Charakterisierung und Störstoffanalyse von rückgewonnenen Stoffströmen aus Wärmedämmverbundsystemen

Due to the growing energy requirements, the proportion of external thermal insulation composite systems (ETICS) installed has increased significantly during the past 50 years. Due to the longevity of these systems, ETICS waste is currently accumulating. Owing to the complex construction as well as a multitude of differently installed materials and substances of the past generations, there are many uncertainties and problems with the clean and low-pollutant processing of such systems. In the frame of this work, the ETICS were processed and sorted before being screened for ingredients or pollutants as well as for the purity of the recovered material fractions.     

Quality management in service ecosystems

Service-oriented architectures and Web services mature and have become more widely accepted and used by industry. This growing adoption increased the demands for new ways of using Web service technology. Users start re-combining and mediating other providers’ services in ways that have not been anticipated by their original provider. Within organisations and cross-organisational communities, discoverable services are organised in repositories providing convenient access to adaptable end-to-end business processes. This idea is captured in the term Service Ecosystem. This paper addresses the question of how quality management can be performed in such service ecosystems. Service quality management is a key challenge when services are composed of a dynamic set of heterogeneous sub-services from different service providers. This paper contributes to this important area by developing a reference model of quality management in service ecosystems. We illustrate the application of the reference model in an exploratory case study. With this case study, we show how the reference model helps to derive requirements for the implementation and support of quality management in an exemplary service ecosystem in public administration.     

Requirements Engineering f��r Product Service Systems

In recent years, manufacturing companies and service providers have moved towards offering customer-specific problem solutions. These integrated bundles usually consist of hardware, software, and service components and are called product service systems (PSS) or hybrid products. Since the success of the resulting solution depends on the understanding of all requirements, requirements engineering (RE) has become a key factor. The article analyzes the state of the art of RE for PSS based on an extensive literature review in the domains of product-, software-, and service engineering. For this, criteria are derived from the characteristics of PSS and from the task area of RE in the life cycle of PSS. Based on these criteria we analyze the most established RE approaches for their suitability for PSS. An important finding is that integrated/interdisciplinary approaches for RE are missing. Moreover, the maturity of RE approaches in the three domains varies significantly. All analyzed approaches heavily rely on concepts and solution characteristics of their own domain so that a transfer to other domains is hardly possible. This literature review lays the foundation for successful RE for PSS and especially for future research aiming at combining and integrating RE approaches and models of product-, software-, and service engineering. Such requirement models could connect concepts of single domains and enable an integrated and seamless RE for PSS.     

Electronic Meeting Support for Councils

City councils hold meetings several times a week. There is a need for computer support at certain meetings. This paper examines the potential for group support systems for use in city council meetings and shows in what ways they can be helpful in pre-meeting and post-meeting activities. The study is based on 17 computer-supported city council meetings, carried out in Stuttgart, Kornwestheim and other cities as part of the Cuparla Project between 1996 and 1998. Three of these meetings are described in the paper as brief case studies. Following this, all 17 meeting sequences are evaluated and analysed. Guidelines have been developed from the results of the study for the introduction of group support systems in city council meetings.     

Quantitative detection of species-specific DNA in feedstuffs and fish meals

A sensitive and rapid method for the quantitative detection of bovine-, ovine-, swine-, and chicken-specific mitochondrial DNA sequences based on real-time PCR has been developed. The specificity of the primers and probes for real-time PCR has been tested using DNA samples of other vertebrate species that may also be present in rendered products. The quantitative detection was performed with dual-labeled probes (TaqMan) using absolute quantification with external standards of single species meat-and-bone meals. This method facilitates the detection of 0.01% of the target species-derived material in concentrate feed mixtures and fish meals.     

An Improved Neural Network Application for Short-Term Load Forecasting in Power Systems

In this paper an improved neural network application for short-term load forecasting purposes is presented. To speed up the learning process on one side, and not to jeopardize the stability performance of the learning process on the other side, the adaptive approach to the learning-rate parameter has been employed. Also, instead of learning overall load characteristics, the preprocessing of input data has been designed with the idea to learn only load demand behavior that is important for a certain period. The proposed neural network has shown good performance, even in the case of the incomplete data temperature set and at high irregularities in weekly load data.     

Effect of lattice anharmonicity in the structural phase transformation of Laves phase HfV2 alloy: A first-principles investigation

First-principles theory was developed to study the structural phase transformations in the Laves phase HfV₂ alloy. We explored the energy landscape and established the role of lattice anharmonicity underlying the structural phase transitions. Our approach is based on a phenomenological Landau theory for the structural phase transition and a mean-field approximation for the free energy. First-principles calculations were utilized to obtain the distortion energy as a function of relevant deformations, and to deduce parameters for constructing the free energy. Our result for the phase transition temperature of HfV₂ is in good agreement with experiment. We find that the high-temperature cubic C15 phase is stabilized by the effect of lattice anharmonicity. The theory also predicts an anomalous increase in shear modulus with increasing temperature for systems where the anharmonicity is pronounced.     

Prozessorientierte Wirtschaftlichkeitsuntersuchung für E-Government

E-Government economy needs to be dealt with in a multidimensional and multiperspective way. Existing evaluation concepts, though, hardly meet these pre-requisites. In this paper we give an overview of approaches and difficulties in evaluating IT-projects in public administration. Current E-Government evaluation approaches and surveys are compared as to their fitness to judge on an actual E-Government project. Based on the E-Government evaluation criteria used for the assessment of the evaluation approaches we develop a process-oriented E-Government evaluation concept which is illustrated in a mini-case.     

Children's moral reasoning and their perceptions of television violence

This experiment examined the effect of a child's age on his or her interpretation of an act of interpersonal violence on television. One hundred eighty-four children in 2 age groups were randomly assigned to 1 of 4 viewing conditions in which they watched a violent video clip. The clips depicted identical violent acts; however, punishment (yes/no) of the violent act and provocation (yes/no) for the violent act were manipulated to create the 4 conditions. Following the video clip, children were asked to judge whether the act was right or wrong and why. They then engaged in a test of their willingness to choose aggression as a solution to a hypothetical interpersonal conflict. As predicted, younger children thought that unpunished violence was more right than punished violence. Older children thought that provoked violence was more right than unprovoked violence, although this result only approached significance. Children's willingness to choose a violent story ending to a hypothetical interpersonal conflict was related to their experimental condition for older children but not for younger children.