Maintenance and services of products as well as processes are pivotal for achieving high availability and avoiding catastrophic and costly failures. At the same time, maintenance is routinely performed more frequently than necessary, replacing possibly functional components, which has negative economic impact on the maintenance. New processes and products need to fulfil increased environmental demands, while customers put increasing demands on customization and coordination. Hence, improved maintenance processes possess very high potentials, economically as well as environmentally. The shifting demands on product development and production processes have led to the emergency of new digital solutions as well as new business models, such as integrated product-service offerings. Still, the general maintenance problem of how to perform the right service at the right time, taking available information and given limitations is valid. The project Future Industrial Services Management (FUSE) project was a step in a long-term effort for catalysing the evolution of maintenance and production in the current digital era. In this paper, several aspects of the general maintenance problem are discussed from a data driven perspective, spanning from technology solutions and organizational requirements to new business opportunities and how to create optimal maintenance plans. One of the main results of the project, in the form of a simulation tool for strategy selection, is also described.

Projektet var ett kortprojekt med syfte att kartlägga och identifiera båda befintliga och nya innovativa tekniker och arbetssätt för ett resurseffektivt underhåll med minimal tidsåtgång. I projektet användes fjärrvärmebranschen och Mälarenergis nya kraftvärmeverk som en fallstudie. Projektets konstellation bestod av Mälarenegi, Sigholm Konsult, ABB Corprate Research och Dynamate IS, SICS Swedish ICT deltog som forskarpart.

Projektet började med arbetsstudier på Mälarenergi hos gruppen ELIN, underhållstekniker inom el och instrument. Arbetsstudien bekräftade att mycket tid går åt till icke värdeskapande arbete (t.ex. leta efter dokumentation och platser) och visar även att det finns många konstruktiva förslag som skulle kunna förbättra möjligheterna att effektivisera aktiviteterna som föregår och följer underhållet. Dessutom skulle detta ha stor inverkan på arbetsmiljön för serviceteknikerna. Lågkvalitativ, otillgänglig och motstridig information är en källa till frustration. Förslag som leder till enkla sätt att lämna över, hitta och sprida information kan alltså ur flera perspektiv förbättra effektiviteten inom underhållsarbetet.

Arbetsstudien och de uppföljande intervjuerna har utgjort grunden för analys och diskussion kring arbetssätt, problem, behov och eventuella tekniska stöd. Resultatet av analysen visas i bilaga 1. Två mindre demostratorer utvecklades också under projektets gång som inspiration och diskussionsunderlag. Båda demonstratorerna avser stöd för inhämtning av information, med utgångspunkt från ett objekt-id och från en arbetsorder.

Mälarenergis nya panna är väl anpassad till digitaliseringen, till exempel är flertalet mätare och instrument utrustade med maskinläsbara objekt-id:n i form av QR-koder. Projektet har därför utvecklat en demonstrator i form av en smartphone-app som läser en QR-kod och visar information från många olika källor om aktuellt objekt. Appen simulerar uppkoppling till en stor mängd system för att hämta information; i realiteten finns information för ett fåtal objekt lagrad i själva appen. För den interaktiva designstudien gjordes en ”pappersdemonstrator” för att diskutera hur man på ett enkelt sätt skulle kunna presentera historisk information över tidigare utfört underhåll. Pappersdemonstratorn utgår ifrån att teknikern har fått en arbetsorder och har behov att reda på vilket arbete som utförts tidigare på det aktuella objektet. Vidare, den 3D-modell som tagits fram under planering och uppförande av block 6 bedömdes vara en möjlig resurs när det gäller att stödja underhållstekniker i att orientera sig i anläggningen och snabbare hitta fram till objekt som ska åtgärdas.

Arbetet kring Mätetal arbetspaket har inkluderat intervjuer med fyra personer på olika nivåer i organisationen, och fått ta del av dokumentation kring hur mätetal är upplagda på Mälarenergi. Mälarenergi är i ett skede just nu där tidigare satsningar på mätetal har stagnerat och enheten planerar ett omtag med både omorganisation och införande av nya mätetal och styrning. Framtida forskning kopplat till verksamhetens utmaningar kan vara exempelvis genom användning av Kanban och andra metoder som syftar till att göra arbetslaget mer medvetna om hur flödet av uppgifter ser ut, och som förenklar kommunikation kring vilka som kan tänkas behöva hjälp och vart flaskhalsarna finns. Projektet var ett projekt inom strategiska innovation program Piia, www.sip-piia.se. Programmet PiiA representerar en nationell kraftsamling inom Processindustriell IT och Automation finansierat av VINNOVA tillsammans med Energimyndigheten och Formas.

The need for improving the capability to detect illegal or hazardous activities and yet reducing the workload of operators involved in various surveillance tasks calls for research on more capable automatic tools. To maximize their performance, these tools should be able to combine automatic capturing of normal behavior from data with domain knowledge in the form of human descriptions. In a proposed Joint Statistical and Symbolic Anomaly Detection System, statistical and symbolic methods are tightly integrated in order to detect the majority of critical events in the situation while minimizing unwanted alerts. We exemplify the proposed system in the domain of maritime surveillance.

This work investigates how entrepreneurs use social networking sites for business. Through surveys, online discussions and interviews, we have looked at activities, motives for participating on networking sites for business, motives for contributing, and differences between online and offline networking. Our results show that networking, facts finding, and marketing are very common activities while sharing of experience is quite rare. Entrepreneurs connect with new people online rather than reifying offline networks. A novel use of social media is that of small businesses using Facebook as a web hotel. We believe that an important explanation to our results is that social media are still informal and not yet incorporated in traditional work routines.

In Sweden, digital TV services have until very recently not been accessible to most people through the TV set. At the same time, TV channels offer more and more content on the web and the majority of the population has access to high-speed internet connections. A web survey aimed at investigating attitudes and behavior related to on-demand TV was distributed in December 2008 to 52 households in an experimental, open (operator neutral) access network in Sweden. Questions were posed on TV arrangements, habits and attitudes; social aspects of TV watching; watching film or TV on-demand; and watching film or TV using the computer. Complementary interviews were also performed with participants that were not part of the experimental environment. Results show that participants in the studies understood and felt a need for time-shift and on-demand TV services: time-shift needs for re-scheduling, catch-up and repeats were expressed as well as on-demand needs for movies and for accessing otherwise unavailable TV content. Support for on-demand TV could also be found in that subjects reported little need for viewing TV content according to a broadcast schedule, with the main exception of news, sports events and other live broadcasts.

Ten households were interviewed about their TV watching to inform the design of TV services. Our participants were average TV viewers who had Internet access but were not technically advanced or frequent users of the Internet as a source for TV material. We found that the flow of programs that broadcast television brings to viewers was the most important motivation for our participants to turn to the TV on-demand possibilities they had access to. Examples of triggers were social cues from people talking about things seen on TV, or time-shifting issues such as missing all or part of programs in the broadcast flow. Special interests such as sports were also a strong motivation for on-demand behavior. For the viewers, linear and on-demand TV watching was intertwined. We conclude that on-demand services should be integrated with broadcast TV in the design of future TV services.

The goal of the CHORUS Vision Document is to create a high level vision on audio-visual search engines in order to give guidance to the future R&D work in this area and to highlight trends and challenges in this domain. The vision of CHORUS is strongly connected to the CHORUS Roadmap Document (D2.3). A concise document integrating the outcomes of the two deliverables will be prepared for the end of the project (NEM Summit).

This work is part of the On-demand IPTV project, conducted by Acreo and SICS with financing from Vinnova and active support from an industrial consortium. The main goal of the project is to study the demands on cost-effective, scalable video-on-demand networks that can deliver video with high-quality with minor quality degradations in the transmission. An important issue in understanding this situation is to explore future user behaviour (and the resulting traffic patterns) when user can choose a mix of broadcast TV and a large number of on-demand channels and services. This paper reports on the first steps to develop an understanding of IPTV user behaviour by investigating the current situation using archetypical, fictional character descriptions often referred to as personas. This is an intermediate version; the final version will be the result of Task 4.1: User requirements analysis, part of WP 4: User needs and behaviour.

After addressing the state-of-the-art during the first year of Chorus and establishing the existing landscape in multimedia search engines, we have identified and analyzed gaps within European research effort during our second year. In this period we focused on three directions, notably technological issues, user-centred issues and use-cases and socio- economic and legal aspects. These were assessed by two central studies: firstly, a concerted vision of functional breakdown of generic multimedia search engine, and secondly, a representative use-cases descriptions with the related discussion on requirement for technological challenges. Both studies have been carried out in cooperation and consultation with the community at large through EC concertation meetings (multimedia search engines cluster), several meetings with our Think-Tank, presentations in international conferences, and surveys addressed to EU projects coordinators as well as National initiatives coordinators. Based on the obtained feedback we identified two types of gaps, namely core technological gaps that involve research challenges, and “enablers”, which are not necessarily technical research challenges, but have impact on innovation progress. New socio-economic trends are presented as well as emerging legal challenges.

Based on the information provided by European projects and national initiatives related to multimedia search as well as domains experts that participated in the CHORUS Think-thanks and workshops, this document reports on the state of the art related to multimedia content search from, a technical, and socio-economic perspective. The technical perspective includes an up to date view on content based indexing and retrieval technologies, multimedia search in the context of mobile devices and peer-to-peer networks, and an overview of current evaluation and benchmark inititiatives to measure the performance of multimedia search engines. From a socio-economic perspective we inventorize the impact and legal consequences of these technical advances and point out future directions of research.