Bøger af Christian Nitschke

Master's Thesis from the year 2005 in the subject Engineering - Industrial Engineering and Management, grade: 2,0, Stellenbosch Universitiy, course: Operations Management, language: English, abstract: The research report takes an in-depth look at the automotive industry and their major participants in the upstream value chain. The different parties involved are the automotive manufacturers (OEMs) and their suppliers. The overall goal of the following report is to identify suitable business models for small to medium sized (SME) automotive suppliers.As the automotive value chain currently undergoes an evolutionary change towards a diminishing vertical integration of the OEMs, it becomes a challenging issue to reconfigure the responsibilities of the suppliers. Thereby OEMs and their suppliers have to cope with a shift from a functional to a process orientated value chain. During this reorganization of the OEM-supplier interface, enterprises realign their strategic intent towards their core competencies as well. Besides the shifting value chain, both suppliers and OEMs have to cope with a consolidation in their industries. This consolidation is impacted by stagnating traditional markets, an ongoing globalization of the value chain, and an increasing productivity pressure in the automotive industry.Looking at the automotive supplier, it becomes obvious that the suppliers are on the one hand challenged by productivity pressures and on the other hand have the opportunity to take over more business of the automotive value chain. The growth potential requires changes in the area of supply chain management and new types of collaboration in the supply network. This prospective development is mainly influenced by a trend towards the outsourcing of entire processes by the OEMs and the increasing need for future innovations in the automotive industry.After discussing the above mentioned issues, the report analyses the role of suppliers with respect to their main customers, the automotive OEMs. Based on the findings business models for suppliers are assessed and key success factors for small to medium sized suppliers are proposed and evaluated. The findings of the evaluation are translated into suggestions for most suitable business models of SMEs. The report concludes with recommendations for the strategy building process indicates problems concerning the shifting value chain, and points out the importance of further research in the field of the small to medium sized automotive supplier industry. [...]

Inhaltsangabe:Introduction: Reconstruction of real-world scenes from a set of multiple images is a topic in Computer Vision and 3D Computer Graphics with many interesting applications. There is a relation to Augmented and Mixed Reality (AR/MR), Computer-Supported Collaborative Work (CSCW), Computer-Aided industrial/architectural Design (CAD), modeling of the real-world (e.g. computer games, scenes/effects in movies), entertainment (e.g. 3D TV/Video) and recognition/analyzing of real-world characteristics by computer systems and robots. There exists a powerful algorithm theory for shape reconstruction from arbitrary viewpoints, called shape from photo-consistency. However, it is computationally expensive and hence can not be used with applications in the field of 3D video or CSCW as well as interactive 3D model creation. Attempts have been made to achieve real-time framerates using PC cluster systems. While these provide enough performance they are also expensive and less flexible. Approaches that use GPU hardware-acceleration on single workstations achieve interactive framerates for novel-view synthesis, but do not provide an explicit volumetric representation of the whole scene. The proposed approach shows the efforts in developing a GPU hardware-accelerated framework for obtaining the volumetric photo hull of a dynamic 3D scene as seen from multiple calibrated cameras. High performance is achieved by employing a shape from silhouette technique in advance to obtain a tight initial volume for shape from photo-consistency. Also several speed-up techniques are presented to increase efficiency. Since the entire processing is done on a single PC, the framework can be applied to mobile setups, enabling a wide range of further applications. The approach is explained using programmable vertex and fragment processors and compared to highly optimized CPU implementations. It is shown that the new approach can outperform the latter by more than one magnitude. The thesis is organized as follows: Chapter 1 contains an introduction, giving an overview with classification of related techniques, statement of the main problem, novelty of the proposed approach and its fields of application. Chapter 2 surveys related work in the area of dynamic scene reconstruction by shape from silhouette and shape from photo-consistency. The focus lies on high performance reconstruction and hardware-acceleration. Chapter 3 introduces the theoretical basis for the proposed [¿]