New Shop Floor Control Approaches for Virtual Enterprises

The virtual enterprise paradigm seems a fit response to face market instability and the volatile nature of business opportunities increasing enterprise’s interest in similar forms of networked organisations. The dynamic environment of a virtual enterprise requires that partners in the consortium own reconfigurable shop floors. This paper presents new approaches to shop floor control that meet the requirements of the new industrial paradigms and argues on work re-organization at shop floor level.

Coalition based approach for shop floor agility – a multiagent approach

Dissertation submitted for a PhD degree in Electrical Engineering, speciality of Robotics and Integrated Manufacturing from the Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia

A multiagent based shop floor transportation system simulator

Dissertação para obtenção do Grau de Mestre em Engenharia Electrotécnica e de Computadores

Service-oriented infrastructure to support the control, monitoring and management of a shop floor system

Dissertação para obtenção do Grau de Mestre em Engenharia Electrotécnica e de Computadores

Is ambient intelligence a truly human-centric paradigm in industry? Current research and application scenario

Based on the paper presented at the International Conference “Autonomous Systems: inter-relations of technical and societal issues”, organized by IET with the support of the Portuguese-German collaboration project on “Technology Assessment of Autonomous Robotics” (DAAD/CRUP) at FCT-UNL, Biblioteca da UNL, Campus de Caparica on 5-6 November 2009.

Diagnosis of an EPS module

Dissertação apresentada na Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia da Universidade Nova de Lisboa para obtenção do grau de Mestre em Engenharia Electrotécnica e Computadores

Product extension services deployment platform

Due to the progresses made in the branch of embedded technologies, manufacturers are becoming able to pack their shop floor level manufacturing resources with even more complex functionalities. This technological progression is radically changing the way production systems are designed and deployed, as well as, monitored and controlled. The dissemination of smart devices inside production processes confers new visibility on the production system while enabling for a more efficient and effective management of the operations. By turning the current manufacturing resources functionalities into services based on a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), in order to expose them as a service to the user, the binomial manufacturing resource/service will push the entire manufacturing enterprise visibility to another level while enabling the global optimization of the operations and processes of a production system while, at the same time, supporting its accommodation to the operational spike easily and with reduced impact on production. The present work implements a Cloud Manufacturing infrastructure for achieving the resource/service value-added i.e. to facilitate the creation of services that are the composition of currently available atomic services. In this context, manufacturing resource virtualization (i.e. formalization of resources capabilities into services accessible inside and outside the enterprise) and semantic representation/description are the pillars for achieving resource service composition. In conclusion, the present work aims to act on the manufacturing resource layer where physical resources and shop floor capabilities are going to be provided to the user as a SaaS (Software as a Service) and/or IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service).

Risk of employing an evolvable production system

Nowadays manufacturing companies are facing a more challenging environment due to the unpredictability of the markets in order to survive. Enterprises need to keep innovating and deliver products with new internal or external characteristics. There are strategies and solutions, to different organisational level from strategic to operational, when technology is growing faster in operational level, more specifically in manufacturing system. This means that companies have to deal with the changes of the emergent manufacturing systems while it can be expensive and not easy to be implement. An agile manufacturing system can help to cope with the markets changeability. Evolvable Production Systems (EPS) is an emergent paradigm which aims to bring new solutions to deal with changeability. The proposed paradigm is characterised by modularity and intends to introduce high flexibility and dynamism at shop floor level through the use of the evolution of new computational devices and technology. This new approach brings to enterprises the ability to plug and unplug new devices and allowing fast reformulation of the production line without reprogramming. There is no doubt about the advantages and benefits of this emerging technology but the feasibility and applicability is still under questioned. Most researches in this area are focused on technical side, explaining the advantages of those systems while there are no sufficient works discussing the implementation risks from different perspective, including business owner. The main objective of this work is to propose a methodology and model to identify, classify and measure potential risk associated with an implementation of this emergent paradigm. To quantify the proposed comprehensive risk model, an Intelligent Decision system is developed employing Fuzzy Inference System to deal with the knowledge of experts, as there are no historical data and sufficient research on this area. The result can be the vulnerability assessment of implementing EPS technology in manufacturing companies when the focus is more on SMEs. The present dissertation used the experts’ knowledge and experiences, who were involved in FP7 project IDEAS, which is one of the leading projects in this area.

Análise e dimensionamento de pavimentos mistos slim floor

Dissertação para obtencão do Grau de Mestre em Engenharia Civil - Perfil Estruturas

Aircraft Engines Maintenance Costs and Reliability: An Appraisal of the Decision Process to Remove an Engine for a Shop Visit Aiming at Minimum Maintenance Unit Cost

Dissertação apresentada como requisito parcial para obtenção do grau de Mestre em Estatística e Gestão de Informação.

Corporate social responsibility and its effect on image and reputation: The case of L’Oréal and its acquisition of The Body Shop

A Work Project, presented as part of the requirements for the Award of a Masters Degree in Management from the NOVA – School of Business and Economics

Evaluation of the impact of L’Oréal’s acquisition of The Body Shop on both brands

A Work Project, presented as part of the requirements for the Award of a Masters Degree in Management from the NOVA – School of Business and Economics

L'Oreal acquisition policy: The Body Shop case study

The Work Project I present focuses on the analysis of L’Oréal acquisition policy, trying to outline if the M&A deals it has led over the last 14 years have succeeded in creating value. By replicating the model proposed by Todd Hazelkorn, Marc Zenner and Anil Shivdasani in their paper “Creating Value with Mergers and Acquisitions”, I analyzed the 29 M&A deals that L’Oréal has led worldwide, understanding the common factors able to explain the success of such transactions. Further, I focused on The Body Shop case study, a highly criticized and controversial acquisition that has proved to be profitable and able to create value.

A process-based control for evolvable production systems

Dissertação apresentada na Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia da Universidade Nova de Lisboa para a obtenção do grau de Mestre em Engenharia Electrotécnica e de Computadores

Continente Choose&Drive

A Work Project, presented as part of the requirements for the Award of a Masters Degree in Management from the NOVA – School of Business and Economics