In recent years, the Swedish railway track system has been neglected in terms of capacity and maintenance. To adapt the existing system to current traffic load there is a great need for extensive improvement and maintenance. Shortcomings are especially occurring on older embankments running over soft subgrades. To select the most suitable method for reinforcement of the embankment, it is important to evaluate different solutions from a life cycle cost perspective. In long-term perspective, it is often shown that a method with low investment cost causes a higher maintenance cost and a shorter technical lifetime.

Mechanization of Swedish agriculture started in the beginning of the twentieth century, to be able to have more animals without raising the number of employers. The horse business has not by far kept up with these cost savings solutions. Cleaning out stables and feeding horses are the most time-consuming tasks in horse stables today. The most common way to clean out the stable is still by shovel and wheelbarrow. The clean out process can easily be mechanized through semi- permanently beds with movable walls between the boxes so that the litter can be removed by a tractor or a loader.

Subclinical mastitis (SCM) is a well-known problem in the dairy sector, where it causes severe economic losses mainly due to reduced milk production. This is a problem not only in the western world but also in developing countries. Surveys from different developing countries have shown a SCM prevalence of 52.4 ? 88.6 % at cow level and 26.7 ? 63.2 % at quarter-level. To combat mastitis is important to optimize the milk production of the cow.

Title Becoming involved in the planning process - from the construction workers perspective.University/Institution Halmstad UniversityKeywordsEmpowerment through participation, construction workers involvement in decision making in the planning process, knowledge management and communication in the planning process, partnering, human resource managementAimThe aim of this bachelor thesis is to provide knowledge and examine how construction workers perceive involvement in the planning process of partnering projects, what they can contribute and what they get out of the planning process.Methodology The study was conducted with a qualitative approach in the form of semi-structured interviews.          The interview studie consist of 10 interviews with construction workers who are specially educated in participating in the planning process at the company ByggDialog AB.ConclusionAll respondents are positive to be involved in the planning process. The main advantages they can see is that they are able to influence technical solutions and methods that will be used later on in the production. Therefore it is important to consider when construction workers should be involved in the planning process so that they get the chance to influence in this decisions.When it comes to the decision making the construction workers should be involved in the decisions that are related to their tasks in the production such as technical solutions, choice of methods and materials. Their main duties and working hours should be in the production.Involvement in planning does not automatically mean that the construction workers are involved in the decision making, it is up to them how much they participate.

Examensarbetet utfördes på NCC Halmstad under våren 2010. Syftet med examensarbetet var att klargöra vad visuell metodik kan tillföra byggbranschen och hur det upplevs av personer som utför byggprojektArbetet innefattar en kvalitativ och en litteraturstudie. Den kvalitativa studien genomfördes med hjälp av sju intervjuer inom Region Syd med personer som arbetat med den visuella metoden NCC Projektplanering. Intervjuerna har ägt rum för att ta reda på hur den visuella metodiken fungerar i praktiken.Litteraturstudien innefattar en utredning av begreppen Lean, Lean Production, Lean Construction, Last Planner och NCC Projektplanering. Den röda tråden från Lean till NCC Projektplanering är att genom ständigt förbättringsarbete skapa engagemang och ökad delaktighet.Den generella uppfattningen av NCC Projektplanering är positiv, dock varierar uppfattningen av metoden efter aktörernas inställning.

Swedish agriculture faces future challenges regarding food production and land use. Increased competition for agricultural land creates complex situations, where conflicts may arise when productive crop land is in demand not only for food production but also energy- and fodder production. On top of that there is an obvious conflict of goals between agricultural production and non-agricultural exploitation of agricultural land. In several emerging economic regions it is noticeable how agricultural land is being expropriated for development of urban settlement and infrastructure, carrying potentially significant long-term effects. During the last decade the exploitation of agricultural land in activities other than food production has increased in Sweden and is expected to continue in the same manor. Approximately 700 hectare of land in Sweden is diverted from food production, annually, and in 2013, the Uppsala Municipality showed the greatest change in land use of all municipalities (SCB, 2013).

Uppsala like many other Swedish cities is affected by heavy housing shortage, in terms of too few existing flats and residents within the city limits. Every semester thousands of new students are facing the same problems of finding themselves adequate accommodation. The waiting lists for flats and student-dorms are getting longer for each year, and the situation is just getting worse. Simultaneously, Uppsala?s ambition is to increase its population and expand as a Swedish metropolitan, according to the Swedish governmental environment goals. This paper investigates and analyses the possibilities of expanding a city?s population by building high-rise buildings.

The public sector is a major purchaser of goods and services. By setting requirements for environmental and social considerations in public procurement, an authority has the possibility to use consumer power to influence the actors in a market. The purpose of this paper is to investigate public procurement of textile products in a municipality, in order to gain knowledge about factors that may be important for the use of environmental and social criteria. Håkan Hydén´s (professor in sociology of law) norm model was used as the basis of the analysis, where the conduct was investigated along three dimensions of the norm ? willingness, knowledge and system conditions ? in order to identify underlying factors that can influence the process.The results ? analyzed by using interviews and documents ? show that the procurer's willingness, motivation and knowledge are important factors in this context, as well as the political priority of the municipality.

Foreseeing future changes in economic activity is of up most importance to a wide array of actors. The time lag in the presentation of official GDP statistics means that to somewhat accurately capture a tendency of where the business cycle is heading one need turn to qualitative sentiment indicators such as Purchasing Managers? Index (PMI) and official sentiment indicators for valuable clues. This thesis uses in-sample and out-of-sample methods to evaluate how well PMI and official Business Tendency Surveys (BTS) in Sweden and Denmark fair against the year-on-year growth rate of industrial production. Moreover, various Swedish regional sentiment indicators get examined and a case study of the indicator for the Öresund region is performed.

The purpose of this thesis is to describe property definition and special boundary demarcation and to analyze the differences between the two cadastral procedures. Property boundaries, especially unlawfully determined boundaries created through unofficial parcelling, can create conflicts between landowners and make it diffi-cult to know which land that a property contains of. It is possible to clarify the boundary conditions through a property definition or through a special boundary demarcation re-establish boundary marks.The methods used are: (1) A literature review to collect background information, (2) A case study to summarize court cases and (3) A questionnaire study to collect opinions from cadastral surveyors.The result is summarized in two comparisons. Firstly between restoration of landmark and special boundary demarcation (which replaced restoration of landmark in a legislative change in 2010), which demonstrated that the change in the law is considered positive because special boundary demarcation gives a legal effect on the boundaries. Secondly between property definition and special boundary demarcation which demonstrated that the two procedures are similar to each other.

Inspection errors are nowadays usually written with pen and paper during building inspections. A company in Stockholm is developing a method by which inspections are made digitally from the beginning and where the inspection attachments shall be stored in a database. The idea of this method is that entrepreneurs can use the database to get an experience feedback from previous surveys so that they can improve their production processes. One problem that occurs is how inspection errors will be sorted into the database. They have to be sorted so that contractors or clients can use and sort out the information in a sensible way when they want to evaluate and make improvements in their production processes.This thesis examines how the inspection errors can be sorted in a structured manner.

The art of producing films have been around for more than a century and the technology just continues to evolve. But although much has happened in 100 years, there are also processes, theories and practices that look the same now as then. I write this thesis because I want to find the differences between the analogue and the digital way of production. This study is based on a qualitative approach because my ambition is to seek the views concerning film production processes. The advantages of analogue film is that it contains more information than the digital formats and that it has a more cinematic style.

Volvo in Arvika produces wheel loaders, and the production is based on forecasts. When a machine is ordered, the customer can choose what type of equipment he or she wants, and these equipments are also made forecasts on. This is made by giving each equipment an estimated procentual usage that shows how many of the machines that will use this option. Today two people are working with the forecasts, planer A in Eskilstuna and planer B in Arvika. Planer A makes a forecast based on the historical outcome and planer B then makes adjustments of this based on how many options that are ordered.

?Death in the pot.? The Fruit and Vegetable Preserving industry in East Scania during the 20th centuryA Company History.At the end of the twentieth century, only one of the six companies previously active in the Fruit and Vegetable Preserving Industry in East Scania survived as an independent company: Kiviks Musterier AB. Actual production remains at two sites only. The aim of this study is to determine the reasons for this development. The companies included in the investigation are AB Bjäre industrier, Gustaf Bong AB, Kiviks Musterier AB, AB Ruuthsbo konservindustrier, Th.

Companies that invest in e-learning have different expectations regarding the outcome of the investment. According to literature and articles it is common that companies see reduction of costs as the primary benefit with e-learning. Therefore we ask ourselves the question if companies have attained the expected benefit of the investment in e-learning and to what extent cost reduction have been a determining factor in the investments? The purpose of the thesis is to examine if companies that invest in e-learning have attained the expected benefits. We also want to examine what the reason for investing in e-learning is and if cost reduction is the primary reason for investing. The study is founded on a qualitative method that is based on a case study in eight companies.