HACCP numa indústria corticeira: implementação, identificação de pontos críticos e proposta de acções correctivas

Mestrado em Engenharia Química

Os preços de transferência e o âmbito de intervenção do auditor: abordagem e enquadramento

Dissertação de Mestrado apresentado ao Instituto de Contabilidade e Administração do obtenção do grau de Mestre em Auditoria Auditoria, sob orientação de Adalmiro Álvaro Malheiro de Castro Andrade

Principles of communication and negotiation

In this chapter we outline the fundamentals of communication and negotiation in a group of people. Being aware of these generic principals greatly contributes to improve the effectiveness and the outcome of the meetings that MUTW students will be engaged in.

Working in and on groups: an illustration of the principles of exploratory practice in an esp classroom

Neste artigo, descrevo e analiso uma actividade de trabalho em grupo desenvolvida para uma aula da disciplina de Língua Inglesa VI das turmas do 3º ano do Curso de Línguas e Secretariado do Instituto Superior de Contabilidade e Administração do Porto (ISCAP). No enquadramento teórico, abordam-se questões relacionadas com o trabalho em grupo numa aula de língua estrangeira, nomeadamente a dimensão social da sala de aula em geral e da interacção aluno-aluno em particular. Apresentam-se então os princípios da Exploratory Practice, com ênfase na possibilidade preconizada por esta abordagem de se poder transformar uma actividade de reflexão e discussão sobre o processo de ensino/aprendizagem numa unidade pedagógica. Segue-se a apresentação da proposta didáctica, respectivo plano de aula e alguns exemplos dos textos produzidos pelos alunos. O artigo termina com a apresentação de alguns comentários críticos, realçando-se a contribuição da Exploratory Practice para o desenvolvimento de uma maior consciencialização por parte dos alunos do seu processo de aprendizagem.

QoS-based surrogates selection and service proposal formulation in offloading environments

Resource constraints are becoming a problem as many of the wireless mobile devices have increased generality. Our work tries to address this growing demand on resources and performance, by proposing the dynamic selection of neighbor nodes for cooperative service execution. This selection is in uenced by user's quality of service requirements expressed in his request, tailoring provided service to user's speci c needs. In this paper we improve our proposal's formulation algorithm with the ability to trade o time for the quality of the solution. At any given time, a complete solution for service execution exists, and the quality of that solution is expected to improve overtime.

A feedback-based decentralised coordination model for distributed open real-time systems

Moving towards autonomous operation and management of increasingly complex open distributed real-time systems poses very significant challenges. This is particularly true when reaction to events must be done in a timely and predictable manner while guaranteeing Quality of Service (QoS) constraints imposed by users, the environment, or applications. In these scenarios, the system should be able to maintain a global feasible QoS level while allowing individual nodes to autonomously adapt under different constraints of resource availability and input quality. This paper shows how decentralised coordination of a group of autonomous interdependent nodes can emerge with little communication, based on the robust self-organising principles of feedback. Positive feedback is used to reinforce the selection of the new desired global service solution, while negative feedback discourages nodes to act in a greedy fashion as this adversely impacts on the provided service levels at neighbouring nodes. The proposed protocol is general enough to be used in a wide range of scenarios characterised by a high degree of openness and dynamism where coordination tasks need to be time dependent. As the reported results demonstrate, it requires less messages to be exchanged and it is faster to achieve a globally acceptable near-optimal solution than other available approaches.

Supplier's selection model based on an empirical study

The problem of selecting suppliers/partners is a crucial and important part in the process of decision making for companies that intend to perform competitively in their area of activity. The selection of supplier/partner is a time and resource-consuming task that involves data collection and a careful analysis of the factors that can positively or negatively influence the choice. Nevertheless it is a critical process that affects significantly the operational performance of each company. In this work, there were identified five broad selection criteria: Quality, Financial, Synergies, Cost, and Production System. Within these criteria, it was also included five sub-criteria. After the identification criteria, a survey was elaborated and companies were contacted in order to understand which factors have more weight in their decisions to choose the partners. Interpreted the results and processed the data, it was adopted a model of linear weighting to reflect the importance of each factor. The model has a hierarchical structure and can be applied with the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) method or Value Analysis. The goal of the paper it's to supply a selection reference model that can represent an orientation/pattern for a decision making on the suppliers/partners selection process

Analysis of the domain of applicability of an algorithm for a resources system selection problem for Distributed/Agile/Virtual Enterprises integration

The process of resources systems selection takes an important part in Distributed/Agile/Virtual Enterprises (D/A/V Es) integration. However, the resources systems selection is still a difficult matter to solve in a D/A/VE, as it is pointed out in this paper. Globally, we can say that the selection problem has been equated from different aspects, originating different kinds of models/algorithms to solve it. In order to assist the development of a web prototype tool (broker tool), intelligent and flexible, that integrates all the selection model activities and tools, and with the capacity to adequate to each D/A/V E project or instance (this is the major goal of our final project), we intend in this paper to show: a formulation of a kind of resources selection problem and the limitations of the algorithms proposed to solve it. We formulate a particular case of the problem as an integer programming, which is solved using simplex and branch and bound algorithms, and identify their performance limitations (in terms of processing time) based on simulation results. These limitations depend on the number of processing tasks and on the number of pre-selected resources per processing tasks, defining the domain of applicability of the algorithms for the problem studied. The limitations detected open the necessity of the application of other kind of algorithms (approximate solution algorithms) outside the domain of applicability founded for the algorithms simulated. However, for a broker tool it is very important the knowledge of algorithms limitations, in order to, based on problem features, develop and select the most suitable algorithm that guarantees a good performance.

Crossing genetic and swarm intelligence algorithms to generate logic circuits

Genetic Algorithms (GAs) are adaptive heuristic search algorithm based on the evolutionary ideas of natural selection and genetic. The basic concept of GAs is designed to simulate processes in natural system necessary for evolution, specifically those that follow the principles first laid down by Charles Darwin of survival of the fittest. On the other hand, Particle swarm optimization (PSO) is a population based stochastic optimization technique inspired by social behavior of bird flocking or fish schooling. PSO shares many similarities with evolutionary computation techniques such as GAs. The system is initialized with a population of random solutions and searches for optima by updating generations. However, unlike GA, PSO has no evolution operators such as crossover and mutation. In PSO, the potential solutions, called particles, fly through the problem space by following the current optimum particles. PSO is attractive because there are few parameters to adjust. This paper presents hybridization between a GA algorithm and a PSO algorithm (crossing the two algorithms). The resulting algorithm is applied to the synthesis of combinational logic circuits. With this combination is possible to take advantage of the best features of each particular algorithm.

Terminology and knowledge engineering conference. New frontiers in the constructive symbiosis of terminology and knowledge engineering

To meet the increasing demands of the complex inter-organizational processes and the demand for continuous innovation and internationalization, it is evident that new forms of organisation are being adopted, fostering more intensive collaboration processes and sharing of resources, in what can be called collaborative networks (Camarinha-Matos, 2006:03). Information and knowledge are crucial resources in collaborative networks, being their management fundamental processes to optimize. Knowledge organisation and collaboration systems are thus important instruments for the success of collaborative networks of organisations having been researched in the last decade in the areas of computer science, information science, management sciences, terminology and linguistics. Nevertheless, research in this area didn’t give much attention to multilingual contexts of collaboration, which pose specific and challenging problems. It is then clear that access to and representation of knowledge will happen more and more on a multilingual setting which implies the overcoming of difficulties inherent to the presence of multiple languages, through the use of processes like localization of ontologies. Although localization, like other processes that involve multilingualism, is a rather well-developed practice and its methodologies and tools fruitfully employed by the language industry in the development and adaptation of multilingual content, it has not yet been sufficiently explored as an element of support to the development of knowledge representations - in particular ontologies - expressed in more than one language. Multilingual knowledge representation is then an open research area calling for cross-contributions from knowledge engineering, terminology, ontology engineering, cognitive sciences, computational linguistics, natural language processing, and management sciences. This workshop joined researchers interested in multilingual knowledge representation, in a multidisciplinary environment to debate the possibilities of cross-fertilization between knowledge engineering, terminology, ontology engineering, cognitive sciences, computational linguistics, natural language processing, and management sciences applied to contexts where multilingualism continuously creates new and demanding challenges to current knowledge representation methods and techniques. In this workshop six papers dealing with different approaches to multilingual knowledge representation are presented, most of them describing tools, approaches and results obtained in the development of ongoing projects. In the first case, Andrés Domínguez Burgos, Koen Kerremansa and Rita Temmerman present a software module that is part of a workbench for terminological and ontological mining, Termontospider, a wiki crawler that aims at optimally traverse Wikipedia in search of domainspecific texts for extracting terminological and ontological information. The crawler is part of a tool suite for automatically developing multilingual termontological databases, i.e. ontologicallyunderpinned multilingual terminological databases. In this paper the authors describe the basic principles behind the crawler and summarized the research setting in which the tool is currently tested. In the second paper, Fumiko Kano presents a work comparing four feature-based similarity measures derived from cognitive sciences. The purpose of the comparative analysis presented by the author is to verify the potentially most effective model that can be applied for mapping independent ontologies in a culturally influenced domain. For that, datasets based on standardized pre-defined feature dimensions and values, which are obtainable from the UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS) have been used for the comparative analysis of the similarity measures. The purpose of the comparison is to verify the similarity measures based on the objectively developed datasets. According to the author the results demonstrate that the Bayesian Model of Generalization provides for the most effective cognitive model for identifying the most similar corresponding concepts existing for a targeted socio-cultural community. In another presentation, Thierry Declerck, Hans-Ulrich Krieger and Dagmar Gromann present an ongoing work and propose an approach to automatic extraction of information from multilingual financial Web resources, to provide candidate terms for building ontology elements or instances of ontology concepts. The authors present a complementary approach to the direct localization/translation of ontology labels, by acquiring terminologies through the access and harvesting of multilingual Web presences of structured information providers in the field of finance, leading to both the detection of candidate terms in various multilingual sources in the financial domain that can be used not only as labels of ontology classes and properties but also for the possible generation of (multilingual) domain ontologies themselves. In the next paper, Manuel Silva, António Lucas Soares and Rute Costa claim that despite the availability of tools, resources and techniques aimed at the construction of ontological artifacts, developing a shared conceptualization of a given reality still raises questions about the principles and methods that support the initial phases of conceptualization. These questions become, according to the authors, more complex when the conceptualization occurs in a multilingual setting. To tackle these issues the authors present a collaborative platform – conceptME - where terminological and knowledge representation processes support domain experts throughout a conceptualization framework, allowing the inclusion of multilingual data as a way to promote knowledge sharing and enhance conceptualization and support a multilingual ontology specification. In another presentation Frieda Steurs and Hendrik J. Kockaert present us TermWise, a large project dealing with legal terminology and phraseology for the Belgian public services, i.e. the translation office of the ministry of justice, a project which aims at developing an advanced tool including expert knowledge in the algorithms that extract specialized language from textual data (legal documents) and whose outcome is a knowledge database including Dutch/French equivalents for legal concepts, enriched with the phraseology related to the terms under discussion. Finally, Deborah Grbac, Luca Losito, Andrea Sada and Paolo Sirito report on the preliminary results of a pilot project currently ongoing at UCSC Central Library, where they propose to adapt to subject librarians, employed in large and multilingual Academic Institutions, the model used by translators working within European Union Institutions. The authors are using User Experience (UX) Analysis in order to provide subject librarians with a visual support, by means of “ontology tables” depicting conceptual linking and connections of words with concepts presented according to their semantic and linguistic meaning. The organizers hope that the selection of papers presented here will be of interest to a broad audience, and will be a starting point for further discussion and cooperation.

Finding a school technological partner: a multicriteria method for school information system producer selection

The choice of an information systems is a critical factor of success in an organization's performance, since, by involving multiple decision-makers, with often conflicting objectives, several alternatives with aggressive marketing, makes it particularly complex by the scope of a consensus. The main objective of this work is to make the analysis and selection of a information system to support the school management, pedagogical and administrative components, using a multicriteria decision aid system – MMASSITI – Multicriteria Method- ology to Support the Selection of Information Systems/Information Technologies – integrates a multicriteria model that seeks to provide a systematic approach in the process of choice of Information Systems, able to produce sustained recommendations concerning the decision scope. Its application to a case study has identi- fied the relevant factors in the selection process of school educational and management information system and get a solution that allows the decision maker’ to compare the quality of the various alternatives.

Group decision making for selection of an information system in a business context

The main objective of this work is to report on the development of a multi-criteria methodology to support the assessment and selection of an Information System (IS) framework in a business context. The objective is to select a technological partner that provides the engine to be the basis for the development of a customized application for shrinkage reduction on the supply chains management. Furthermore, the proposed methodology di ers from most of the ones previously proposed in the sense that 1) it provides the decision makers with a set of pre-defined criteria along with their description and suggestions on how to measure them and 2)it uses a continuous scale with two reference levels and thus no normalization of the valuations is required. The methodology here proposed is has been designed to be easy to understand and use, without a specific support of a decision making analyst.

Expatriates recruitment and selection for long-term international assignments in portuguese companies

Long-term international assignments’ increase requires more attention being paid for the preparation of these foreign assignments, especially on the recruitment and selection process of expatriates. This article explores how the recruitment and selection process of expatriates is developed in Portuguese companies, examining the main criteria on recruitment and selection of expatriates’ decision to send international assignments. The paper is based on qualitative case studies of companies located in Portugal. The data were collected through semi-structured interviews of 42 expatriates and 18 organisational representatives as well from nine Portuguese companies. The findings show that the most important criteria are: (1) trust from managers, (2) years in service, (3) previous technical and language competences, (4) organisational knowledge and, (5) availability. Based on the findings, the article discusses in detail the main theoretical and managerial implications. Suggestions for further research are also presented.

An approach for automated service selection and ranking using services choreography

In today’s highly competitive market, it is critical to provide customers services with a high level of configuration to answer their business needs. Knowing in advance the performance associated with a specific choreography of services (e.g., by taking into account the expected results of each component service) represents an important asset that allows businesses to provide a global service tailored to customers’ specific requests. This research work aims at advancing the state-of-the-art in this area by proposing an approach for service selection and ranking using services choreography, predicting the behavior of the services considering customers’ requirements and preferences, business process constraints and characteristics of the execution environment.

Criteria for the selection of foster families and monitoring of placements.: Comparative study of the application of the Casey Foster Applicant Inventory-Applicant Version (CFAI-A)

Based on a literature review, this article frames different stages of the foster care process, identifying a set of standardized measures in the American and Portuguese contexts which, if implemented, could contribute towards higher levels of foster success. The article continues with the presentation of a comparative study, based on the application of the Casey Foster Applicant Inventory-Applicant Version (CFAI-A) questionnaire, in the aforementioned contexts. Taking a comparative analyses of CFAI-A's psychometric characteristics in four different samples as a starting point, one discovered that despite the fact that the questionnaire was adapted to Portuguese reality, it kept the quality values presented on the American samples. It specifically shows significant values regarding reliability and validity. This questionnaire, which aims to assess the potential of foster families, also supports the technical staff's decision making process regarding the monitoring and support of foster families, while it also promotes a better decision in the placement process towards the child's integration and development.