Engineering Software Steyr (Austria)

Zusammenfassung Der Einsatz moderner Digitaltechnologien im Profifußball wie z. B. Wearables wie GPS-Tracker und Pulsuhren sowie Videokameras in Kombination mit KI-gestützten Software-Tools zur Datenanalyse (sogenannte Sports-Analytics-Systeme) kann zur Steigerung der Spielerleistung beitragen und bietet weitere Vorteile für Trainer, Vereine und andere Interessensgruppen wie Medien, z. B. bessere Datengrundlage für Entscheidungen, Steigerung der Profitabilität und gesteigerte Transparenz. Allerdings wird bei der Betrachtung der Auswirkungen des Technologieeinsatzes die Perspektive der Spieler oft vernachlässigt. Diese Arbeit analysiert die Auswirkungen des Einsatzes digitaler Überwachungstechnologien auf Athleten im Profifußball. Konkret wurden Leistung, Emotion, Motivation und Stress der Spieler sowie Datenethik untersucht. Das Datenmaterial bilden 176 in den letzten beiden Jahrzehnten auf Fußballplattformen veröffentlichte Artikel, unter anderem Berichte von Fußballmagazinen und Sportzeitschriften, die inhaltsanalytisch untersucht wurden. In diesen Artikeln wurden insgesamt 285 Textpassagen identifiziert, die sich auf die fünf genannten Faktoren beziehen. Die Ergebnisse zeigen, dass 91 % der 82 kodierten Aussagen zu Leistung einen positiven Einfluss des Einsatzes von Digitaltechnologien nahelegen, jedoch auch 47 % der 60 kodierten Aussagen zu Emotionen über negative Gefühle berichten. Hinsichtlich der Motivation zeigt sich, dass 75 % der 71 dazu kodierten Aussagen auf eine eingeschränkte Selbstbestimmung und damit einhergehend auf eine wahrgenommene Autonomieeinschränkung hinweisen. Die Datenlage zum Stress ist äußerst begrenzt (insgesamt nur fünf kodierte Aussagen), jedoch legen die wenigen vorhandenen Aussagen nahe, dass die von den Athleten wahrgenommene Überwachung und der Leistungsdruck bedeutsame Stressoren sein können. Es wurden außerdem zahlreiche Aussagen zur Datenethik identifiziert (insgesamt 67), die insbesondere in Bezug auf den Schutz der Privatsphäre und die Rechte der Athleten ein problematisches Bild zeichnen (64 %). In einer Gesamtschau verdeutlichen die hier berichteten Befunde das erhebliche Potenzial von Digitaltechnologien zur Verbesserung der Spielerleistung, verweisen jedoch zugleich auf die Notwendigkeit einer kritischen Auseinandersetzung mit möglichen negativen psychologischen Konsequenzen sowie ethischen und datenschutzrechtlichen Fragestellungen.

Background: A 33-year-old pregnant woman experienced ear trauma from contact with a fish while swimming. Afterwards, the woman presented with vertigo and hearing loss. Methods: Clinical examination showed a foreign body (FB) in the middle and inner ear, which was removed surgically under general anesthesia. Postoperative care included antibiotics; the FB was sent to the lab for analysis. Results: Although vertigo resolved after surgical intervention, the woman continued to experience hearing loss and finally experienced deafness. Patient had an unusual mechanism of inner ear trauma. The FB was identified as part of a fish and determined to originate from a fish species of the genus Hemiramphus which is listed as harmless to humans in FishBase. Conclusions: As severe penetration of an FB into the middle and inner ear can lead to serious complications, removal of an FB from the ear requires special competence and should therefore only be performed by specifically skilled professional staff.

The detection of hazardous substances during emergencies is a critical yet dangerous task for first responders. Mobile sensing robots can reduce the risk. Nevertheless, field-ready deployable systems are rare. This paper presents an initiative to provide a deployable sniffer robot for hazardous substance detection. Special care is taken to ensure integration into fire service operations by providing standard operating procedures and eliminating dependency on GNSS or external communication infrastructure. Utilizing the off-the-shelf components for mobility and sensing, combined with onboard data processing, communication, and visualization, the system enables remote, real-time environmental monitoring. Initial field evaluations with Austrian firefighting units demonstrate promising results in mobility, usability, and operational effectiveness. The project aims to close the "Valley of Death" between research and real-world deployment through field-ready design, provision of training concepts, and realistic validation.

This study investigates the impact of promotional timing on fresh and frozen product sales during holiday periods within the supermarket sector. Using a comprehensive dataset from an Austrian retail chain, spanning six years and over 19 million transaction lines, the research highlights the critical interplay between promotional strategies, consumer purchasing behavior, and product perishability. The findings reveal that pre-holiday promotions are particularly effective for fresh products such as fruits, vegetables, meat, and fish, leveraging consumer urgency due to store closures and perishability. In contrast, frozen products exhibit more stable sales patterns, with less pronounced effects from promotional timing due to their suitability for stockpiling. The analysis emphasizes the importance of tailored promotional strategies. Five key implications emerge: the necessity of timing promotions for fresh products to capitalize on consumer urgency, the reduced sensitivity of frozen products to promotional timing, the effectiveness of promotions for high-frequency items in driving sales and traffic, the importance of customizing promotions by product type and leveraging deal intensity, and the critical role of accurate forecasting to minimize waste, particularly for frozen goods. These insights contribute to both theoretical understanding and practical strategies, offering retailers actionable recommendations to enhance sales performance, optimize inventory management, and reduce wastage during holiday periods. The study also highlights avenues for future research, including product-level analyses and the exploration of consumer behavior across different holiday types.

In manufacturing, a bottleneck workstation frequently emerges, complicating production planning and escalating costs. To address this, Drum-Buffer-Rope (DBR) is a widely recognized production planning and control method that focuses on centralizing the bottleneck workstation, thereby improving production system performance. Although DBR is primarily focused on creating a bottleneck schedule, the selection of planning parameters is crucial, as they significantly influence the scheduling process. Conducting a comprehensive full factorial enumeration to identify the ideal planning parameters requires substantial computational effort. Simulation Budget Management (SBM) offers an effective concept to reduce this effort by skipping less promising parameter combinations. This publication introduces a method for integrating SBM into multi-stage multi-item DBR planned and controlled production system with limited capacity, aimed at determining the optimal planning parameters. Furthermore, we conduct a simulation study to analyze the effects of different production system environments, i.e., varying levels of shop load and process uncertainty, on both the performance and parameterization of DBR and the efficacy of SBM. Our results show significant reduction in simulation budget for identifying optimal planning parameters compared to traditional full factorial enumeration.

In this study, an advanced hypoplastic model incorporating the critical state is integrated into smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) for the numerical investigation of geotechnical large-deformation problems. Moreover, a return mapping strategy is proposed to regulate the stress state to avoid calculation failure. Furthermore, a closed-form solution to predicting the failure surface implicitly incorporated in the hypoplastic model is derived. The proposed SPH method is examined with element tests such as the oedometer test and biaxial compression test to observe a good performance of the SPH model. Finally, the SPH model is applied to numerically reproducing sand column collapse to investigate the effect of the initial void ratio on the behavior of soil.