Reengenharia do framework cosmos: uma solução para prover suporte e adaptações abertas.

Self-adaptive software system is able to change its structure and/or behavior at runtime due to changes in their requirements, environment or components. One way to archieve self-adaptation is the use a sequence of actions (known as adaptation plans) which are typically defined at design time. This is the approach adopted by Cosmos - a Framework to support the configuration and management of resources in distributed environments. In order to deal with the variability inherent of self-adaptive systems, such as, the appearance of new components that allow the establishment of configurations that were not envisioned at development time, this dissertation aims to give Cosmos the capability of generating adaptation plans of runtime. In this way, it was necessary to perform a reengineering of the Cosmos Framework in order to allow its integration with a mechanism for the dynamic generation of adaptation plans. In this context, our work has been focused on conducting a reengineering of Cosmos. Among the changes made to in the Cosmos, we can highlight: changes in the metamodel used to represent components and applications, which has been redefined based on an architectural description language. These changes were propagated to the implementation of a new Cosmos prototype, which was then used for developing a case study application for purpose of proof of concept. Another effort undertaken was to make Cosmos more attractive by integrating it with another platform, in the case of this dissertation, the OSGi platform, which is well-known and accepted by the industry

Utilização de indicadores financeiros e não-financeiros na gestão de hotéis no Rio Grande do Norte: um estudo sob a ótica do Balanced Scorecard

This study presents the results of a research on the use of financial and non-financial performance indicators used by medium and large hotels. The research was conducted in Rio Grande do Norte, a Brazilian State. The objective is to identify the usage of performance measures by these companies. Hotel industry is one of the most important sectors in the Rio Grande do Norte economy. The research takes the Balanced Scorecard as a conceptual framework, since it represents an original contribution to the literature of managerial accounting, for rethinking old issues, pointing out themes that were forgotten or badly interpreted, to discuss the requirements imposed by the economy environment, dominated by competitive companies, and increasing the understanding of the relationship between strategy and operation. The objective of the research is to investigate if the hotel managers make use of a managerial information system or not, when evaluating the performance of their business unit. The research reveals the usage of performance evaluation using a large variety of measures. Among them is worth mention: the usage of accounting profit altogether with the EVA/MVA, the process cycle time, total quality management, process transformation, strategic mission, vision, strategic measures, measures related to feedback, risk, costs, productivity, incomes, customers retention, customer satisfaction and profitability, measures using time as a component, quality of the process, cost of the processes, employees capabilities, information systems, motivation, empowerment and alignment. The research leads to the conclusion that the usage of the deriving concepts of Balanced Scorecard can improve the performance measurement systems used by hotels