A CYBER-PHYSICAL SYSTEM WITH A MIXED REALITY INTERFACE

ABSTRACT

Undoubtedly, the corporation has become one of the most powerful forces in twentieth century economies. It is both a method of property tenure and a means of organizing economic life. The corporation’s separation of ownership into component parts, control and beneficial ownership has brought into sharp focus the fundamental divergence between shareholder and management interests. With sole proprietorships, the owners are usually the same people who manage and operate the business. But in large companies, corporate officers manage the business on behalf of the owners. This separation of ownership and control creates a potential conflict of interests. In particular, managers may care about their salaries, fringe benefits, or the size of their offices and support staff; or perhaps even the overall size of the business they are running, more than they care about the shareholders’ profits. This agency problem caused by the separation of ownership and control has long been a great concern globally. This is particularly so in the wake of mass corporate scandals witnessed in the past couple of years. Just like any other country, Nigeria has faced the same problem. In Nigeria, the Companies and Allied Matters Act, Cap. C20, LFN, 2004, was enacted as the principal statute regulating the formation and management of companies. The central tenets of the Act have been accountability, efficiency and objectivity on the part of management. However, cracks are visible in many areas of the Act with gross attendant consequences for directors. It is found out that the exercise of the powers as conferred by the Act on the directors to direct and manage the business of the company is vulnerable to abuse. This is particularly the ABSTRACT

This thesis presents a cyber physical system that mirrors and augments real world devices and their functionality in a virtual representation of the real world. The energy characteristics of real world devices are measured and presented in the virtual reality interface in real-time. The virtual reality interface augments the functionality of the real world system with virtual inputs and outputs. The system is designed and implemented using a multi-agent software model. The challenge of keeping real and virtual worlds synchronous and consistent is solved by introducing a synchronisation block.

The synchronisation and consistency of the real and virtual worlds were evaluated from a technical perspective. Synchronisation was evaluated with timing measurements. They revealed that the system operated most of the time without breaking timing conditions. Still, there were at times larger delays which showed that the system was not synchronous all the time. Consistency was verified with empirical measurements of visually observable states. The responses of the system to the user actions were mainly consistent, although a malfunction leading to inconsistency between the states of virtual and real devices was found.

The results demonstrate that the real world devices and their corresponding virtual representations are controlled synchronously and their visually observable states remain consistent. The thesis shows that it is feasible to augment a cyber-physical system with virtual objects, for example virtual sensors, which operate and interact synchronously with the real world system. The thesis concludes with a discussion on findings and future work.

Key words: cyber-physical system, mixed reality, virtual reality, synchronicity, consistency, user interaction, energy measurement.

Juntunen J. (2016) Kyberfysikaalinen järjestelmä sekoitetun todellisuuden rajapinnassa. Oulun yliopisto, sähkötekniikan osasto, sähkötekniikan opintosuunta. Diplomityö, 76 s.

case when directors are partially permitted to deal in contracts with their own companies. There is therefore the need for amendment of the Act. This study examines the relevant provisions of the Companies and Allied Matters Act, 2004 as well as the two Codes of Corporate Governance for public companies in Nigeria using doctrinal method. The objective is to ensure that there is corporate accountability.