Sweetening abroad

This project aims to plan the internationalization strategy of the Portuguese small firm A Tarte, producer of a gourmet pie, to a European country in order to enlarge its sales. Therefore, a thorough analysis of the company and of the bakery market is performed to understand the complete environment. It is followed by a quantitative analysis of fourteen countries to select the most attractive market, whose results indicated United Kingdom as the best option. After, the direct exporting entry mode was analysed and costs estimated. Lastly, the expansion to London is recommended to be pursued with a UK local agent/distributor support

Dpws middleware to support agent-based manufacturing control and simulation

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

An ontology-based representation of an agent-based controlled robotic cell

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

An agent-based evolutionary approach for manufacturing system layout design

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

Expressão em Escherichia coli de antigénios do Cell fusing agent virus (Flaviviridae: Flavivirus) como proteína de fusão

RESUMO: O Cell Fusing Agent Vírus (CFAV), considerado como o primeiro “flavivírus específicos de insectos” (ISF), parece estar exclusivamente adaptado aos seus hospedeiros, não replicando em células de vertebrados. Apesar de ter sido identificado há mais de três décadas (1975), a verdade é que muito pouco se conhece sobre a sua biologia. Dado o seu parentesco filogenético com alguns outros flavivírus encontrados naturalmente em mosquitos de diferentes géneros colhidos em diferentes regiões do globo, este vírus poderá ser usado como modelo para o estudo de ISF. No entanto, necessitam do desenvolvimento de ferramentas básicas, tais como clones moleculares ou baterias de soros contendo anticorpos que reconheçam uma ou mais proteínas codificadas pelo genoma viral, produzidas, por exemplo, a partir de antigénios virais produzidos de forma recombinante. Com este trabalho pretendeu-se a optimização de protocolos que permitiram a expressão e purificação parcial de quatro proteínas [duas proteínas estruturais (C e E) e duas não estruturais (NS3hel e NS5B)] do CFAV em E. coli, todas elas produzidas como proteínas de fusão com “caudas” (tags) de hexahistidina nos seus extremos carboxilo. Para a expansão do CFAV foram utilizadas células Aedes albopictus (C6/36). Após a realização da extracção do RNA viral e a obtenção de cDNA, procedeu-se amplificação, por RT-PCR, das regiões codificantes das proteínas C, E, NS3hel e NS5B, utilizando primers específicos. Os quatro fragmentos de DNA foram independentemente inseridos no vector pJTE1.2/blunt usando E. coli NovaBlue como hospedeira de clonagem e, posteriormente, inseridos em vectores de expressão pET-28b e pET-29b usando E. coli BL21(DE3)pLysS e Rosetta(DE3)pLysS como hospedeiras de expressão. Após da indução, expressão e purificação das proteínas recombinantes C, E, NS3hel e NS5B, foi confirmada a autenticidade destas proteínas produzidas através do método Western Blot com um anticorpo anti-histidina. --------- ABSTRACT: The Cell Fusing Agent virus (CFAV) considered as the first "insect- specific flavivirus" (ISF) and seems to be uniquely adapted to their hosts, not replicating in vertebrate cells. Although it has been known for more than three decades (1975), the truth is very little is known about its biology. Given its close phylogenetic relationship with other flavivirus naturally circulating in various genera of mosquitoes collected from different regions of the globe, this virus could be used as a model for the study of ISF. However, such studies require the development of experimental basic tools, such as molecular clones or serum batteries containing antibodies that recognize one or more proteins encoded by the viral genome, produced, for example, from viral antigens recombinant produced. In this work, we carried out the optimization of protocols that allowed the expression and partial purification of four proteins [two structural proteins (C and E) and two nonstructural proteins (NS3hel and NS5B)] CFAV in E. coli as fusion protein for c-terminal hexahistidine tags. For the expansion of the CFAV we used Aedes albopictus (C6/36) cells. After completion of the viral RNA extraction and cDNA obtained, amplification of the coding regions of the C, E, NS5B and NS3hel proteins was carried out by RT-PCR using specific primers. The four DNA fragments were independently inserted into the vector pJTE1.2/blunt using E. coli NovaBlue as cloning host and then inserted into expression vectors pET-28b and pET-29b using E. coli BL21(DE3)pLysS and Rosetta(DE3)pLysS as expression host. After induction, expression and purification of recombinant C, E, NS3hel and NS5B proteins Western Blot analyses with an anti-histidine antibody confirmed the authenticity of these proteins produced.

Customer Lifetime Value: a framework for application in the insurance industry - Building a Business Process to Generate and Maintain an Automatic Estimation Agent

Research Project submited as partial fulfilment for the Master Degree in Statistics and Information Management

An agent based architecture for material handling systems

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

Lightweight robust behavior industrial agent methodology

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

Novel ready-to-eat mango product using gellan gum as gelling agent: physico-chemical, microbial and sensory characteristics

Este trabalho foi efectuado com o apoio da Universidade de Lisboa, Instituto Superior de Agronomia com o Centro de Engenharia dos Biossistemas (CEER

Agent-based parking occupancy simulation

The existing parking simulations, as most simulations, are intended to gain insights of a system or to make predictions. The knowledge they have provided has built up over the years, and several research works have devised detailed parking system models. This thesis work describes the use of an agent-based parking simulation in the context of a bigger parking system development. It focuses more on flexibility than on fidelity, showing the case where it is relevant for a parking simulation to consume dynamically changing GIS data from external, online sources and how to address this case. The simulation generates the parking occupancy information that sensing technologies should eventually produce and supplies it to the bigger parking system. It is built as a Java application based on the MASON toolkit and consumes GIS data from an ArcGis Server. The application context of the implemented parking simulation is a university campus with free, on-street parking places.

Integration of a mobile autonomous robot in a surveillance multi-agent system

This dissertation aims to guarantee the integration of a mobile autonomous robot equipped with many sensors in a multi-agent distributed and georeferenced surveillance system. The integration of a mobile autonomous robot in this system leads to new features that will be available to clients of surveillance system may use. These features may be of two types: using the robot as an agent that will act in the environment or by using the robot as a mobile set of sensors. As an agent in the system, the robot can move to certain locations when alerts are received, in order to acknowledge the underlying events or take to action in order to assist in resolving this event. As a sensor platform in the system, it is possible to access information that is read from the sensors of the robot and access complementary measurements to the ones taken by other sensors in the multi-agent system. To integrate this mobile robot in an effective way it is necessary to extend the current multi-agent system architecture to make the connection between the two systems and to integrate the functionalities provided by the robot into the multi-agent system.

DYNAMOD – A dynamic agent based modelling framework for digital businesses

Digital Businesses have become a major driver for economic growth and have seen an explosion of new startups. At the same time, it also includes mature enterprises that have become global giants in a relatively short period of time. Digital Businesses have unique characteristics that make the running and management of a Digital Business much different from traditional offline businesses. Digital businesses respond to online users who are highly interconnected and networked. This enables a rapid flow of word of mouth, at a pace far greater than ever envisioned when dealing with traditional products and services. The relatively low cost of incremental user addition has led to a variety of innovation in pricing of digital products, including various forms of free and freemium pricing models. This thesis explores the unique characteristics and complexities of Digital Businesses and its implications on the design of Digital Business Models and Revenue Models. The thesis proposes an Agent Based Modeling Framework that can be used to develop Simulation Models that simulate the complex dynamics of Digital Businesses and the user interactions between users of a digital product. Such Simulation models can be used for a variety of purposes such as simple forecasting, analysing the impact of market disturbances, analysing the impact of changes in pricing models and optimising the pricing for maximum revenue generation or a balance between growth in usage and revenue generation. These models can be developed for a mature enterprise with a large historical record of user growth rate as well as for early stage enterprises without much historical data. Through three case studies, the thesis demonstrates the applicability of the Framework and its potential applications.

An agent-based simulator to estimate domestic energy use

Throughout recent years, there has been an increase in the population size, as well as a fast economic growth, which has led to an increase of the energy demand that comes mainly from fossil fuels. In order to reduce the ecological footprint, governments have implemented sustainable measures and it is expected that by 2035 the energy produced from renewable energy sources, such as wind and solar would be responsible for one-third of the energy produced globally. However, since the energy produced from renewable sources is governed by the availability of the respective primary energy source there is often a mismatch between production and demand, which could be solved by adding flexibility on the demand side through demand response (DR). DR programs influence the end-user electricity usage by changing its cost along the time. Under this scenario the user needs to estimate the energy demand and on-site production in advance to plan its energy demand according to the energy price. This work focuses on the development of an agent-based electrical simulator, capable of: (a) estimating the energy demand and on-site generation with a 1-min time resolution for a 24-h period, (b) calculating the energy price for a given scenario, (c) making suggestions on how to maximize the usage of renewable energy produced on-site and to lower the electricity costs by rescheduling the use of certain appliances. The results show that this simulator allows reducing the energy bill by 11% and almost doubling the use of renewable energy produced on-site.

An agent based architecture to support monitoring in plug and produce manufacturing systems using knowledge extraction

In recent years a set of production paradigms were proposed in order to capacitate manufacturers to meet the new market requirements, such as the shift in demand for highly customized products resulting in a shorter product life cycle, rather than the traditional mass production standardized consumables. These new paradigms advocate solutions capable of facing these requirements, empowering manufacturing systems with a high capacity to adapt along with elevated flexibility and robustness in order to deal with disturbances, like unexpected orders or malfunctions. Evolvable Production Systems propose a solution based on the usage of modularity and self-organization with a fine granularity level, supporting pluggability and in this way allowing companies to add and/or remove components during execution without any extra re-programming effort. However, current monitoring software was not designed to fully support these characteristics, being commonly based on centralized SCADA systems, incapable of re-adapting during execution to the unexpected plugging/unplugging of devices nor changes in the entire system’s topology. Considering these aspects, the work developed for this thesis encompasses a fully distributed agent-based architecture, capable of performing knowledge extraction at different levels of abstraction without sacrificing the capacity to add and/or remove monitoring entities, responsible for data extraction and analysis, during runtime.

Assessment of a novel Cu (II) complex as a potential anticancer agent

Widely used in cancer treatment, chemotherapy still faces hindering challenges, ranging from severe induced toxicity to drug resistance acquisition. As means to overcome these setbacks, newly synthetized compounds have recently come into play with the basis of improved pharmacokinetic/pharmacodynamic properties. With this mind-set, this project aimed towards the antiproliferative potential characterization of a group of metallic compounds. Additionally the incorporation of the compounds within a nanoformulation and within new combination strategies with commercial chemotherapeutic drugs was also envisaged. Cell viability assays presented copper (II) compound (K4) as the most promising, presenting an IC50 of 6.10 μM and 19.09 μM for HCT116 and A549 cell line respectively. Exposure in fibroblasts revealed a 9.18 μM IC50. Hoechst staining assays further revealed the compound’s predisposition to induce chromatin condensation and nuclear fragmentation in HCT116 upon exposure to K4 which was later demonstrated by flow cytometry and annexin V-FITC/propidium iodide double staining analysis (under 50 % cell death induction). The compound further revealed the ability to interact with major macromolecules such as DNA (Kb = 2.17x105 M-1), inducing structural brakes and retardation, and further affecting cell cycle progression revealing delay in S-phase. Moreover BSA interactions were also visible however not conclusive. Proteome profiling revealed overexpression of proteins involved in metabolic activity and underexpression of proteins involved in apoptosis thus corroborating Hoechst and apoptosis flow cytometry data. K4 nanoformulation suffered from several hindrances and was ill succeeded in part due to K4’s poor solubility in aqueous buffers. Other approaches were considered in this regard. Combined chemotherapy assays revealed high cytotoxicity for afatinib and lapatinib strategies. Lapatinib and K4 proteome profiling further revealed high apoptosis rates, high metabolic activity and activation of redundant proteins as part of compensatory mechanisms.