Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Adaptability'

In the face of future transport energy supply constraints it is imperative that planners understand transport energy adaptability within cities. This thesis presents for the first time an analysis methodology for mapping the spatial distribution of limits to energy adaptability. Termed the Minimum Energy Transport Adaptability (META) method, it characterises urban areas, synthesising a situation in which households have enacted all viable transport energy adaptations. The output is an estimation of the minimum possible transport energy required by households in meeting their day-to-day activity requirements. The META method combines elements of energy engineering, accessibility modelling and transport activity modelling. The analysis makes use of national household travel surveys to define the frequency of activity access and ability to use modes at the national level, and study area Geographical Information Systems (GIS) data for origins, facilities and transport networks. Two case studies have been investigated in New Zealand, the cities of Christchurch and Hamilton, and have shown that most residential areas in these cities do not limit the adaptive options available to residents. However, outlying areas, satellite towns and lifestyle properties consistently require large amounts of transport energy consumption and thus limit the ability of residents to adapt to future energy constraints. The META model enables, for the first time, the effects of future transport energy constraints to be mapped, visualised, quantified, and consequently considered in the planning process.

The research is framed on the premise that designing buildings that can adapt by accommodating change easier and more cost-effectively provides an effective means to a desired end a more sustainable built environment. In this context, adaptability can be viewed as a means to decrease the amount of new construction (reduce), (re)activate underused or vacant building stock (reuse) and enhance disassembly/ deconstruction of components (reuse, recycle) - prolonging the useful life of buildings (reduce, reuse, recycle). The aim of the research is to gain a holistic overview of the concept of adaptability in the construction industry and provide an improved framework to design for, deploy and implement adaptability. An over-arching research question was posited to guide the inquiry: how can architects understand, communicate, design for and test the concept of adaptability in the context of the design process? The research followed Dubois and Gadde s (2002) systematic combining as an over-arching approach that continuously moves between the empirical world and theoretical models allowing the co-evolution of data collection and theory from the beginning as part of a non-linear process with the objective of matching theory with reality. An initial framework was abducted from a preliminary collection of data from which a set of mixed research methods was deployed to explore adaptability (interviews, building case studies, dependency structural matrices, practitioner surveys and workshop). Emergent from the data is an expanded and revised theory on designing for adaptability consisting of concepts, models and propositions. The models illustrate many of the casual links between the physical design structure of the building (e.g. plan depth, storey height) and the soft contingencies of a messy design/construction/occupation process (e.g. procurement route, funding methods, stakeholder mindsets). In an effort to enhance building adaptability, the abducted propositions suggest a shift in the way the industry values buildings and conducts aspects of the design process and how designer s approach designing for adaptability.

1. Mykola Denysenko, Olena Budiakova Modern strategies personnel management in the epoch of the digital economy Digital economy and digital society: Civil Engineering and Applied Arts Katowice School of Technology Monograph 22. – Wydawnictwo Katowicach, 2019. – С. 234-242. 2. Денисенко М.П., Будякова О.Ю. Сучасні стратегії управління персоналом підприємств. Приазовський економічний вісник. 2018. № 5(10). C.175-181. 3. Денисенко М.П., Будякова О.Ю., Волощук Ю.В. Зарубіжний досвід управління персоналом. Вченi записки Унiверситету «КРОК» (економічні науки). № 2(54). 2019. C. 137-144. 4. Budiakova O., Tsarenok D. Innovative solutions for enterprise personnel іn the digital economy. Innovative solutions in modern science. 2019. №6 (33). P. 5-18.
Adapting and functioning well in today's world can only be achieved by mastering and constantly developing key competencies in this area. The best companies – the so-called «digital elite» (Digirati) – combine digital activism and strong leadership, making the transition from simply using information technology to transforming the business. This is what is known as «digital maturity». Organizations vary significantly in this attribute, and those that are more digitally mature outperform their competitors in business. Analysts from Capgemini Consulting and the MIT Sloan School of Management analyzed more than 400 large companies from different industries to understand what digital business means to them. The results of the study showed that financial performance depends on the use of new technologies and management techniques in the following ways: Organizations that actively use technology and new management techniques are, on average, 26% more profitable than their competitors; organizations that invest heavily in digital technology, but pay little attention to management, have financial performance 11% lower; more conservative companies that improve only management gain plus 9% in profit, but could potentially acquire three times more with digital technology; those that have not yet chosen a growth strategy have negative financial performance compared to other market players – According to the results of the study, the conclusion is clear that today we need people who can not only conduct digital transformation, but also develop new business models for digital enterprises

Background: Stroke survivors fall more often, mostly due to stumbling and slipping; which may signify. These causes of falls are hypothesized to be caused by difficulty in controlling and adjusting foot placement in response to the environment. In healthy adults’ foot placement control is known to be influenced by balance control, available response time and executive function. All these factors are known to be affected by stroke; however, how these factors affect foot placement accuracy in stroke survivors is largely unknown. The overarching aim of this thesis is therefore to understand the role of these factors in the control of foot placement following stroke and by extension to better understand how foot-placement is controlled, the causes of stroke related impairments and potential reasons for falls. Methods/Results: Young (n=14) and older healthy adults (n=9) and stroke survivors (n=13) completed a series of experiments on a C-Mill (a force instrumented treadmill with visual projection of stepping targets) designed to assess the role of balance (study 1), response time (study 2) and executive function (study 3) on foot placement control in stroke survivors. Study 1 compared foot placement control in supported versus unsupported conditions; balance support reduced overall error while target stepping (main effect F (1,30)=18.141, p < 0.001), but mostly in stroke survivors. Study 2 compared foot placement control when targets could be seen in advance (planned) with targets appearing at midstance (reactive). Foot-placement error altered according to direction of step but not available response time, with significant increase in error (F (1,28) =6.013, p=0.021) when adjusting steps medio-laterally but decreased when adjusting steps anterio-posterially (F (1,28) = 5.932, p=0.021). Overall, stroke survivors missed about 10% of targets and undershot all targets while young healthy adults undershoot only lengthening steps. Study 3 evaluated the use of functional near-infrared spectrometry (fNIRS) to measure activation of prefrontal cortex activation (brain networks responsible for executive function) in target stepping conditions which can be expected to increase challenge to executive function. fNIRS showed high inter person variability and no systematic trends according to walking conditions. Conclusion: Stroke survivors miss about 1 in every 10 targets; in the real world this may lead to a fall. Balance support may generally help stroke survivors control foot-placement more accurately. However, the lack of difference in accuracy between reactive and pre-planned stepping indicates stroke survivors may respond to all foot-placement adaptations reactively (a “cluttered terrain strategy”). This ‘cluttered terrain strategy’ is indicative of increased cognitive control, however the use of fNIRS needs development to robustly be assess this during walking.

Thesis (M. Eng.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Civil and Environmental Engineering, 2009.
Includes bibliographical references (leaves 58-60).
Buildings are static elements in a dynamic environment characterized by fast changing needs and evolving environmental, social, and economic standards. Thus, today challenge for structural design through Design for Adaptability and Deconstruction (DfAD) is to create buildings that are flexible enough to answer these needs. This thesis analyses DfAD for building structures and presents three case studies: a tent, a structure with prefabricated panellised systems, and a container building. The key arguments that justify DfAD are the negative environmental impact of the current structures; the life cycle of a building; the changes expected from buildings; and the cost incentive of this design. DfAD is a combination of design approaches that deal with the different scales of a structure. The fundamental tools to achieve DfAD are the connections, the type of structure, and the use of prefabricated systems. This thesis shows that standardization and layer-and-module modelling are essential to achieve a sustainable structural design. Three case studies present the structural features and the applications of this design approach.
by Sabrina Mouilek.
M.Eng.

The existing buildings in the UK are not designed to be functionally adaptive to fit a spectrum of purposes. Alternatively, scrapping these buildings and building anew does not appear to be an economically viable and environmentally sustainable solution either. Proactive solutions to respond to future potential changes of use are rare in previous and current building designs, which ultimately make these buildings functionally redundant. At present, curiosity about adaptable buildings is spreading among owners, developers and policy makers; however, no detailed investigation has been undertaken to identify the economic costs and benefits of adaptability in new buildings. Thus, the present endeavour was designed to bridge this gap. The research exploited both case studies and survey designs to explore the answers to the above problem. Two case studies were undertaken to establish that building changes occur over time, as well as to assess their economic implications in the current built environment at both macro and micro levels. Three web-based surveys (WBS) were designed and circulated among quantity surveyors and architects of the 100 leading consultancy practices in the UK to identify both the design and economic aspects of adaptability in buildings. The total numbers of respondents to WBS1, WBS2 and WBS3 were 13, 32 and 42, respectively. In addition, data was collected from semi-structured interviews with two policy makers, two structural engineers, a quantity surveyor and a facilities manager. Unstructured interviews with a senior planner, a project manager, two architects and a services engineer were used to clarify the issues of design and planning for adaptability in buildings. The findings were interwoven to develop a conceptual framework to identify the economic considerations for adaptability in new buildings. Two workshops were undertaken with the industry partners for the Adaptable Futures research project to verify the results obtained from the case studies and to test the usability of the developed conceptual framework. The group members had multi-disciplinary backgrounds of architecture, quantity surveying and structural engineering, allowing a robust grounding for verification. The results contribute to the body of knowledge in two ways. Firstly, the developed conceptual framework identifies the economic considerations (costs and benefits) for change of use in buildings within the wider context of adaptability over the lifecycle aspects. This will assist owners/clients and developers in their economic decisions for designing new buildings for potential adaptations. Secondly, the research findings strengthen the reliability of the existing body of knowledge whilst confirming the urgent need for designing new buildings towards potential adaptations. In addition, the findings strongly emphasise plan depth and floor to ceiling height as the most influential design parameters for building change of use, the details of which are not highlighted in the previous literature.

Adaptability is defined as having the capacity to be modified for a new use or purpose; the quality of being able to adjust to new conditions. Adaptability in a space can have many venues and effects depending on the intent of its flexibility. This thesis will explore several methods of adaptability in design in context with a Makerspace, a community space which functions to provide the facilities and work environment for a variety of creators to use. In a building typology, a Makerspace with a large variety of users, the ability for the spaces to be informed by and reactive to each individual user is imperative to its objective. The approach to exploring adaptable design solutions is in analyzing the potential makers occupying the space, what their specific needs are and how can architectural designs become flexible in a way that allows the Makers to craft their own work environments. The primary objectives of this thesis are to: 1. Explore some of the various definitions of adaptability and how those meanings can be incorporated into design solutions 2. Identify spaces in the project that can be adapted for their specific purpose 3. Determine the methods of adaptability suited to the building typology and its users 4. Discuss adaptable design in terms of fixed and kinetic characteristics 5. Design spaces that are responsive to the site, the project's purpose and the unique needs of each user. The site of the project is located on the 500 block of South Broadway Street, Baltimore MD in the upper Fells Point district. Site dimensions are roughly 55' by 200' of infill space between surrounding retail and residential properties. This site was chosen to accommodate a Makerspace as it is central to Baltimore city's three major arts districts (Bromo,Highlandtown and Station North Arts Districts) and could be considered a hub where local makers convene and establish a work space for a period of time that has the specific equipment and environment they require.
Master of Architecture
Adaptability is defined as having the capacity to be modified for a new use or purpose; the quality of being able to adjust to new conditions. This thesis explores ways in which architectural design can be adaptable. To have the quality of being able to adjust to new conditions, in this case the people that will use the space and the purpose of the spaces. Baltimore city is home to a large variety of local artists and creators working on their craft. The three major arts districts in the city, Bromo, Highlandtown and Station North cultivate a community of people that create and consume artistic and innovative projects. In order to most successfully create, an artist should have access to a work environment that is not a hindrance but an asset to their process. The arts community of Baltimore could greatly benefit from a place that offers suitable work environments to a community which does not typically have a designated place. This thesis uses the building type: Makerspace which is a facility used as a tool for creators or "makers" to enter with an idea and facilitate a project. A makerspace can provide access to communal equipment that would otherwise be expensive for the individual maker to own, private and/or public work spaces to use for the maker's individual needs and a sense of community. The Makerspace was chosen as the vessel for exploration into adaptable design because of the nature of the building's purpose. The people that will inhabit and use the spaces will have a variety of specific needs in a work space. I wanted to explore how the designs of spaces could become flexible to accommodate those specific needs. The primary objectives of this thesis are to: 1. Explore some of the various definitions of adaptability and how those meanings can be incorporated into design solutions 2. Identify spaces in the project that can be adapted for their specific purpose 3. Determine the methods of adaptability suited to the building typology and its users 4. Discuss adaptable design in terms of fixed and kinetic characteristics 5. Design spaces that are responsive to the site, the project's purpose and the unique needs of each user.

“[that] which does not change does not endure” – Henri Bergson Numbers only quantify the development Qatar is experiencing. In Doha, the city is a physical manifestation of these changes. The general approach to development follows a ‘tear down, build new’ model. Potential value is lost in what is discarded, despite necessity and convenience. This study addresses the topic by dispelling the assumed need to destroy in order to build. In doing so, it examines existing vernacular spaces that are often overlooked. The main application is analyzed through agents of space, such as buildings and the urban environment with varied outcomes. The study introduces and encourages an alternative narrative to the existing approach through transformative principles of preservation. It addresses the core concepts of temporality and permanence by negotiating what to retain and/or what to alter. Consequently, trace plays a major role as a process of honoring and embracing the past by materializing it. Incorporating novel elements allow for a shift in perception to occur. Value becomes a method of enriching and elevating a topic, idea, artifact, material, function, or experience.

Due to the dominance of the trait approach, personality is widely reduced to a set of trait scores which represent ‘usual’ behaviour. However, individuals show substantial variation within their personality (e.g. Fleeson, 2001; 2004). Thus there is a need for research into the personality characteristics which underlie this variance so that personality can be more fully quantified. To this end, the current thesis investigated a previously unresearched personality characteristic: personality adaptability, which was defined as: accurate and goal directed selection of personality states across situations which is designed to gain a desired outcomes and which may result in behaviour which is in accordance or discordance with the individual’s personal preferences in any given situation. Two studies were run to investigate whether personality adaptability exists as an individual difference. The studies also assessed the validity of personality adaptability by establishing its level of divergence from self-monitoring (Snyder, 1974), and role as a predictor of task performance and satisfaction with life (Diener, Emmons, Larsen, & Griffin, 1985). Study 1 utilised a repeated measures design. Participants completed two tasks, within a laboratory setting, designed to require the opposite poles of normal extraversion. Personality adaptability was quantified by calculating the distance between participants’ extraversion level in the two tasks (goal directed state range), and the distance between the required state and observed behaviour in each task (task specific personality adaptability). Within study 2, overt naturalistic observation of stand-up comedians performing stand-up comedy was undertaken. Personality adaptability was represented by calculating the distance between the required state for achieving a successful task outcome and the observed behaviour of each comedian, along comedy relevant facets of personality. Participants of both studies also completed the Satisfaction with Life Scale (Diener et al., 1985) and Self-Monitoring Scale (Snyder, 1974). The study 1 participants also completed a 7-item version of the Big Five Inventory’s (BFI) (John & Srivastava, 1999) trait extraversion scale while study 2 participants completed the full BFI. The results of study 1 indicated that, on average, individuals adapted their behaviour in line with the task requirements showing substantially higher levels of extraversion in the high extraversion requiring task, compared to the low extraversion task (d = -1.43, p < 0.001). Consistency between personality (extraversion) state was also shown across the tasks (r = .43, p < 0.01) implicating trait personality as a determinant of personality state alongside personality adaptability. Both studies indicated personality adaptability to be an individual difference with the factor models extracted, in both studies, indicating a single factor of personality adaptability. Personality adaptability was also shown to be distinct from self-monitoring and trait personality in both studies, and to be the most pervasive predictor of task performance when compared to trait personality and self-monitoring. In study 1, personality adaptability represented by goal directed state range accounted for up to 11% of the variance in the measures of task performance while task specific personality adaptability accounted for up to 47%. In study 2, personality adaptability accounted for up to 41% of the variance in measures of task performance. Self-monitoring and trait personality did not account for any unique variance in task performance within study 2. However, trait extraversion showed a similar effect to goal directed state range on task 1 performance, within study 1 (Beta = .23 and .21, respectively). Personality adaptability was not shown in either study to be a significant predictor of satisfaction with life. Rather the trait personality and self-monitoring factors were the unique predictors of this dependent variable.

Thesis: S.M., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2019
Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.
Includes bibliographical references (pages 55-56).
Differential privacy is a mathematical technique that provides strong theoretical privacy guarantees by ensuring statistical indistinguishability of individuals in a dataset. It has become the de facto framework for providing privacy-preserving data analysis over statistical datasets. Differential privacy has garnered significant attention from researchers and privacy experts due to its strong privacy guarantees. However, the lack of flexibility due to the dearth of configurable parameters in existing mechanisms, the accuracy loss caused by the noise added, and problems with choosing a suitable value of the privacy parameter, E, have prevented its widespread adoption in the industry. In this thesis, I address these issues. In differential privacy, the standard approach is to add Laplacian noise to the output of queries. I propose new probability distributions and noise adding mechanisms that preserve ([epsilon])-differential privacy and ([epsilon], [delta])-differential privacy.
The distributions can be observed as an asymmetric Laplacian distribution and a generalized truncated Laplacian distribution. I show that the proposed mechanisms add optimal noise in a global context, conditional upon technical lemmas. In addition, I also show that the proposed mechanisms have greater adaptability than the Laplacian mechanism as there is more than one parameter to adjust. I then demonstrate that the generalized truncated Laplacian mechanism performs better than the optimal Gaussian mechanism. The presented mechanisms are highly useful as they enable data controllers to fine-tune the perturbation necessary to protect privacy to use case specific distortion requirements. The second issue addressed in this thesis is to identify an optimal value of E and specify bounds on it. E is used to quantify the privacy risk posed by revealing statistics calculated on private and sensitive data.
Though it has an intuitive theoretical explanation, choosing an appropriate value is non-trivial. I present a systematic and methodical way to calculate e once the necessary constraints are given. In order to derive context-specific optimal values and an upper bound on E, I use the confidence probability approach, Chebyshev's inequality, and McDiarmid's inequality.
by Vaikkunth Mugunthan.
S.M.
S.M. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science

Construction flexibility inside a hospital building serves as an enabler for a health service to clinically progress. This research sought the opportunity of extending flexible design approaches by consolidating established knowledge into a refreshed flexibility pattern mapping. The resulting understanding provided a base for developing design propositions as examples of apt, flexible solutions. This research contributed to guiding flexibility towards enhanced practices and it partially addressed the softening of the logarithmic growth of financial burden for health services. Also, the research provided a model for a change-ready building fabric, allowing responsive opportunity towards the accelerating pace of clinical development.

Adaptability and cohesion were studied in a sample of thirty-nine remarried families, using the Family Adaptability and Cohesion Evaluation Scales (FACES III). The purpose of the study was to add to the growing body of empirical research dealing with the remarried family as a unique family form. Comparisons were made between family members and between the remarried and norm group families. The results both support and fail to support existing literature. Age of children was a factor in levels of both family adaptability and cohesion with levels being lowest during adolescent years. When pre-adolescent children were involved, remarried family adaptability was higher than in the intact norm families. This was not true when adolescents were present. Also, stepparents with no natural children scored higher in adaptability than parents with natural-born children. Remarried family satisfaction was positively correlated with adaptability but negatively correlated with cohesion. Also, family adaptability varied according to the complexity of the family.
Ph. D.
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The increasing enforcement of take-back laws and the changing requirements of external environments, e.g. shorter lifecycle products, increasing customer demands, and growing electronic retailing and catalogues, have made both producers and distributors in the European industry face the challenges of managing returned and discarded products that relate to reverse logistics. In particular, manufacturers of electrical and electronic equipment have to perform the completely new tasks of collecting their products put on the market at the end-of-life and providing an appropriate recovery program at no charge. This study investigates the adaptability to reverse logistics in the European electronics industry and the transferability of reverse logistics management models from European countries to Vietnam at firm and network level. This study conducted survey methodology, content analysis of published case studies, and in-depth interview with firms to investigate the adaptability and transferability. This study made some academic contributions towards enriching the applications of the organizational theories in the specialized field of reverse supply chain management. Moreover, this study also contributed to some managerial implications for producers, distributors, service providers, and policy makers to improve reverse logistics performance at both firm and network level.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Aerospace Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, 2008.
Committee Chair: Dr. Mavris, Dimitri; Committee Member: Dr. Hollingsworth, Peter; Committee Member: Dr. McMichael, Jim; Committee Member: Dr. Saleh, Joseph; Committee Member: Dr. Schrage, Daniel.

Life Design approach represents a new paradigm for career counseling and development in the 21st century augmenting 20th-century Person-Environment (P-E) fit and developmental models by focusing on making meaning through work. Life Design emerged from work by an international group of scholars and practitioners in seven countries to better account the complexities of work and careers brought about by today’s economic conditions, globalization, and the digital revolution (Savickas et al., 2009; Nota & Rossier, 2015). People today experience a new social arrangement of work that moves from permanent to more temporary jobs, from linear to dynamic career trajectories, and from specific career knowledge to lifelong learning. Moreover, it emphasizes the need to support people to become expert in co-construction and Life Design processes, to anticipate and deal with career transitions, and to consider the hope for a foreseeable future, optimism, future orientation, and resilience, useful to individual’s future planning and behavior, and career adaptability, that is a modern world workers’ essential resource to manage frequent career and life transitions. According to Life Design approach, the research project is articulated in three phases. The first phase was aimed at the validation and development of instruments to assess the variables above described. In this respect two questionnaires were developed: ‘Vision about future’, to assess hope, optimism and negative view towards the future and ‘Design My Future’, to assess the Youth resilience and future orientation. . Explorative and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) were used to analyze factor structure, evaluated convergent and discriminant validity. Multi-group Confirmatory Factor Analysis procedures was conducted to verify the factorial structural across gender. The second phase was finalized to investigate the relationships between career adaptability, positive variable, that is, hope, optimism, future orientation, resilience and life satisfaction. This phase was characterized by the development of different research projects, aiming to test the positive variables mediating role inside the adaptability and life satisfaction report. 1. In the first study, a cross cultural work, in collaboration with the University of Lausanne, 537 young Swiss adolescents and 727 young Italian adolescents were involved in order to assess the mediating role of hope and optimism in the relationship between career adaptability and life satisfaction relatively to both Countries. The conceptual model across countries was also verified. 2. In the second study 120 adults with disability were involved in order to investigate the mediating role of hope in the relationship between career adaptability and life satisfaction. 3. In the third study 152 (62 fathers and 90 mothers) parents of children with intellectual disabilities were involved to investigate the mediating role of resilience in the relationship between career adaptability and life satisfaction. Structural Equation Models (SEM) were conducted for the studies to test the models indicated above and to define the structure of the relationships between the considered different variables. The third phase of the project was focused on the development and implementation of an online method based on the Life Design's theoretical principles. In order to evaluate the effectiveness of intervention, a study was conducted with 200 middle school students: 100 of the participants were assigned to the traditional intervention group and 100 were assigned to the on-line intervention group aiming to increase their level of career adaptability and life satisfaction. A variance analysis with repeated measures was carried out to evaluate pre- and post-test differences between the two intervention groups on levels of adaptability, life satisfaction, and wishes toward the future. Results indicated that students in the on-line intervention group showed higher levels of concern, control, curiosity and life satisfaction than those in the traditional intervention group. Also, they suggested that intervention increased students’ narratives wishes, richer in aspects useful for a career design more in tune with our times. Overall, the results underline the importance of preventive career education activities focusing on strengthening career adaptability, which in turn can sustain the development of positive expectations towards future and life satisfaction concerning both adolescents and adults.
L’approccio Life Design rappresenta un nuovo paradigma per il career counseling nel 21° secolo, volto al superamento dei modelli teorici del 20° secolo, fondati sulla ‘corrispondenze persona – ambiente’. Esso si sviluppa dal lavoro di un gruppo internazionale di studiosi, al fine di spiegare la complessità del lavoro e delle carriere professionali, considerando il contesto socio economico attuale caratterizzato da crisi, globalizzazione e rivoluzione digitale (Savickas et al., 2009; Nota & Rossier 2015). In considerazione di ciò, le recenti riflessioni in materia di progettazione professionale, enfatizzano che non si può più pensare che il futuro sia anticipabile, prevedibile e ricco di possibilità e promesse come si credeva in passato. Sono più frequenti cambiamenti, transizioni e forme di lavoro a tempo determinato (Savickas, Nota, Rossier, et al., 2009). Inoltre, l’approccio Life Design, pone l’accento sulla necessità di supportare le persone nel diventare esperte nei processi di co-costruzione e progettazione della vita, di anticipare e gestire le transizioni professionali, e di considerare la speranza, l'ottimismo, l'orientamento futuro, e la resilienza, quali variabili importanti alla pianificazione dei comportamenti futuri dell’individuo e, l’adaptability, quale risorsa essenziale per gestire le frequenti transizioni di carriera e di vita. All’interno dell’approccio teorico del Life Design si sviluppa il presente progetto di ricerca che si articola in tre fasi. Durante la prima fase si è proceduto alla validazione e allo sviluppo di strumenti al fine di valutare le variabili sopra descritte. A questo riguardo sono stati sviluppati due questionari:’Vision about Future’, per valutare la speranza, e l'ottimismo verso il e ‘Design My Future’, per valutare la resilienza e l'orientamento al futuro in un gruppo di giovani preadolescenti. Analisi esplorative e confermative (EFA e CFA) sono state utilizzate al fine di analizzarne la struttura fattoriale e la validità convergente e discriminante degli strumenti. Analisi multi-gruppo sono state inoltre condotte al fine di verificare la struttura fattoriale nel genere. La seconda fase del progetto è stata finalizzata all’analisi dei rapporti tra career adaptability, variabili positive (speranza, ottimismo, orientamento futuro, e resilienza) e soddisfazione di vita. Durante questa fase sono stati sviluppati diversi progetti di ricerca al fine di testare il ruolo di mediazione delle variabili positive considerate nel rapporto tra adaptability e soddisfazione di vita. 1. Nel primo studio, un lavoro interculturale, in collaborazione con l'Università di Losanna, 537 giovani adolescenti svizzeri e 727 giovani adolescenti italiani sono stati coinvolti, al fine di valutare il ruolo di mediazione della speranza e dell’ottimismo nel rapporto tra career adaptability e soddisfazione di vita nei due paesi. 2. Nel secondo studio sono stati coinvolti 120 adulti con disabilità al fine di indagare il ruolo di mediazione della speranza nella relazione tra career adaptability e soddisfazione di vita. 3. Un altro studio è stato sviluppato al fine di studiare il ruolo di mediazione della resilienza nella relazione tra career adaptability e la soddisfazione di vita in un gruppo di 152 genitori (62 padri e 90 madri) con figli con disabilità. Modelli di equazioni strutturali (SEM) sono stati condotti nei diversi studi per testare i modelli sopra descritti e per definire la struttura delle relazioni tra le diverse variabili considerate. Nella terza fase del progetto è stato messo a punto un intervento online fondato sui principi teorici del Life Design. L'efficacia dell’intervento è stata valutata attraverso uno studio condotto con 200 studenti delle scuole medie: 100 dei partecipanti sono stati assegnati al gruppo di intervento tradizionale e 100 sono stati assegnati al gruppo di intervento on-line volto ad incrementare i loro livelli di adaptability e soddisfazione di vita. Un'analisi della varianza a misure ripetute è stata effettuata al fine di valutare le differenze pre e post-test tra i due gruppi di intervento sui livelli di adaptability, soddisfazione di vita e desideri verso il futuro. I risultati hanno messo in evidenza che gli studenti che hanno preso parte al gruppo di intervento on-line hanno mostrato livelli più elevati di preoccupazione, controllo, curiosità e soddisfazione di vita rispetto agli studenti che hanno preso parte all’intervento ‘più tradizionale’ di vocational guidance. In generale i risultati ottenuti dal presente progetto di ricerca hanno messo in evidenza l’importanza di mettere a punto degli interventi di career guidance che possano rafforzare l’adaptability delle persone, la quale a sua volta può sostenere lo sviluppo di aspettative positive verso il futuro e aumentare i livelli di soddisfazione di vita di giovani e adulti.

Les véhicules modernes sont de plus en plus informatisés pour satisfaire les exigences de sureté les plus strictes et pour fournir de meilleures expériences de conduite. Par conséquent, le nombre d'unités de contrôle électronique (ECU) dans les véhicules modernes a augmenté de façon continue au cours des dernières années. En outre, les applications à calcul complexe offrent une demande de calcul plus élevée sur les ECU et ont des contraintes de temps-réel dures et souples, d'où le besoin d’une approche unifiée traitant les deux types de contraintes. Les architectures multi-cœur permettent d'intégrer plusieurs niveaux de criticité de sureté sur la même plate-forme. De telles applications ont été conçues à l'aide d'approches statiques; cependant, les approches dites statiques ne sont plus réalisables dans des environnements très dynamiques en raison de la complexité croissante et les contraintes de coûts strictes, d’où la nécessite des solutions plus souples. Cela signifie que, pour faire face aux environnements dynamiques, un système automobile doit être adaptatif; c'est-à-dire qu'il doit pouvoir adapter sa structure et / ou son comportement à l'exécution en réponse à des changements fréquents dans son environnement. Ces nouvelles exigences ne peuvent être confrontées aux approches actuelles des systèmes et logiciels automobiles. Ainsi, une nouvelle conception de l'architecture électrique / électronique (E / E) d'un véhicule doit être développé. Récemment, l'industrie automobile a convenu de changer la plate-forme AUTOSAR actuelle en "AUTOSAR Adaptive Platform". Cette plate-forme est développée par le consortium AUTOSAR en tant que couche supplémentaire de la plate-forme classique. Il s'agit d'une étude de faisabilité continue basée sur le système d'exploitation POSIX qui utilise une communication orientée service pour intégrer les applications dans le système à tout moment. L'idée principale de cette thèse est de développer de nouveaux concepts d'architecture basés sur l'adaptation pour répondre aux besoins d'une nouvelle architecture E / E pour les véhicules entièrement électriques (VEF) concernant la sureté, la fiabilité et la rentabilité, et les intégrer à AUTOSAR. Nous définissons l'architecture ASLA (Adaptive System Level in AUTOSAR), qui est un cadre qui fournit une solution adaptative pour AUTOSAR. ASLA intègre des fonctions de reconfiguration au niveau des tâches telles que l'addition, la suppression et la migration des tâches dans AUTOSAR. La principale différence entre ASLA et la plate-forme Adaptive AUTOSAR est que ASLA permet d'attribuer des fonctions à criticité mixtes sur le même ECU ainsi que des adaptations bornées temps-réel, tant dis que Adaptive AUTOSAR sépare les fonctions temps réel critiques (fonctionnant sur la plate-forme classique) des fonctions temps réel non critiques (fonctionnant sur la plate-forme adaptative). Pour évaluer la validité de notre architecture proposée, nous fournissons une implémentation prototype de notre architecture ASLA et nous évaluons sa performance à travers des expériences
Modern vehicles have become increasingly computerized to satisfy the more strict safety requirements and to provide better driving experiences. Therefore, the number of electronic control units (ECUs) in modern vehicles has continuously increased in the last few decades. In addition, advanced applications put higher computational demand on ECUs and have both hard and soft timing constraints, hence a unified approach handling both constraints is required. Moreover, economic pressures and multi-core architectures are driving the integration of several levels of safety-criticality onto the same platform. Such applications have been traditionally designed using static approaches; however, static approaches are no longer feasible in highly dynamic environments due to increasing complexity and tight cost constraints, and more flexible solutions are required. This means that, to cope with dynamic environments, an automotive system must be adaptive; that is, it must be able to adapt its structure and/or behaviour at runtime in response to frequent changes in its environment. These new requirements cannot be faced by the current state-of-the-art approaches of automotive software systems. Instead, a new design of the overall Electric/Electronic (E/E) architecture of a vehicle needs to be developed. Recently, the automotive industry agreed upon changing the current AUTOSAR platform to the “AUTOSAR Adaptive Platform”. This platform is being developed by the AUTOSAR consortium as an additional product to the current AUTOSAR classic platform. This is an ongoing feasibility study based on the POSIX operating system and uses service-oriented communication to integrate applications into the system at any desired time. The main idea of this thesis is to develop novel architecture concepts based on adaptation to address the needs of a new E/E architecture for Fully Electric Vehicles (FEVs) regarding safety, reliability and cost-efficiency, and integrate these in AUTOSAR. We define the ASLA (Adaptive System Level in AUTOSAR) architecture, which is a framework that provides an adaptive solution for AUTOSAR. ASLA incorporates tasks-level reconfiguration features such as addition, deletion and migration of tasks in AUTOSAR. The main difference between ASLA and the Adaptive AUTOSAR platform is that ASLA enables the allocation of mixed critical functions on the same ECU as well as time-bound adaptations while adaptive AUTOSAR separates critical, hard real-time functions (running on the classic platform) from non-critical/soft-real-time functions (running on the adaptive platform). To assess the validity of our proposed architecture, we provide an early prototype implementation of ASLA and evaluate its performance through experiments

Les véhicules modernes sont de plus en plus informatisés pour satisfaire les exigences de sureté les plus strictes et pour fournir de meilleures expériences de conduite. Par conséquent, le nombre d'unités de contrôle électronique (ECU) dans les véhicules modernes a augmenté de façon continue au cours des dernières années. En outre, les applications à calcul complexe offrent une demande de calcul plus élevée sur les ECU et ont des contraintes de temps-réel dures et souples, d'où le besoin d’une approche unifiée traitant les deux types de contraintes. Les architectures multi-cœur permettent d'intégrer plusieurs niveaux de criticité de sureté sur la même plate-forme. De telles applications ont été conçues à l'aide d'approches statiques; cependant, les approches dites statiques ne sont plus réalisables dans des environnements très dynamiques en raison de la complexité croissante et les contraintes de coûts strictes, d’où la nécessite des solutions plus souples. Cela signifie que, pour faire face aux environnements dynamiques, un système automobile doit être adaptatif; c'est-à-dire qu'il doit pouvoir adapter sa structure et / ou son comportement à l'exécution en réponse à des changements fréquents dans son environnement. Ces nouvelles exigences ne peuvent être confrontées aux approches actuelles des systèmes et logiciels automobiles. Ainsi, une nouvelle conception de l'architecture électrique / électronique (E / E) d'un véhicule doit être développé. Récemment, l'industrie automobile a convenu de changer la plate-forme AUTOSAR actuelle en "AUTOSAR Adaptive Platform". Cette plate-forme est développée par le consortium AUTOSAR en tant que couche supplémentaire de la plate-forme classique. Il s'agit d'une étude de faisabilité continue basée sur le système d'exploitation POSIX qui utilise une communication orientée service pour intégrer les applications dans le système à tout moment. L'idée principale de cette thèse est de développer de nouveaux concepts d'architecture basés sur l'adaptation pour répondre aux besoins d'une nouvelle architecture E / E pour les véhicules entièrement électriques (VEF) concernant la sureté, la fiabilité et la rentabilité, et les intégrer à AUTOSAR. Nous définissons l'architecture ASLA (Adaptive System Level in AUTOSAR), qui est un cadre qui fournit une solution adaptative pour AUTOSAR. ASLA intègre des fonctions de reconfiguration au niveau des tâches telles que l'addition, la suppression et la migration des tâches dans AUTOSAR. La principale différence entre ASLA et la plate-forme Adaptive AUTOSAR est que ASLA permet d'attribuer des fonctions à criticité mixtes sur le même ECU ainsi que des adaptations bornées temps-réel, tant dis que Adaptive AUTOSAR sépare les fonctions temps réel critiques (fonctionnant sur la plate-forme classique) des fonctions temps réel non critiques (fonctionnant sur la plate-forme adaptative). Pour évaluer la validité de notre architecture proposée, nous fournissons une implémentation prototype de notre architecture ASLA et nous évaluons sa performance à travers des expériences
Modern vehicles have become increasingly computerized to satisfy the more strict safety requirements and to provide better driving experiences. Therefore, the number of electronic control units (ECUs) in modern vehicles has continuously increased in the last few decades. In addition, advanced applications put higher computational demand on ECUs and have both hard and soft timing constraints, hence a unified approach handling both constraints is required. Moreover, economic pressures and multi-core architectures are driving the integration of several levels of safety-criticality onto the same platform. Such applications have been traditionally designed using static approaches; however, static approaches are no longer feasible in highly dynamic environments due to increasing complexity and tight cost constraints, and more flexible solutions are required. This means that, to cope with dynamic environments, an automotive system must be adaptive; that is, it must be able to adapt its structure and/or behaviour at runtime in response to frequent changes in its environment. These new requirements cannot be faced by the current state-of-the-art approaches of automotive software systems. Instead, a new design of the overall Electric/Electronic (E/E) architecture of a vehicle needs to be developed. Recently, the automotive industry agreed upon changing the current AUTOSAR platform to the “AUTOSAR Adaptive Platform”. This platform is being developed by the AUTOSAR consortium as an additional product to the current AUTOSAR classic platform. This is an ongoing feasibility study based on the POSIX operating system and uses service-oriented communication to integrate applications into the system at any desired time. The main idea of this thesis is to develop novel architecture concepts based on adaptation to address the needs of a new E/E architecture for Fully Electric Vehicles (FEVs) regarding safety, reliability and cost-efficiency, and integrate these in AUTOSAR. We define the ASLA (Adaptive System Level in AUTOSAR) architecture, which is a framework that provides an adaptive solution for AUTOSAR. ASLA incorporates tasks-level reconfiguration features such as addition, deletion and migration of tasks in AUTOSAR. The main difference between ASLA and the Adaptive AUTOSAR platform is that ASLA enables the allocation of mixed critical functions on the same ECU as well as time-bound adaptations while adaptive AUTOSAR separates critical, hard real-time functions (running on the classic platform) from non-critical/soft-real-time functions (running on the adaptive platform). To assess the validity of our proposed architecture, we provide an early prototype implementation of ASLA and evaluate its performance through experiments

System integration, interoperability, just in time delivery, window of opportunity, and dust-to-dust optimization are all keywords of our computerized future. Survivability is an important concept that together with dependability and quality of service are key issues in the systems of the future, i.e. infrastructural systems, business applications, and everyday desktop applications. The importance of dependable systems and the widely spread usage of dependable system together with the complexity of those systems makes middleware and frameworks for survivability imperative to the system builder of the future. This thesis presents a simulation approach to investigate the effect on data survival when the defending system uses knowledge of the current situation to protect the data. The results show the importance of situation awareness to avoid wasting recourses. A number of characteristics of the situational information provided and how this information may be used to optimize the system.

This thesis, “A Strategic Approach to adaptability in office buildings”, is the result of a doktor ingeniør-project financed by a NBI project called “Buildings in a life cycle perspective”. The work was carried out at the Department of Building Technology, Faculty of Architecture, Planning and Fine Arts at NTNU in the period 1997 - 2001.

The main objective of this work is to develop and present knowledge about adaptability in office buildings and how this knowledge can be enhanced. Adaptability is thought to be important in order to reduce mismatches between buildings and their user organisations. Mismatches will occur in the Building – User Relationship over a period of time. The level of mismatch will vary, but at one point the mismatch exceeds the acceptable mismatch level, and major adaptations in the building, in the use of the building, or in how the user organisation finances and procures real estate, are needed. The acceptable mismatch level will vary from situation to situation, but there will always be some level of mismatch in the Building – User Relationship, and minor adaptations must be carried out continuously.

As opposed to many of the earlier works that have dealt with these issues, this work is mainly focused on adaptability, not only on flexibility. Adaptability is here defined as “the ability to change, responding to internal or external changes”, and it is seen as something that approaches the problem “from the top”. Flexibility, on the other hand, is seen as more solution-oriented, giving possibilities for change within a limited set of alternatives. Flexibility is still seen as important, but as one of several ways to achieve physical adaptability, together with partitionability, multifunctionality, and extendability. This work is also more based on a social-constructivist approach to the problem, and on the socio-technical relationships between buildings and users, rather than on technical solutions.

The main reason to engage oneself in the study of adaptability in office buildings is that we have seen the changes that have taken place in offices during the last 100 years, and that we expect these changes to accelerate. During the history of office buildings there has been a large variety in office layouts and workplace design. The use of the building and the workplace ideals may change, but the actual building is more durable. Thus, most buildings will meet a change in requirements during their lifetime, to which they have to be adapted. Some existing buildings adapt readily to change, others are more difficult to alter. The building will be adapted if the value of adapting the building into new or future use is thought to be greater than the value of the alternatives and the cost of adaptations. This value can be both financial value and value of use.

The value of use is most clearly seen in the Building – User Relationship (BUR). This is a dialectic relationship between buildings and users, where the two sides are believed to mutually affect each other. When the organisation changes, the building must be adapted in response to a new situation. On the other hand, the organisation will adapt itself to the possibilities and constraints in the building. The BUR is not necessarily only concerned with one user. It can also be seen as the relationship between the building and several users or between the user and several buildings. Major and continuous changes and adaptations will happen in both cases, and the same approach, with some adaptations, can be used.

Because the BUR is thought to be constantly changing, there is always a mismatch between supply (what the building can offer) and demand (what the organisation needs). This mismatch must be managed in order to create the best possible fit between the building and the user organisation.

To manage the mismatches, one has to consider planning and decision-making under uncertainty. An understanding of the direction and the future on the demand side (the user organisation), as well as a strategy for developing the supply side (the building) must be developed. The interface between the two has to be managed in a long-term perspective. In order to deal with this, a strategic way of managing the mismatch is chosen, and the Strategic Approach to adaptability is based on a strategic iterative decision-making process. The metaphor of design has been used to explore and explain the iterative decision-making process, which is based on interaction between the phases of awareness, analysis, and action.

The main ingredients in the Strategic Approach are:

1. A “mindset”, which is a way of thinking about changes in the Building – User Relationship. This mindset includes knowledge about organisations and buildings and how they change and affect each other.

2. Strategic, iterative decision-making based on a process of awareness, analysis, and action. This decision-making process can be applied in different situations. Two situations of special relevance to the Building – User Relationship have been described in this work: The management of BUR mismatches, which is the continuous process of adapting buildings and user organisations to each other, and the Strategic Approach used in the building’s life cycle, from initiative concept, programming, design, and construction, to use and operation.

3. Some tools can be applied within the strategic decision-making process to aid decision-making. For ex. assess uncertainty, for financial analysis, to anticipate the future, to evaluate buildings, to structure planning processes, for visualising, or for problem solving. In this work, two tools have been described in detail: scenarios and layering.

4. Measures are actual solutions that can be applied (a) to the building, (b) to the use of buildings, or (c) in finance and contracts, to enhance adaptability. Actual measures are outside the scope of this work, where the main focus is on strategic decision-making and the Building – User Relationship. They are, however, mentioned when appropriate, i.e. in the description of design strategies and of layering.

This study is mostly explorative, and an interpretative research approach has been used. This means that concepts and theories have been developed during the enquiry. An iterative research process with empirical and theoretical studies was used. The research instruments were interviews, workshops, and case studies, as well as a final example case, which is used to demonstrate the Strategic Approach in practice.

4 cases are presented: Dagbladet, a major retrofit process of a building complex with several buildings of different ages, which focused on a layered and phased retrofit process. Gjensidige, a new corporate headquarters for a large insurance company, which in its new building focused on strategic decisions and end-user involvement.

Office XX, an experimental building with technical solutions that encourages flexibility and give possibilities for easy assembly and disassembly of the building or parts of it. And finally K-bank’s new headquarters, Colosseum Park, which was developed as a commercial multi-purpose office building.

The Strategic Approach is finally applied to an example, in order to show how it could have been used in practice. A description of the real sequence of events is compared to an idealised version of the example; a simulation of the Strategic Approach used in the Consultants Inc. project”. The study shows that Consultants Inc. might have benefited from using the approach. The next step will, however, be to test the Strategic Approach in a pilot case and monitor the long-term effects on adaptability and BUR mismatches.

The main results from this work have been:

- That a Strategic Approach based on an understanding of the dynamics in the Building-User Relationship, and a strategic decision-making process has been developed, as well as some tools and methods which can be applied within a Strategic Approach. Some of this is developed in this project. Other issues are based on previous works, but used within the framework, the Strategic Approach developed in this project.

- That a Strategic Approach has been shown to be important and necessary to improve adaptability in office buildings.

Natural ecosystems are dynamic and complex, with many being threatened by human activity. However, humans can also be at the root of a solution to this problem by developing ecosystem engineering which can be used to design, construct, modify, upgrade, repair, remediate, and maintain ecosystems. The aim of this project was to improve virtual ecosystems that can be used to increase the knowledge base for ecological engineering by studying adaptability as a factor for the success of species. This was done by analysing adaptive species in a virtual ecosystem, a computer application with which various configurations can be designed and studied in a closed environment. The virtual ecosystems used in this project represent ecosystems in general rather than any specific ecosystem, and allow for repeatable test cases to be run so that ecosystem dynamics can be studied. Adaptability was defined as the ability of an individual to adjust to a short term environmental pressure according to two factors: the adaptation speed, which is how fast an individual can respond to a change in environment, and the adaptive capacity, which is a quantitative indicator of how much the individual is able to adapt. In this project, experiments were performed to determine the effects of adaptability when applied to one aspect of individuals in an ecosystem. From the results of the experiments it was seen that the adaptation speed value could affect the success of a producer species in an ecosystem both positively and negatively. It was also found that ecosystems with both a consumer and producer species could persist longer when adaptability was incorporated into the individuals of the consumer species.

Thesis (M. Eng.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Civil and Environmental Engineering, 2010.
Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.
Includes bibliographical references (p. 91-93).
Design for Adaptability and Deconstruction (DfAD) is an emerging trend in the construction industry that focuses on the end-of-life aspect of buildings. It is based on the concept that the life of a building or building component ends because it is unable to adapt to change. With proper implementation, DfAD is an important tool to achieve sustainable design for buildings, as it ideally may form a closed materials loop for construction materials by optimizing the amount of materials salvaged at the end of a building's useful life through deconstruction. This thesis focuses on ways to improve the feasibility of deconstruction and material savings, primarily through DfAD. By implementing DfAD principles and guidelines, designing with reusable materials, and planning and implementing a project effectively, the current practical and economic barriers to deconstruction may be mitigated. This thesis presents the essential considerations for deconstruction and materials salvage and presents potential policies to improve its viability. Three case studies present the applications of DfAD approaches and the lessons learned from common challenges associated with deconstruction.
by Karen E. Quinn.
M.Eng.

The current study sought to answer the question: Does reported family coherence and adaptability differ between parents who completed private, public, and international adoptions? The desired population was adoptive parents in the United States. The survey utilized two existing measures, the Family Sense of Coherence (FSOC) and the Family Adaptation Scales (FAS). Results of a one-way independent ANOVA showed that adoption type (i.e. private, public, international) had no significant effect on FSOC and FAS sum scores. Future research should recruit a larger and more representative sample of adoptive parents in the United States, so that findings can be used to tailor educational programming with adoptive parents.

As it becomes more common for individuals to work in many different jobs throughout their lives, career adaptability becomes more important to understanding how individuals deal with this changing environment. This study examined the history and background of career adaptability and personality, as well as current research in the field. A total of 196 students from a large Midwestern university completed the Career Futures Inventory – Revised and a Big Five measure from the International Personality Item Pool to examine potential relationships between individual personality traits and career adaptability. Pearson correlations, linear and hierarchical regression analyses, and analysis of variance were used to analyze possible relationships. The results of the study indicated that 39.7% of career adaptability was accounted for by the Big Five personality traits. All five personality traits and career adaptability were moderately correlated and neuroticism, conscientiousness, and extraversion predicted participants’ overall career adaptability. Hierarchical regression analyses showed that career adaptability and career agency both predicted major satisfaction above and beyond personality. Key words: career adaptability, Big Five personality, major satisfaction

Partant du constat que les compétences créatives ont été peu étudiées dans le champ de l’orientation, alors même que les conduites d’orientation dans le contexte sociétal moderne font très largement appel aux compétences individuelles d’ouverture, de flexibilité, d’originalité, d’adaptation, voire même d’innovation, la thèse présentée examine la place et le rôle de la créativité comme composante des compétences à s’orienter.Après avoir exploré différentes associations possibles entre créativité et différentes compétences à s’orienter, nous nous focalisons d’une part sur les relations entre la créativité et l’adaptabilité de carrière telles que définies et opérationnalisées par Savickas (Savickas & Porfeli, 2012), et d’autre part entre la créativité et l’adaptabilité individuelle telle que définie et opérationnalisée par Ployart et Bliese (2006). Une étude portant sur un échantillon d’étudiants de premier cycle universitaire en France (n = 500) a été conduite et les résultats obtenus indiquent des corrélations significatives et positives entre le potentiel créatif et certaines des dimensions de l’adaptabilité individuelle et de carrière et invitent à accorder une place plus importante à la créativité dans les modèles d’orientation tout au long de la vie
Two major approaches have emerged in the discipline of career counseling to determine the key factors in career development: the relationship between creative potential and adaptability, and between creative potential and the individual characteristics of personality, motivation, and logical reasoning. This research attempts to integrate these two approaches by evaluating the impact of each of these factors on adaptability. 500 undergraduate volunteers filled out self-assessment questionnaires and performed timed graphic efficiency tests. The results were subjected to statistical analysis. The findings indicate that the individual characteristics of personality and motivation have higher correlation with adaptability than creativity and logical reasoning. Future research should involve different populations and employ non-graphic tests of creativity to confirm these results. If confirmed it would then be necessary to further explore the role of creativity in career development

While environmental and economic sustainability have been driving factors in the movement towards a more resilient built environment, social sustainability is a factor that has received significantly less attention over the years. Federal support for low-income housing has fallen drastically, and the deficit of available, adequate, affordable homes continues to grow. In this thesis, I explore one way that architects can design affordable housing that is intrinsically sustainable. In the past, subsidized low-income housing has been built as if to provide a short-term solution—as if poverty and lack of affordable housing is a short-term problem. However, I argue that adaptable architecture is essential for the design of affordable housing that is environmentally, economically, and socially sustainable. Further, architects must balance affordability, durability, and adaptability to design sustainable solutions that are resistant to obsolescence. I conclude by applying principles and processes of adaptability in the design of Apto Ontario, an adaptable affordable housing development in the low-income historic downtown of Ontario, California (Greater Los Angeles). Along a new Bus Rapid Transit corridor, Apto Ontario would create a diverse, resilient, socially sustainable community in an area threatened by the rise of housing costs.

Elasti-city is an urban model generated with the purpose of satisfying current and future needs. Potentiating the dynamic properties of urban environments can transform them into adaptable ones. Understanding the city as an ever-changing environment allows architects and urban designers to read in urban complexity other than its current problematic. Buildings, and by extension cities, that are adaptable can provide solutions to multiple issues, generate vibrant urban life and permit people to mold and transform their surrounding environment.

I examine whether it is possible for the temporal resolution and reliability of a photoreceptor to vary across the eye. This possibility has not been addressed before in any animal and yet it is important for our understanding of how visual systems may be designed to register patterns of optic flow or to track moving targets. In the male blowfly, Calliphora vicina, I show that both spatial and temporal acuity are higher at the front of the eye and fall off with retinal eccentricity. The particular pattern of tuning observed emphasises the importance of tracking to the male fly, a behaviour commonly observed in flies prior to mating. To investigate this possibility further, in Chapter 3 I compare the responses of male and female photoreceptors to simulated target stimuli. For this purpose I use the housefly, Musca domestica, a species whose anatomical and behavioural sex-differences are well documented. The male photoreceptor responds much more powerfully to small moving targets than the female and response amplitude greatly exceeds that predicted from conventional models of photoreceptors dynamics. In particular, the male photoreceptor boosts the signals generated by targets moving within the behavioural regime of distances and speeds. These results allow the limits of male pursuit vision to be determined and demonstrate the impact of behaviour on retinal function. Adaptation of photoreceptor sensitivity and temporal resolution to ambient illumination is a well-known phenomenon. This process is usually considered to be complete within seconds. However, I show in M. domestica that significant improvements in temporal resolution and reliability can occur over a much longer period. These improvements are derived from a more consistent registration of the timing of photon absorption events and appear to be associated with a reduction in rhabdomeral surface area.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sloan School of Management, Operations Research Center, 2011.
Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.
Includes bibliographical references (p. 151-157).
The electricity industry has been experiencing fundamental changes over the past decade. Two of the arguably most significant driving forces are the integration of renewable energy resources into the electric power system and the creation of the deregulated electricity markets. Many new challenges arise. In this thesis, we focus on two important ones: How to reliably operate the power system under high penetration of intermittent and uncertain renewable resources and uncertain demand: and how to design an electricity market that considers both efficiency and fairness. We present some new advances in these directions. In the first part of the thesis, we focus on the first issue in the context of the unit commitment (UC) problem, one of the most critical daily operations of an electric power system. Unit commitment in large scale power systems faces new challenges of increasing uncertainty from both generation and load. We propose an adaptive robust model for the security constrained unit commitment problem in the presence of nodal net load uncertainty. We develop a practical solution methodology based on a combination of Benders decomposition type algorithm and outer approximation techniques. We present an extensive numerical study on the real-world large scale power system operated by the ISO New England (ISO-NE). Computational results demonstrate the advantages of the robust model over the traditional reserve adjustment approach in terms of economic efficiency, operational reliability, and robustness to uncertain distributions. In the second part of the thesis, we are concerned with a geometric characterization of the performance of adaptive robust solutions in a multi-stage stochastic optimization problem. We study the notion of finite adaptability in a general setting of multi-stage stochastic and adaptive optimization. We show a significant role that geometric properties of uncertainty sets, such as symmetry, play in determining the power of robust and finitely adaptable solutions. We show that a class of finitely adaptable solutions is a good approximation for both the multi-stage stochastic as well as the adaptive optimization problem. To the best of our knowledge, these are the first approximation results for multi-stage problems in such generality. Moreover, the results and the proof techniques are quite general and extend to include important constraints such as integrality and linear conic constraints. In the third part of the thesis, we focus on how to design an auction and pricing scheme for the day-ahead electricity market that achieves both economic efficiency and fairness. The work is motivated by two outstanding problems in the current practice - the uplift problem and equitable selection problem. The uplift problem is that the electricity payment determined by the electricity price cannot fully recover the production cost (especially the fixed cost) of some committed generators, and therefore the ISOs make side payments to such generators to make up the loss. The equitable selection problem is how to achieve fairness and integrity of the day-ahead auction in choosing from multiple (near) optimal solutions. We offer a new perspective and propose a family of fairness based auction and pricing schemes that resolve these two problems. We present numerical test result using ISO-NE's day-ahead market data. The proposed auction- pricing schemes produce a frontier plot of efficiency versus fairness, which can be used as a vaulable decision tool for the system operation.
by Xu Andy Sun.
Ph.D.

Data migration is common as information needs to be moved and transformed between services and applications. Performance in the context of speed is important and may have a crucial impact on the handling of data. Information can be sent in varying formats and XML is one of the more commonly used. The information that is sent can change in structure from time to time and these changes needs to be handled. The parsers’ ability to handle these changes are described as the property “adaptability”. The transformation of XML files is done with the use of parsing techniques. The parsing techniques have different approaches, for example event-based or memory-based. Each approach has its pros and cons. The aim of this study is to research how three different parsers handle parsing XML documents with varying structures in the context of performance. The chosen parsing techniques are SAX, DOM and VTD. SAX uses an event-based approach while DOM and VTD uses a memory-based. Implementation of the parsers have been made with the purpose to extract information from XML documents an adding it to an ArrayList. The results from this study show that the parsers differ in performance, where DOM overall is the slowest and SAX and VTD perform somewhat equal. Although there are differences in the performance between the parsers depending on what changes are made to the XML document.

Distributed applications are exposed as reusable components that are dynamically discovered and integrated to create new applications. These new applications, in the form of aggregate services, are vulnerable to failure due to the autonomous and distributed nature of their integrated components. This vulnerability creates the need for adaptability in aggregate services. The need for adaptation is accentuated for complex long-running applications as is found in scientific Grid computing, where distributed computing nodes may participate to solve computation and data-intensive problems. Such applications integrate services for coordinated problem solving in areas such as Bioinformatics. For such applications, when a constituent service fails, the application fails, even though there are other nodes that can substitute for the failed service. This concern is not addressed in the specification of high-level composition languages such as that of the Business Process Execution Language (BPEL). We propose an approach to transparently autonomizing existing BPEL processes in order to make them modifiable at runtime and more resilient to the failures in their execution environment. By transparent introduction of adaptive behavior, adaptation preserves the original business logic of the aggregate service and does not tangle the code for adaptive behavior with that of the aggregate service. The major contributions of this dissertation are: first, we assessed the effectiveness of BPEL language support in developing adaptive mechanisms. As a result, we identified the strengths and limitations of BPEL and came up with strategies to address those limitations. Second, we developed a technique to enhance existing BPEL processes transparently in order to support dynamic adaptation. We proposed a framework which uses transparent shaping and generative programming to make BPEL processes adaptive. Third, we developed a technique to dynamically discover and bind to substitute services. Our technique was evaluated and the result showed that dynamic utilization of components improves the flexibility of adaptive BPEL processes. Fourth, we developed an extensible policy-based technique to specify how to handle exceptional behavior. We developed a generic component that introduces adaptive behavior for multiple BPEL processes. Fifth, we identify ways to apply our work to facilitate adaptability in composite Grid services.

Atualmente, adaptabilidade é uma característica desejada em aplicações paralelas. Por exemplo, o crescente número de usuários competindo por recursos em arquiteturas paralelas gera mudanças constantes no conjunto de processadores disponíveis. Aplicações adaptativas são capazes de executar usando um conjunto volátil de processadores, oferecendo urna melhor utilização dos recursos. Este comportamento adaptativo é conhecido corno maleabilidade. Outro exemplo vem da constante evolução das arquiteturas multi-core, as quais aumentam o número de cores em seus chips a cada nova geração. Adaptabilidade é a chave para permitir que os programas paralelos sejam portáveis de uma máquina a outra. Assim. os programas paralelos são capazes de adaptar a extração do paralelismo de acordo com o grau de paralelismo específico da arquitetura alvo. Este comportamento pode ser visto como um caso particular de evolutividade. Nesse sentido, esta tese está focada em: (i) maleabilidade para adaptar a execução das aplicações paralelas às mudanças na disponibilidade dos processadores; e (ii) evolutividade para adaptar a extração do paralelismo de acordo com propriedades da arquitetura e dos dados de entrada. Portanto, a questão remanescente é "Como prover e suportar aplicações adaptativas?". Esta tese visa responder tal questão com base no MPI (Message-Passing Interface), o qual é a API paralela padrão para HPC em ambientes distribuídos. Nosso trabalho baseia-se nas características do MPI-2 que permitem criar processos em tempo de execução, dando alguma flexibilidade às aplicações MPI. Aplicações MPI maleáveis usam a criação dinâmica de processos para expandir-se nas ações de crescimento (para usar processadores extras). As ações de diminuição (para liberar processadores) finalizam os processos MPI que executam nos processadores requeridos, preservando os dados da aplicação. Note que as aplicações maleáveis requerem suporte do ambiente de execução, uma vez que precisam ser notificadas sobre a disponibilidade dos processadores. Aplicações MPI evolutivas seguem o paradigma do paralelismo de tarefas explícitas para permitir adaptação em tempo de execução. Assim, a criação dinâmica de processos é usada para extrair o paralelismo, ou seja, para criar novas tarefas MPI sob demanda. Para prover tais aplicações nós definimos tarefas MPI abstratas, implementamos a sincronização entre elas através da troca de mensagens, e propusemos uma abordagem para ajustar a granularidade das tarefas MPI, visando eficiência em ambientes distribuídos. Os resultados experimentais validaram nossa hipótese de que aplicações adaptativas podem ser providas usando características do MPI-2. Adicionalmente, esta tese identificou os requisitos rio nível do ambiente de execução para suportá-las em clusters. Portanto, as aplicações MPI maleáveis melhoraram a utilização de recursos de clusters; e as aplicações de tarefas explícitas adaptaram a extração do paralelismo de acordo com a arquitetura alvo. mostrando que este paradigma também é eficiente em ambientes distribuídos.
Currently, adaptability is a desired feature in parallel applications. For instante, the increasingly number of user competing for resources of the parallel architectures causes dynamic changes in the set of available processors. Adaptive applications are able to execute using a set of volatile processors, providing better resource utilization. This adaptive behavior is known as malleability. Another example comes from the constant evolution of the multi-core architectures, which increases the number of cores to each new generation of chips. Adaptability is the key to allow parallel programs portability from one multi-core machine to another. Thus, parallel programs can adapt the unfolding of the parallelism to the specific degree of parallelism of the target architecture. This adaptive behavior can be seen as a particular case of evolutivity. In this sense, this thesis is focused on: (i) malleability to adapt the execution of parallel applications as changes in processors availability; and (ii) evolutivity to adapt the unfolding of the parallelism at runtime as the architecture and input data properties. Thus, the open issue is "How to provide and support adaptive applications?". This thesis aims to answer this question taking into account the MPI (Message-Passing Interface), which is the standard parallel API for HPC in distributed-memory environments. Our work is based on MPI-2 features that allow spawning processes at runtime. adding some fiexibility to the MPI applications. Malleable MPI applications use dynamic process creation to expand themselves in growth action (to use further processors). The shrinkage actions (to release processors) end the execution of the MPI processes on the required processors in such a way that the application's data are preserved. Notice that malleable applications require a runtime environment support to execute, once they must be notified about the processors availability. Evolving MPI applications follow the explicit task parallelism paradigm to allow their runtime adaptation. Thus, dynamic process creation is used to unfold the parallelism, i.e., to create new MPI tasks on demand. To provide these applications we defined the abstract MPI tasks, implemented the synchronization among these tasks through message exchanges, and proposed an approach to adjust MPI tasks granularity aiming at efficiency in distributed-memory environments. Experimental results validated our hypothesis that adaptive applications can be provided using the MPI-2 features. Additionally, this thesis identifies the requirements to support these applications in cluster environments. Thus, malleable MPI applications were able to improve the cluster utilization; and the explicit task ones were able to adapt the unfolding of the parallelism to the target architecture, showing that this programming paradigm can be efficient also in distributed-memory contexts.

Product adaptability is the capability to adjust a product by adding/replacing its constitu-ents for different applications. To acquire this capability, a product should be a modular structure that can form different modular combinations. The purpose of this thesis is pro-posing a design method to develop such products. The method includes the following characteristics: a product essentially implements its applications by providing proper ac-tions/reactions to interact with its surrounding conditions; such actions/reactions can be used to develop the subsystems of a product by building energy-flow or force-path con-nections; optional modules can be separated from the subsystems that contain optional applications; all modules are arranged as an open architecture to provide space and inter-face for each optional module; and each module is endued with the principal content of actions/reactions, inside energy flows or force paths, space, and interfaces constraints, so that it can be physically formed through a dual-domain formation process. Following this method, a multi-purpose electric vehicle (MEV) is developed. Adaptability Efficacy (AE) is proposed to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed method.
February 2017

The overall purpose of this study was to explore the impact of homelessness on family cohesion and adaptability. Using the Olson's Circumplex Model of Family Functioning and Systems Theory as conceptual framework, 13 families in a transitional house completed a self-administered questionnaire which was designed to measure the family's perception of the impact of homelessness on family cohesion and adaptability. The data were analyzed using descriptive statistics and are reported in terms of frequency distribution and percentages. The findings revealed that homeless families are significantly more rigid on the adaptability dimension of Faces III and are extremely enmeshed on the Cohesion dimension.

With growing recognition of the duality of language and culture, the TESOL profession is placing increasing emphasis on the importance of understanding intercultural dynamics in the second language classroom. Currently, however, there is a lack of empirical information and measurement instruments to aid understanding within the field of cross-cultural communication. In response to this lack of instrumentation, Kelley and Meyers (1993) recently created the Cross-Cultural Adaptability Inventory (CCAI), a 5 0-item, self-perception inventory designed to measure cross-cultural adaptability through a total score and four contributing dimensions: Emotional Resilience, Flexibility/Openness, Perceptual Acuity and Personal Autonomy. The two primary purposes of this study were: (1) to add to a limited empirical base by studying the effect of four independent variables--host culture contact, cultural distance, second language proficiency, and length of previous experience abroad--on the dependent variable of cross-cultural adaptability; (2) to explore the possibility of using the CCAI for cross-cultural training in the TESOL profession. Two hundred and forty-five college/university students from two schools participated in the study. Subjects were selected based on location and length of previous cross-cultural experience abroad. Twenty-eight subjects with academic minors in TESOL were also specifically selected. The statistical methodology of this study differed from that of Kelley and Meyers in its treatment of the CCAI Likert scale data as ordinal rather than interval data. After creating an index based on rank scores, one-way analysis of variance and Pearson's correlation coefficient were used for statistical analysis. Overall, the four primary variables of the study were shown to be significantly related to self-perceptions of cross-cultural adaptability. Of the four, cultural distance showed the weakest relationship. One scale, Personal Autonomy, stood out for consistently different results than those of the other three scales. Results were also discussed for TESOL vs. non-TESOL minors, age, gender, and satisfaction with sojourn abroad.