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This paper sought to identify and analyze what are the barriers towards women career’s development as business leaders in Brazil and Nicaragua when it comes to the country societal variables. In order to comprehend these barriers through women’s perception, qualitative data was chosen for this investigation, which was gathered through one-to-one interviews within businesswomen from Brazil and Nicaragua that have experience in leadership positions. The results of this research confirm that societal, economic, and political factors have great influence at gender equality and in how it affects women’s progress as business leaders. Thus, it can vary considerably between countries, even when they have similar culture backgrounds. Furthermore, it is imperative to comprehend these differences in order to close any gender gap in the field.
Observing the ratios of the rail usage in terms of passenger travelled per km and per capita, we see that there are huge differences between countries, so some railway systems are performing better in catching passengers than others. By analysing the factors that make the railways attractive for users, and setting standard values for these factors, we can analyse how well a system is performing. This paper has investigated those factors and developed an assessment tool that will inform about the required improvements, so in a later stage specific strategies can be developed to increase the performance in order to attract more passengers. Spain will be used as case study, since the country has specially low passenger rail usage compared to other countries even though the large investments in high speed lines the country undertook in the last decades.
The e-commerce market has been growing for years and this trend seems to be continuing. Online stores for clothing are very successful. It seems that hardly any company can afford not to have a digital presence. This goes hand in hand with the fact that the range of products on offer to customers is getting bigger and bigger. But it's not just the range that's getting bigger, it's also the effort customers have to make to find the right product. For this reason, many successful online stores are already relying on AI. In doing so, companies are creating opportunities for customers that an employee could hardly manage. Implemented on the website, AI can check inventory, update it in real time, predict trends and evaluate customer or user data and make suitable recommendations. This is important for the customer because with the huge choice available, for one thing, personalization is increasingly important and being presented with a relevant selection. A central question is whether the recommendations are trustworthy and whether they can be equated with a real salesperson advising the customer. After all, trust is relevant in longterm customer relationships in that it leads to loyalty and satisfaction, which in turn increases the intention to repurchase. The recommendation tools mentioned are also of particular interest for another reason. On the one hand, they help customers to get a relevant selection of the offer and thus to get faster to the desired one. On the other hand, they are relevant for companies not only because of customer satisfaction, but also because of the chance to reduce returns. The large online stores for clothing offer their customers very generous opportunities to return the goods free of charge. In doing so, the companies have responded to customer wishes, because hardly anything is more important to them when it comes to online shopping: free returns. In this way, customers have minimized the risk of having to keep goods that do not fit or please them. This thesis examines whether recommendation tools can help customers to better assess the sizes and properties of clothing, so that they receive more suitable clothing and do not even feel the need to order several sizes of the same item of clothing. It can therefore be assumed that trust in the recommendations of the AI tools reduces uncertainty, which in turn should reduce the intention to return goods. Another assumption to be tested is that of the perceived usefulness of the recommendation tools. As a prerequisite to get an assessment of these assumptions is the usage of the tools. Therefore, a survey was initiated in the DACH region to assess the extent to which usage influences the factors mentioned. It was found by means of a regression analysis that the frequency of online purchases, mediated by perceived usefulness, explains the influence on trust.
In recent years, numerous studies around the world have examined the environmental potential of biochar to determine whether it can help address climate challenges. Several of these studies have used the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) method to evaluate the environmental impacts of biochar systems. However, studies focus mainly on biochar obtained from pyrolysis, while the number of studies on biochar from gasification is small.
To contribute to the current state of LCA research on biochar from gasification, LCA was performed for biochar, electricity, and heat from a wood gasification plant in Vorarlberg, Austria. Woodchips from local woods are used as biomass feedstock to produce energy, i.e., electricity and heat. Thereby, biochar is obtained as a side product from gasification. The production of syngas and biochar takes place in a floating fixed-bed gasifier. Eventually, the syngas is converted to electricity in a gas engine and fed to the power grid. Throughout different stages within the gasification process, heat is obtained and fed into local heat grid to be delivered to customers. The biochar produced complies with the European Biochar Industry (EBI) guidelines and is used on a nearby farm for manure treatment and eventually for soil application. Thereby, the effect of biochar used for manure treatment is considered to reduce emissions occurring from manure, i.e., nitrogen monoxide (N2O). Further, the CO2 sequestration potential of biochar, i.e., removal of CO2 from the atmosphere and long-term storage, is considered. Several constructions, such as the construction of the gasification system and the heating grid, are included in the evaluation.
As input related reference flow, 1 kg of woodchips with water content of 40 % is used. Three functionals units are eventually obtained, i.e., 0.17 kg of biochar applied to soil, 4.47 MJ of heat and 2.82 MJ of electricity, each per reference flow. The results for Global Warming Potential (GWP) for biochar is – 274.7*10 - 3 kg CO2eq per functional unit, which corresponds to – 1.6 kg CO2eq per 1 kg biochar applied to soil. The GWP for heat results in 17.1*10 - 3 CO2eq per functional unit, which corresponds to 3.6*10 - 3 kg CO2eq per 1 MJ. For electricity, a GWP of 38.1*10 - 3 kg CO2eq per functional unit is obtained, which is equivalent to 13.5*10 - 3 kg CO2eq per 1 MJ.
The calculation was performed using SimaPro Version 9.1 and the ReCiPe method with hierarchist perspective.
Bubble columns are recently used for the humidification of air in water treatment systems and fuel cells. They are well applicable due to their excellent heat and mass transfer and their low technical complexity. To design and operate such devices with high efficiency, the humidification process and the impact of the operating parameters need to be understood to a sufficient degree. To extend this knowledge, we use a refined and novel method to determine the volumetric air–liquid heat and mass transfer coefficients and the humidifier efficiency for various parametric settings. The volumetric transfer coefficients increase with both of the superficial air velocity and the liquid temperature. It is further shown that the decrease of vapor pressure with an increase of the salinity results in a corresponding decrease in the outlet humidity ratio. In contrast to previous studies, liquid heights smaller than 0.1 m are investigated and significant changes in the humidifier efficiency are seen in this range. We present the expected humidifier efficiency with respect to the superficial air velocity and the liquid height in an efficiency chart, such that optimal operating conditions can be determined. Based on this efficiency chart, recommendations for industrial applications as well as future scientific challenges are drawn.
The electricity demand due to the increasing number of EVs presents new challenges for the operation of the electricity network, especially for the distribution grids. The existing grid infrastructure may not be sufficient to meet the new demands imposed by the integration of EVs. Thus, EV charging may possibly lead to reliability and stability issues, especially during the peak demand periods. Demand side management (DSM) is a potential and promising approach for mitigation of the resulting impacts. In this work, we developed an autonomous DSM strategy for optimal charging of EVs to minimize the charging cost and we conducted a simulation study to evaluate the impacts to the grid operation. The proposed approach only requires a one way communicated incentive. Real profiles from an Austrian study on mobility behavior are used to simulate the usage of the EVs. Furthermore, real smart meter data are used to simulate the household base load profiles and a real low voltage grid topology is considered in the load flow simulation. Day-ahead electricity stock market prices are used as the incentive to drive the optimization. The results for the optimum charging strategy is determined and compared to uncontrolled EV charging. The results for the optimum charging strategy show a potential cost saving of about 30.8% compared to uncontrolled EV charging. Although autonomous DSM of EVs achieves a shift of load as pursued, distribution grid operation may be substantially affected by it. We show that in the case of real time price driven operation, voltage drops and elevated peak to average powers result from the coincident charging of vehicles during favourable time slots.
If left uncontrolled, electric vehicle charging poses severe challenges to distribution grid operation. Resulting issues are expected to be mitigated by charging control. In particular, voltage-based charging control, by relying only on the local measurements of voltage at the point of connection, provides an autonomous communication-free solution. The controller, attached to the charging equipment, compares the measured voltage to a reference voltage and adapts the charging power using a droop control characteristic. We present a systematic study of the voltage-based droop control method for electric vehicles to establish the usability of the method for all the currently available residential electric vehicle charging possibilities considering a wide range of electric vehicle penetrations. Voltage limits are evaluated according to the international standard EN50160, using long-term load flow simulations based on a real distribution grid topology and real load profiles. The results achieved show that the voltage-based droop controller is able to mitigate the under voltage problems completely in distribution grids in cases either deploying low charging power levels or exhibiting low penetration rates. For high charging rates and high penetrations, the control mechanism improves the overall voltage profile, but it does not remedy the under voltage problems completely. The evaluation also shows the controller’s ability to reduce the peak power at the transformer and indicates the impact it has on users due to the reduction in the average charging rates. The outcomes of the paper provide the distribution grid operators an insight on the voltage-based droop control mechanism for the future grid planning and investments.
In recent years, ultrashort pulsed lasers have increased their applicability for industrial requirements, as reliable femtosecond and picosecond laser sources with high output power are available on the market. Compared to conventional laser sources, high quality processing of a large number of material classes with different mechanical and optical properties is possible. In the field of laser cutting, these properties enable the cutting of multilayer substrates with changing material properties. In this work, the femtosecond laser cutting of phosphor sheets is demonstrated. The substrate contains a 230 micrometer thick silicone layer filled with phosphor, which is embedded between two glass plates. Due to the softness and thermal sensitivity of the silicone layer in combination with the hard and brittle dielectric material, the separation of such a material combination is challenging for both mechanical separation processes and cutting with conventional laser sources. In our work, we show that the femtosecond laser is suitable to cut the substrate with a high cutting edge quality. In addition to the experimental results of the laser dicing process, we present a universal model that allows predicting the final cutting edge geometry of a multilayer substrate.
Entangled photon generation at 1550 nm in the telecom C-band is of critical importance as it enables the realization of quantum communication protocols over long distance using deployed telecommunication infrastructure. InAs epitaxial quantum dots have recently enabled on-demand generation of entangled photons in this wavelength range. However, time-dependent state evolution, caused by the fine-structure splitting, currently limits the fidelity to a specific entangled state. Here, we show fine-structure suppression for InAs quantum dots using micromachined piezoelectric actuators and demonstrate generation of highly entangled photons at 1550 nm. At the lowest fine-structure setting, we obtain a maximum fidelity of 90.0 ± 2.7% (concurrence of 87.5 ± 3.1%). The concurrence remains high also for moderate (weak) temporal filtering, with values close to 80% (50%), corresponding to 30% (80%) of collected photons, respectively. The presented fine-structure control opens the way for exploiting entangled photons from quantum dots in fiber-based quantum communication protocols.
Arrayed Waveguide Grating (AWG) is a passive optical component, which have found applications in a wide range of photonic applications including telecommunications and medicine. Silica-on-Silicon (SoS) based AWGs use a low refractive-index contrast between the core (waveguide) and the cladding which leads to some significant advantages such as low propagation losses and low fiber coupling losses between the AWG waveguides and the fibres. Therefore, they are an attractive DWDM solution offering higher channel count technology and good performance characteristics compared to other methods. However, the very low refractive-index contrast means the bending radius of the waveguides needs to be very large (on the order of several millimeters) and may not fall below a particular critical value to suppress bending losses. As a result, silica-based waveguide devices usually have a very large size that limits the integration density of SiO2-based photonic integrated devices. High-index contrast AWGs (such as silicon, silicon nitride or polymer-based waveguide devices) feature much smaller waveguide size compared to low index contrast AWGs. Such compact devices can easily be implemented on a chip and have already found applications in emerging applications such as optical sensors, devices for DNA diagnostics and optical spectrometers for infrared spectroscopy.In this work, we present the design, simulation, technological verification and applications of both, the low-index contrast and high-index contrast AWGs. For telecommunication applications AWG-MUX/Demux with up to 128-channels will be presented. For medical applications the AWG-spectrometer with up to 512-channels will be presented.This work was carried out in the framework of the projects: ADOPT No. SK-AT-20-0012, NOVASiN No. SK-AT-20-0017 and AUTOPIC No. APVV-17-0662 from Slovak research and development agency of Ministry of Education, Science, Research and Sport of the Slovak Republic and No. SK 07/2021 and SK 08/2021 from Austrian Agency for International Cooperation in Education and Research (OeAD-GmbH); and project PASTEL, no. 2020-10-15-001, funded by SAIA.
A Telecom optical fibers are still being the best transmission medium of digital data and analogue signals for long distance applications. Progress in integrated photonics enables development of photonic chips with new unique properties, circuits of the future, and overcomes current limits in information and communication technologies. The packaging of photonic chips is necessary for taking them out of research laboratories into real implementation in the information and communication technology applications. One important step of packaging is effective coupling of optical radiation between telecom optical fiber with ten microns core dimension and photonic chip optical waveguide with submicron dimensions. For complex photonic chips, it is necessary to couple not one optical fiber but several optical fibers, which are arranged in fiber arrays. In this case, it is necessary to use a 6D positioning system, which allows to optimally adjust the relative position of the photonic chip and the fiber arrays. After setting the optimal relative position of the photonic chip and the fiber array, the process of their fixation follows. One possibility of fixation is gluing with an adhesive in the optical path between the photonic chip and an array of optical fibers with a refractive index close to the refractive index of the optical fiber core. This paper is focused on the experimental test set-up for the temperature characterization of fiber array to photonics chip butt coupling at 1310 nm and 1550 nm wavelengths fixed themselves by UV adhesive in the optical path. The main aims of this works are selection of better adhesive from two types for gluing of photonic chip and fiber array in packaging process of photonics chips and validation of gluing process developing. The coupling and alignment of fiber arrays to photonics chip were done by automated active alignments system and they were fixed themselves by curable epoxy adhesive. Temperature changes of coupling insertion losses are measured and investigated for two different UV adhesives during three temperature cycles from -40 °C to 80 °C in climatic chamber according to Telcordia. Spectral dependence of insertion losses were measured and compared before and after three temperature cycles for 1530 nm to 1570 nm spectral range at room temperature.
This work was supported by the Slovak Research and Development Agency under the contracts APVV-17-0662 and SK-AT-20-0017 and by the COST Action “European Network for High Performance Integrated Microwave Photonics” (EUIMWP) CA16220.
In this paper, design of 1×8 multimode interference passive optical splitter is proposed. The structure of the splitter is designed based on a silicon nitride material platform. This work aims to find the minimum physical dimensions of the designed splitters with the satisfactory optical performance. According to the minimum insertion loss and minimum non-uniformity, the optimum length of the splitters is determined.
Femtosecond laser ablation on Si generates 2D ripple structures, known as laser induced periodic surface structures (LIPSS) and pinholes. We fabricated membranes with 20 to 50 μm thickness perforated by an array of tapered pinholes up to 5 μm in diameter and 10 to 20 μm spacing. Within several micrometer the pinholes transform into hollow photonic waveguides with constant diameter from 1μm to 2μm. Such structures offer a 3D photonic coupling device for polymer Y-branch- and MMI-splitter. We measured a considerable change of electrical resistivity for 500 ppm H2 in air using Si/SiO2/TiO2 substrates with 2D LIPSS. We propose to investigate 3D waveguide arrays also for photonic-chemical sensors.
In this paper we report on the experimental test set-up for the temperature characterization of fiber array to photonics chip butt coupling at 1310 nm and 1550 nm wavelengths. The alignment and gluing of fiber arrays to photonics chip were done by automated active alignments system and they were fixed themselves by UV curable epoxy adhesive. Temperature changes of coupling insertion losses are measured and investigated for two different UV adhesives during three temperature cycles from -40 °C to 80 °C in climatic chamber. Spectral dependence of insertion losses was measured and compared before and after three temperature cycles for 1530 nm to 1570 nm spectral range at room temperature.
We present design, simulation and optimization of polymer based 16-channel, 100-GHz AWG designed for central wavelength of 1550 nm. The input design parameters were calculated applying AWG-Parameters tool. The simulations were performed applying a commercial photonic tool PHASAR from Optiwave. The achieved transmission characteristics were evaluated by AWG-Analyzer tool and show a satisfying agreement between designed and simulated AWG optical properties. Finally, the influence of the number of phased array (PA) waveguides on the AWG performance was studied. The results show that there is a certain minimum number of PA waveguides necessary to reach sufficient AWG performance.
This paper presents the design, simulation, and optimization of a 1×128 multimode interference (MMI) splitter with a silica-on-silicon channel profile. This work aims to study the influence of the different S-Bend output waveguide shapes at the end of the MMI coupler on the final optical properties. The 1×128 MMI splitters have been simulated using beam propagation method in OptiBPM software. The optical properties of all considered splitters with different shapes of outputs waveguides are discussed and compared with each other. Based on the minimum insertion loss and non-uniformity, the final shape of output waveguides, ensuring the lowest losses, is determined.
Today, optics and photonics is widely regarded as one of the most important key technologies for this century. Many experts even anticipate that the 21st century will be century of photon much as the 20th century was the century of electron. Optics and photonics technologies affect almost all areas of our life and cover a wide range of applications in science and industry, e.g. in information and communication technology, in medicine, life science engineering as well as in energy and environmental technology. However even so attractive, the photonics is not well known by most people. To motivate especially young generation for optics and photonics we worked out a lecture related to the “light” for children aged eight to twelve years. We have prepared many experiments to explain the nature of light and its applications in our everyday life. Finally, we focused on the optical data transmission, i.e. how modern communication over optical networks works. To reach many children at home we recorded this lecture and offered it as a video online in the frame of children’s university at Vorarlberg University of Applied Sciences. By combining the hands-on teaching with having a fun while learning about the basic optics concepts we aroused interest of many children with a very positive feedback.
The increasing digitalisation of daily routines confronts people with frequent privacy decisions. However, obscure data processing often leads to tedious decision-making and results in unreflective choices that unduly compromise privacy. Serious Games could be applied to encourage teenagers and young adults to make more thoughtful privacy decisions. Creating a Serious Game (SG) that promotes privacy awareness while maintaining an engaging gameplay requires, however, a carefully balanced game concept. This study explores the benefits of an online role-playing boardgame as a co-designing activity for creating SGs about privacy. In a between-subjects trial, student groups and educator/researcher groups were taking the roles of player, teacher, researcher and designer to co-design a balanced privacy SG concept. Using predefined design proposal cards or creating their own, students and educators played the online boardgame during a video conference session to generate game ideas, resolve potential conflicts and balance the different SG aspects. The comparative results of the present study indicate that students and educators alike perceive support from role-playing when ideating and balancing SG concepts and are happy with their playfully co-designed game concepts. Implications for supporting SG design with role-playing in remote collaboration scenarios are conclusively synthesised.
Debugging errors in software applications can be a major challenge. It is not enough to know that a specific error exists, but the cause of it must be found in order to be able to fix it. Finding the source of an error can be time and cost intensive. The general approach is to analyse and debug the presumably erroneous part of the software. The analysis can be accompanied by instrumentation to gather additional information during the program execution. The analysis is made more difficult by the existence of different errors categories. Each category may need to be handled individually. Especially in embedded software applications, which commonly lack features like process or memory isolation, error detection and prevention can be even more challenging. This is the kind of problem this thesis tackles. This thesis tries to support developers during debugging and troubleshooting. The main focus is on errors related to memory management and concurrency. Specific features and properties of Arm Cortex-M processors are used to try to detect errors as well as their causes. For example, the memory protection unit is used to isolate the stack memories of different tasks running in a RTOS. The thesis tries to provide as much information as possible to the developer when reporting errors of any kind. The solution developed in this thesis also contains a custom memory allocator, which can be used to track down errors related to dynamic memory management. Furthermore, a Eclipse plugin has been developed which provides assertions for array accesses to detect and prevent out-of-bound accesses. The resulting solution has been implemented in commercial embedded software applications. This ensures that the developed solution is not only suitable for newly developed applications, but also for the integration into already existing products.
A concept for a recommender system for the information portal swissmom is designed in this work. The challenges posed by the cold start problem and the pregnancy-related temporal interest changes need to be considered in the concept. A state-of-the-art research on recommender systems is conducted to evaluate suitable models for solving both challenges. The explorative data analysis shows that the article's month of pregnancy is an important indicator of how relevant an article is to a user. Neither collaborative filtering, content-based filtering, hybrid models, nor context-aware recommender systems are applicable because the user's pregnancy phase is unknown in the available data. Therefore, the proposed recommender system concept is a case-based model that recommends articles which belong to the same gestation phase as the currently viewed article.
This recommender system requires that the month of pregnancy, in which an article is relevant, is known for each article. However, this information is only available for 31% of all articles about pregnancy. Consequently, this work looks for an approach to predict the month of gestation based on the article text. The challenges with this are that only few training data are available, and the article texts of the various months of pregnancy often contain the same terms, considering all articles are about pregnancy. A keyword-based approach using the TF-IDF model is compared with a context-based approach using the BERT model. The results show that the context-based approach outperforms the keyword-based approach.
In the context of this master thesis, general tensions within the relationship between headquarters and their subsidiaries are examined using the practical example of a Swiss company with its subsid-iary in Kenya. Thereby, the influence of cultural aspects and the associated different expectations on management and leadership are emphasized. In doing so, two countries are compared which have not yet been considered in the same context. The objective of this master thesis is to develop a framework that enables the headquarter in the German speaking area of Switzerland and the sub-sidiary in the Bantu speaking area of Kenya to overcome cultural barriers and to increase mutual understanding in the business context. This will facilitate the identification of potentially dysfunc-tional aspects in the working relationship and provide a basis for optimizing the existing business relationship between the Swiss headquarter and the Kenyan subsidiary.
This thesis addresses the overarching question of what the two business entities need to know about each other in terms of cultural characteristics and emerging differences in business practices (in terms of management/leadership) in order to improve the overall cooperation and working rela-tionship between the headquarter and its subsidiary. Thus, the following topics are emphasized with-in this thesis: tensions within the headquarter/subsidiary relationship, concise country profiles of Switzerland and Kenya including a cultural overview of both countries, cultural concepts including organizational culture, common leadership theories related to the situational leadership approach, and finally, an evaluation of the current status quo in the working relationship between the Swiss headquarter and the Kenyan subsidiary based on interviews.
The term start-up has become indispensable when new ideas are to be turned into business ventures. The number of start-ups is continuously increasing, but at the same time, many new start-ups are marked by failure. The successful path from start-up to a stable business model is to be explored in more detail in this thesis. The focus here is on the various success factors and how decisive they are.
At present, start-ups are mainly focusing on the area of digitalisation, not only triggered by the Covid19 pandemic but also by the high demand for digital products and services. In the past, start-ups founded in Silicon Valley/USA have been incredibly successful. Nevertheless, currently many other countries offer decisive advantages for start-ups and are therefore more attractive than the Silicon Valley. In Europe, Spain stands out with a rapidly growing start-up scene, primarily in the metropolises of Madrid and Barcelona.
This Master's thesis aims to empirically investigate the interrelationships of the necessary success factors in the start-up scene for the country of Spain. The focus of the study here is on the digitalisation industry. Qualitative content analysis is used for closer examination and is carried out through expert interviews. Qualitative research allows a much deeper insight into the interviewees' personal experiences and examines non-measurable factors. The subsequent evaluation is intended to present correlations and provide new insights. In summary, a list of recommendations is generated to provide future founders with suitable suggestions and advice right from the start.
This master thesis investigates leadership traits and how they can drive success within international organizations in the digital era. The basic principles of what defines a leader have undergone significant scrutiny throughout the past one hundred years, however, the digital revolution has created the most upset when considering the requirements for efficient leadership.
This paper utilizes a literature review to first determine how modern leadership theory developed and the implications of current research, followed by an empirical study designed to collect real-world data which represents how current leaders active in various industries understand their role as a leader and what skills they use to promote success within their organization.
Cross-examination of these sources indicates that the most effective leaders employ a combination of Transformational Leadership Theory and Emotional Intelligence-based leadership. The extent to which a leader must individualize their style is strongly contingent on the organizational culture, the individual employees, and the external environment. While traits such as communication, charisma, and trustworthiness are certainly strong indications of an efficient leader, agility and adaptability clearly stand out as the traits which are most required for highly effective leaders in the digital era.
This paper gives an insight into how cybersecurity is built inside and outside banks in Austria. The research was conducted based on information received from bank representatives in Austria as well as on literature, participation in various kinds of online conferences, and so on. The main objective of this paper was to investigate the cybersecurity execution scheme and to consider the possible impact of the cultural factor on cybersecurity execution. Due to a force majeure situation like coronavirus, the author was able to obtain little information from participants, but even this helped to draw satisfactory conclusions and make recommendations to banks. Thanks to the vast amount of literature and research, confirmation of the factor under study was found, confirming the relevance of the work and the potential for further research.
Companies worldwide and, therefore, companies from Vorarlberg face a common problem: the lack of skilled workers that led to the so-called “war for talents” in the last decades. This problem encouraged scientists to investigate the importance of many different monetary incentives and non-cash benefits to win this war for talents. This master’s thesis aims to examine if and how companies in Vorarlberg already use non-cash benefits. Furthermore, the most important benefits and their influence on the attractiveness of job advertisements are identified.
For this purpose, interviews with three HR managers from companies in Vorarlberg are carried out. Subsequently, in a quantitative survey, 21 different monetary incentives and non-cash benefits, intangible non-cash benefits, and corporate culture are evaluated by 316 participants. Furthermore, the participants ranked five different job advertisements to conceive results on the research questions.
The results clearly show that non-cash benefits are far more critical for future employees than classical monetary incentives. Although the number of international participants was lower than the number of Austrian and German participants (41 to 81 to 194), it is still obvious that independent of nationality, non-cash benefits can lead to a competitive advantage for companies in Vorarlberg. The interviews show that companies already work with such benefits in their daily business but do not strategically communicate on the topic.
To summarize, it can be concluded that a variety of non-cash benefits should be implemented within a company and also should be mentioned in job advertisements as they can help to attract more applicants not only from Austria but also from abroad and, therefore, help to win the war for talents.
Leadership, leader-follower relationship, and
subordinates’ behaviors during the Covid-19
pandemic
(2021)
In today’s world, companies feel the urge to disguise from competitors and to connect emotionally with consumers in order to foster a meaningful and long-lasting relationship. Simultaneously, stakeholders demand an increase of companies’ social responsibility. Cause-related marketing (CRM) is a marketing tool that addresses the change in societal values and the rising expectations from stakeholder groups. The increasing number of companies that choose to partner with a non-profit organization highlights that linking a charitable cause to the company's brand is an effective marketing tool. Authors illustrate that CRM, as a form of showing corporate social responsibility, will become even more important in the future. This master thesis examines the relationship between CRM, emotions, and culture. The research goal is to identify if CRM programs are effective in evoking emotions in consumers and if the cultural background of a consumer influences the evocation of certain emotions. The empirical findings outline that CRM programs are effective in evoking emotions. Other-focused emotions evoked by CRM programs are stronger expe-rienced by members of collectivistic countries than by members of individualistic countries. Likewise other-focused emotions evoked by CRM programs are stronger experienced by high interdependent selves than by low interdependent selves.
HRM Practices and Innovative Work Behavior: Employee Involvement and Job Auton-omy as influencing factors of Innovative Work Behavior
An organization´s capacity to innovate often resides within its employee´s innovative work behavior. Previous research suggested positive effects of employee involvement and job autonomy on innovative behavior. This research aims to analyze the impact of involvement- and autonomy-focused HRM practices (participation, information-sharing, work-scheduling autonomy, decision-making autonomy, and work-methods autonomy) on innovative work behavior. It is hypothesized that all five HRM practices mentioned above positively influence employees´ innovative work behavior. Therefore, a cross-sectional quantitative research design was chosen. Online questionnaire data from 376 employees in Austria was analyzed. Although all five HRM practices correlated with innovative work behavior, only work-methods autonomy had a statistically significant influence on the innovative work behavior of all employees. Thus, practitioners should include work-methods autonomy as critical HRM practice in a “high-innovation” HRM system to facilitate employees´ innovative work behavior.
In this work, the simulation possibilities of transient magnetic fields are investigated. For this purpose, an experimental setup is established to compare the simulation results with actual measurement data.
The experimental set-up consists of two coils, which are placed on two U-shaped iron cores. These cores are then brought together to form two air-gaps. These two gaps are used for measurement and the optional insertion of samples. The simulations are carried out with the finite element method (FEM) program ANSYS Maxwell 19R3.
In the first experiments, static simulations and measurements are compared to verify the validity of the available material data and the simulation techniques, especially the symmetry considerations, excitations of the coils, and boundary conditions. The static simulations show two main sources of uncertainty. The B-H curve of the core material used in the simulations and the air-gap distance uncertainty.
After validating the simulations with the static measurements, transient experiments are performed. In these experiments, the qualitative agreement of the simulation and measurement, as well as the characteristic rise times are compared. The experiments show a decisive influence of the considered loss mechanisms on the agreement of the simulation results with the measurements. Therefore, several simulations with different loss mechanisms are performed.
Finally, also the simulation capability including a material sample in the upper gap is investigated. Therefore, the conformity of the relative change of the measurement and the simulation is compared.
In the experiments a good simulation capability within a 5% error bar is seen. The main difficulty of this work represents the uncertainty due to the available material data. It is assumed, that with more accurate material data the error can be reduced significantly.
This paper analyses an electrical test tower of the OMCIRON electronics GmbH and evaluates whether a Predictive Maintenance (PdM) strategy can be implemented for the test towers. The company OMICRON electronics GmbH performs unit tests for its devices on test towers. Those tests consist of a multitude of subtests which all return a measurement value. Those results are tracked and stored in a database. The goal is to analyze the data of the test towers subtests and evaluate the possibility of implementing a predictive maintenance system in order to be able to predict the RUL and quantify the degradation of the test tower.
By assuming that the main degradation source are the relays of the test tower, a reliability modelling is performed which is the model-driven approach. The data-driven modelling process of the test tower consists of multiple steps. Firstly, the data is cleaned and compromised by removing redundances and optimizing for the best subtests where a subtest is rated as good if the trendability and monotonicity metric values are above a specific threshold. In a second step, the trend behaviours of the subtests are analyzed and ranked which illustrates that none of the subtests contained usable trend behaviour thus making an implementation of a PdM system impossible.
By using the ranking, the data-driven model is compared with the reliability model which shows that the assumption of the relays being the main error source is inaccurate.
An analysis of a possible anomaly detection model for a PdM is evaluated which shows that an anomaly detection is not possible for the test towers as well. The implementability of PdM for test towers and other OMICRON devices is discussed and followed up with proposals for future PdM implementations as well as additional analytical analyses that can be performed for the test towers.
The purpose of an energy model is to predict the energy consumption of a real system and to use this information to address challenges such as rising energy costs, emission reduction or variable energy availability. Industrial robots account for an important share of electrical energy consumption in production, which makes the creating of energy models for industrial robots desirable. Currently, energy modeling methods for industrial robots are often based on physical modeling methods. However, due to the increased availability of data and improved computing capabilities, data-driven modeling methods are also increasingly used in areas such as modeling and system identification of dynamic systems. This work investigates the use of current data-driven modeling methods for the creation of energy models focusing on the energy consumption of industrial robots.
For this purpose, a robotic system is excited with various trajectories to obtain meaningful data about the system behavior. This data is used to train different artificial neural network (ANN) structures, where the structures used can be categorized into (i) Long Short Term Memory Neural Network (LSTM) with manual feature engineering, where meaningful features are extracted using deeper insights into the system under consideration, and (ii) LSTM with Convolutional layers for automatic feature extraction. The results show that models with automatic feature extraction are competitive with those using manually extracted features. In addition to the performance comparison, the learned filter kernels were further investigated, whereby similarities between the manually and automatically extracted features could be observed. Finally, to determine the usefulness of the derived models, the best-performing model was selected for demonstrating its performance on a real use case.
With the digitalisation, and the increased connectivity between manufacturing systems emerging in this context, manufacturing is shifting towards decentralised, distributed concepts. Still, for manufacturing scenarios manual input or augmentation of data is required at system boundaries. Especially in distributed manufacturing environments, like Cloud Manufacturing (CMfg) systems, constant changes to the available manufacturing resources and products pose challenges for establishing connections between them. We propose a feature-oriented representation of concepts, especially from the manufacturing domain, which serves as the basis for (semi-) automatically linking, e.g., manufacturing resources and products. This linking methodologies, as well as knowledge inferred using it, is then used to support distributed manufacturing, especially in CMfg environments, and enhance product development. The concepts and methodologies are to be evaluated in a real world learning factory.