This report is a result of a bachelor thesis at the school of Architecture and the Built environment (corresponding to 15 HP) and is written during spring 2012 at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm. The Bachelor's essay is based on the design and dimensioning of a house which is located at a predetermined site in Malmo, Sweden.The idea is to construct a house that is appropriate to use for an average Swedish family of four family members. The house is designed in a modern way with respect to ease of access and disabled facilities. The installation that have been considered are heating, ventilation, sanitation and electricity. Construction calculations and material selection are also discussed.Furthermore, a study about photovoltaic cells has been done.

The cost of transportation has strongly increased in the recent years, transportations which are a major part for the construction companies. Skanska Asphalt which is a part of Skanska Sverige AB has noticed that there are significant cost savings to be made with the purchasing of transports. The transports in this case is about asphalt, where the costs are about 10% of the outsourcing business turnover. The purpose of this thesis is to study the working practice that Skanska Asphalt are using today in controlling and time-writing, for the asphalt transportations. Resulting in recommendations on how to improve the working practice at Skanska Asphalt.This study was conducted with the help of a number of interviews with Skanska?s employees and with suppliers of transportation to describe the practices which are being used in during the asphalt transportation.

Today Scania give a high priority to the continuous improvements on the quality of their vehicles. To follow up the flaws in product quality, which are recognized by the repairs at the local workshops, material requests are carried through to be able to analyze the defects at the plant in Södertälje ? in purpose to improve the product quality. The material requests are also carried through to compensate the workshop for their expenses and to check that they are working according to the company?s warranty manual.Due to local routines and different distribution structures at the different markets the lead times and the costs caused by the flow of material are hard to estimate.

The sun is an endless energy source and the heat it produces can be used to heatup our homes. This technology is relatively old and was introduced in the late70-s. There are two kinds of solar collectors that are most frequently used todayand these are plain solar collectors and vacuum solar collectors. The plain solarcollectors are the once that are used the most but the vacuum solar collectorshave increased more as a percentage the last couple of years.The biggest question asked regarding an investment in solar heating is if theplant is economically profitable. This question has no direct answer because itis dependent on a couple of prerequisites.

GIS on the Internet is a rather new phenomenon, which has evolved from the need ofdistributed geographical data. It is also a powerful tool for presenting information on theInternet. This master thesis aim to create a web based GIS application with information onlime spreading and the situation concerning acidification in the county of Kronoberg, Sweden.The web based GIS application will be used by the county administrations in Kronoberg toinform the public and the municipal authorities of current counteracting acidification activity.This report includes documentation on acidifying processes and liming activities, which arepublicised together with the web based GIS application. The web based GIS application wascreated with ArcIMS, a new program in the ESRI family of GIS programs. The programincludes a guided structure, to development of everything from a map to a complete GISapplication, including mapservice and websites.

In this paper, a navigation support approach for speech-only interaction based on auditory icons for room-based designs is presented, i.e. naturally occurring sounds that have a natural mapping to the system's underlying design metaphor. In contrast to many recent investigations that have focused on multi-modal or augmented reality systems, this paper concerns a unimodal speech and sound-only system. An auditory icon based prototype system for buildings maintenance support using a room-based metaphor was developed. The design was evaluated in a comparison with earcons and no-sound designs.

Research issue: The transition from Basel II to Basel III becomes consuming for banks, financially. But Basel III should be profitably for financial market economy. Risks in the financial world is very complex. Is Basel III is sufficient to manage risk and future crisesPurpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine the application of Basel II and the transition to Basel III in Sweden with the banking system in focus.Method: The study has a qualitative research methodology for the collection of empirical data. The study is based on interviews with four large banks of Sweden (Swedbank, SEB, Nordea, Handelsbanken) and with Finansinspektionen.

Executive SummaryThis final thesis has examined the effects of an increased centralization and better coord­in­ation of the distribution logistics at ABB in Västerås. The company is today strongly decent­ralized and there is a minimum of collaboration between the 20 business units. This is why the questions were raised; how could the business units coordinate outbound logistic activities and what effects would that provide. The obj­ect­ive of this final thesis is to provide basic data for a future decision-making which desc­r­ibe these effects.The report has mapped out the factors that are important to ABB in an evaluation of their logistic activities and how the outbound logistics work today. The four factors are cost efficiency, delivery service, environmental impact and logistics capability.

An increasingly globalized market is leading to hard competition among manufacturing companies, which means that they are forced to become more customer focused to survive in the market. A Customer Relationship Management system is a system that will be of assistance to help companies succeed in building long term relationships with their customers. Best of Breed and ERP-based are two types of CRM systems. The study has focused on analyzing and examine the need for CRM systems at manufacturing companies. Our question formulation has been:? What need do businesses want to satisfy with a Best of Breed-based and ERP-based CRM system?? Are there any differences in the use of Best of Breed-based and ERP-based CRM system?In this study, we have chosen to carry out interviews and quantitative surveys with manufacturing companies to get their view of CRM-systems.

This paper deals primarily with the developmental potential and use of court -based mediation in Swedish law, and its relation to court-based conciliation and the judicial procedure as means to end a conflict.  In Chapter 42, Section 17 of the Swedish Code of Judicial Procedure, a judge, before the parties have their main hearing, can act as a mediator between the parties to settle the dispute. The judge should, according to the law, always try to make the parties come to an agreement before the main hearing. This obligation can be fulfilled either through the use of court-based conciliation, or court based mediation. Mediation as such is rarely used in Sweden, and one of the goals of this essay is to try to provide a tentative answer to why that might be the case.  The second goal is to try to find a consistent, yet flexible notion, of the concept of ?jurisdiction?, and to provide an explanation for the relation between mediation as an alternative method for dispute resolution and the judicial procedure.                                                                                                                                            .

In order for a judgement to be enforceable in another Member State, there is a certain requirement for an "intermediate? court procedure, a so-called exequatur procedure. An exequatur procedure is both expensive and time-consuming. The average cost of the procedure within the EU is 2 200 euro in a case without particular difficulties. In more complex cases, the cost of the procedure can be validated up to 12 700 euro.

Syfte Studiens syfte är att utvärdera internprissystemet på Blekingesjukhuset i Karlskrona. Metod Uppsatsen är en fallstudie av internprissystemet på Blekingesjukhuset i Karlskrona. För att tillföra en viss bredd till utvärderingen utgörs vårt empiriska material av intervjuer med såväl verksamhetschefer, planeringsstrateg, controllers samt sjukhusets ekonomidirektör. Med avsikt att underlätta presentationen av studiens resultat och utvärderingen, som sådan, har vi utformat en utvärderingsmall baserad på den information som samlats in under våra intervjuer. Slutsatser Studien pekar på att sjukhuset använder internprissystemet i syfte att skapa kostnadsmedvetenhet bland de anställda, för att på så sätt förhindra överkonsumtion av tjänster som utförs internt.

The Swedish potential of electricity production from roof mounted solar panels has been determined in three steps: accessing the existing roof top areas, simulating the amount of electricity solar panels can produce on these areas and finally analyzing how large the necessary economical change is to make the solar cells profitable.The total existing amount of roof top areas are 319 square kilometers and the area distribution follows the distribution of people. This leads to an installed power of 47,9 GW which are expected to produce 49,0 TWh electricity per year. If the quality of the electricity is prioritized the highest the power is reduced to 3,7 GW, generating 3,8 TWh yearly, but if the hosting capacity is calculated from Sweden?s total electricity need, the capacity is 42 TWh per year.Today, solar panels are not profitable in Sweden for houses, even though there is a subsidy of 35 % of the investment costs, discounted in 25 years. The profitability is calculated with a cost of capital of 5 %, a price on electricity of 1 SEK/kWh and an investment cost of 20 SEK/Wp.

A clean and affordable energy source for cooking is deficient in developing countries. People rely on fuels that contribute to environmental, social and health problems.Biogas is an alternative energy source and an increased investment in small-scale biogas production can in several developing countries be found. Several projects have started to use the technology in developing countries because of the benefits with biogas. Some cases in the establishment of biogas plants have succeeded and some have not. The study is a literature review supplemented by two field studies.

This paper aim to present a model for evaluating what we choose to call HTML-frameworks, a framework that contains a set of CSS layouts and occasionally JavaScript support, based on the characteristics of the software quality standard ISO/IEC 9126-1. The methods used to produce this model is based on a field study that involved making a web portal with the help of a HTML-framework, some relevant literature and an analysis of the framework based on the characteristics of the ISO/IEC 9126-1 standard. The result was a model based on twelve different characteristics; functionality, web browser compatibility, collaborative skills, user-friendliness, documentation, visuals, graphic layout, performance, activity, professional support, replaceability and license. This model should be viewed upon as a suggestion to what a model for choosing HTML-framework could look like, because we haven?t had the time to test it in a real situation, so further studies are needed, and we believe there could be improvements made in the objectivity of the assessments of the characteristics..