mergers and acquisitions.