Due to their complexity and heavy wear from rail traffic, switches are a sensitive part of the railway infrastructure and moreover expensive to maintain. Furthermore, increasing railway traffic not only accelerates the wear rate but also obstructs the necessary maintenance measures. This paper examines the opportunities for a transition to a long-term maintenance strategy in the Swedish railway network. It contains a study of the maintenance strategy of Banverket, and also analyses statistics of errors in the railway infrastructure. The survey was completed utilising interviews with infrastructure managers, maintenance contractors, planners of railway operations and the Banverket material service department.

At the EU summit in Cologne in 1999, a consensus was reached concerning the common foreign and security policy within the European Union. It was decided at the summit that the WEU (Western European Union) should be incorporated into the EU - whom would then be given military capability to act autonomously without the necessity of Nato involvement. This essay investigates the factors that made this agreement possible from a rational choice perspective, but also from the perspective of the power and influence on negotiations on behalf of various types of leadership present at the meeting. Many nations at the summit of Cologne where for the creation of a military force in the form of ESDP (European Security and Defence Policy) within the Union, and many where against such a decision. However a consensus was reached and that is what this essay shall try to explain.

This study uses European researcher Tomas Valasek?s hypothesis about factors required for defence cooperation in order to achieve conditions which can be successfully applied to the Nordic defence cooperation NORDEFCO. The study uses only Norway and Sweden on the grounds that they are the original actors and the driving forces behind the defence cooperation. The factors studied are; the countries' strategic culture, solidarity and trust between countries, similarity in military forces, if similar conditions prevail in the defence industry and if the intentions of cooperation have been clarified.Mainly government documents in the form of propositions, orientations and defence documents are studied, together with previous research in this area and, especially, interviews with representatives of NORDEFCO at military level and policy level as well as outside perspectives from the military attachés in each country. With the intention of studying the extent to which the factors Valasek features may prove to be significant in assessing the conditions for enhanced cooperation in NORDEFCO, the study raises the question of how it is possible to find expressions for the factors.

Syftet med uppsatsen är att undersöka hur man skulle kunna öka effektiviteten i svenskpilotutbildning genom att effektivisera planeringen och schemaläggningen.Utbildningsplanering tillhör en typ av verksamhet som kan hänföras till kategorinschemaläggningsproblem. Det vill säga någon form av verksamhet där aktiviteter ska tilldelasresurser och planeras över tiden. Ett sätt att lösa denna typ av problem är att använda sig avoptimeringsmetoder. Det vill säga matematiska modeller och metoder som syftar till att hitta detbästa (optimala) alternativet i en beslutssituation.I uppsatsen jämförs planeringen av svensk pilotutbildning med en liknande turkisk verksamhet.Detta görs i syfte att undersöka om de optimeringsmetoder som används i Turkiet kan användasför att öka effektiviteten i den svenska utbildningsplaneringen.Uppsatsen visar att det är möjligt att erhålla stora effektivitetsökningar vid en lyckadimplementering av optimeringsmetoder men att det är svårt att direkt överföra erfarenheter frånett problem till ett annat. En viktig slutsats är att effektiviteten i planeringen i första hand ärberoende av organisation, arbetssätt och principer för resursutnyttjande snarare än användande avoptimeringsmetoder..

Abstract The technology has made it possible for you as a train traveller to be available in other places than stations and on the train. You now have the possibility to communicate by the phone or through the Internet to get information about the train you want to take. Development in mobile technology gives us new possibilities to communication. We want to find out whatever SMS would be a suitable approach to inform passengers about delays. The problem formulation is ?If the technology is available to inform the passengers about delays in an more effective way than today, then why not use it? The ?Kustpilen? that operates in Blekinge and Skåne is the case for our study.

This thesis has been carried out at the Building and Civil Engineering Programme at Chalmers University of Technology in cooperation with NCC Technology. The study aims to investigate the optimal design of a library of standardized structural solutions for in-house multi-family buildings and what benefits it brings. Today NCC use technology platforms to improve efficiency and simplify the construction process. The platforms provide the constructors guidelines on how construction details should look like, but the details are not complete. NCC Technology started in the spring of 2013 a project to investigate what benefits there are to create a library of standardized structural solutions for the constructors, with more detailed solutions than in the platforms.

The purpose of this study was to examine how modern information and communication technology influence collective action within the framework of social movements. By studying the protests in the Arab World 2011, and focusing on the social movements in Suleimanya in northern Iraq, by observation taken on place, the essay discusses that collective action is closely related to the use of technology, for example cell phones and Internet.Result shows that modern communication technology has enabled immeasurable access andconnection between individuals throughout the world, which seems to be different from previouscollective action. The new communication channels in the form of social media, has been used for the dissemination of information and news, documentation, organization and membership recruitment in the social movements in the Arab World and Suleimanya. The new social movements have the tendency to be decentralized and flattened organized, they are now self-organizing and that they only do a whole as global patterns, as evidenced by the social movements in the Arab World andSuleimanya..

The purpose of this media scientific study is to contribute to a better understanding about how blind people?s empowerment and participation may affect their role in the digital society.Earlier international studies in this area have shown that blind people not only need more knowledge then the seeing population about the computer, but also about the technology behind their tools for using Internet. The results from these studies have also shown that Internet increases the blind people?s independents and that those who use Internet feel more involved in the society.A qualitative method was chosen to study the three most common categories from the earlier studies: knowledge of technology, empowerment and participation. Are there differences in the results compared to our study in Sweden 2014?Interviews with eight blind, experienced computer users have shown that knowledge of technology is essential for their use of Internet and that the Internet increases their empowerment and their participation.

The aim of this study is to analyze the construction of "Christian masculinity" during the modern era. This is made in opposition to earlier research that has claimed that masculinity could not be constructed religiously, that is, without at the same time being constructed as effeminate or anti-masculine.Using a wide variety of theoretical concepts - such as discourse analysis, class, secularisation, masculinity as constructed from countertypes, and finally masculinity as a homosocial construction - I analyze a free church in Sweden, the Scanian Missionary Society (Skånes Missionssällskap), during the period of ca 1939-1945 (the society was a district of the Swedish Covenant Church, or Svenska Missionsförbundet), in order to argue for the standpoint that masculinity, in fact, could be constructed religiously. The primary source is the society's weekly journal Sydposten.The main results in this study can be summarized as follows: 1) The leading men in the Scanian Missionary Society did, in fact, construct a Christian masculinity, i. e. a masculinity whose core values and ideals were Christian, e.g.

Sweden is dependent on secure sea transport. Shorter disruption of imports of fuel and crude oil can be managed with an emergency stock, but a prolonged halt in imports creates problems. For industry, the vulnerability is greater. Fragmented production chains in combination with expenditure reductions in inventory causes a dependency on proper transport of intermediate goods in the manufacturing industry. A lengthy disruption thus involves disruption of production for both domestic consumption and for export goods containing imported parts.In order to secure shipping routes with a limited number of vessels, Mine Counter Measures (MCM) capacity is required, and according to the Armed Forces, developed with new sensors and autonomous vehicles.

The aim of this Master?s thesis is to examine the profession of librarianship by studying tasks in Swedish public libraries. The method is a textual analysis of articles inspired by the critical discourse analysis of Norman Fairclough. The theory applied consists of the profession theory of Andrew Abbott and the gender theory of Yvonne Hirdman. The questions raised are: how do librarians speak about their tasks, which discourses can be constructed and how can profession theory and gender theory explain the result.

The goal of this master thesis is to show the benefit of using computer games of the type First Person Shooter, FPS in the field of military simulations. The main focus in this is around a couple of topics. Creating the AI that controls the behaviour of the computer-controlled characters, the bots. Create an environment where it is possible to supervise the bots and also design a framework that enables cooperation between a group of bots, a squad. The result is Total Unreal Studio, TUS, a program where it is possible to add bots to a squad, connect them to a game server and inspect what the bots are doing.

This bachelor thesis is a critical study in which we are studying if the swedish reports of the so called ?second revolution? in Egypt have been objective. We have been studying this by using Jörgen Westerståhls objectivity model and we have chosen to investigate whether the reports have been objective balance-wise. The second revolution is a term which describes the protests and demonstrations that led to the military action in which the elected president Muhammad Mursi were forced to resign on the 4th of July, 2013The study includes articles from five leading Swedish newspapers, Aftonbladet, Dagens Nyheter, Expressen, Göteborgs-Posten and Svenska Dagbladet. We have been studying all the articles that include the word ?Egypt?.

The Swedish Armed Forces have gone through a remarkable change. From beingan organisation built on the notion of countering a Soviet invasion it has evolvedto focusing on small, multilateral rapid reaction capabilities to be used within theframework of the European security and defence policy, ESDP.This thesis regards the change as a process of Europeanisation. Drawing fromsociological and historical institutionalism, it is shown that the Swedish ArmedForces in the post-cold war context was path dependent and unwilling to redefineits historical raison d?être. The origin of the ESDP Europeanised the nationaldefence policy, whereas the bureaucracy was still unwilling to translate the newstructural norms.

Syftet med uppsatsen är att belysa möjligheter och begränsningar med olika tekniska system för att identifiera kontakter på stridsfältet, främst med avseende på att minska risken för vådabekämpningar. Uppsatsen skall också belysa om införande av tekniska system för identifiering av kontakter är den enskilt bästa metoden för att undvika vådabekämpningar. Syftet är att läsaren skall uppnå en förståelse för vad olika typer av system för identifiering kan bidra med för att minska risken för vådabekämpningar. Utöver detta belyses andra nackdelar och fördelar med de olika tekniska systemen förutom just inom området identifiering.Uppsatsen beskriver olika händelser där vådabekämpningar skett och kopplar dessa mot hur olika tekniska system eventuellt hade kunnat minska risken för att vådabekämpningen skulle ha skett. Uppsatsen beskriver också ett antal olika tekniska system för identifiering av kontakter på stridsfältet..