Utilization of Interactive Internet in High Education

The present work reports on the practical cooperation between two Universities from Hungary and Portugal. Students from Portugal are remotely accessing an experimental facility, which is physically in Hungary. The cooperation among these Higher Education establishments allowed the development and testing of a Remote Laboratory at the BME. This paper reports on the characteristics and initial testing of the Thermocouples Rise Time Measurement System and provides information on development and students' feedback.

A Service Integration Platform for Collaborative Networks

Integrated manufacturing constitutes a complex system made of heterogeneous information and control subsystems. Those subsystems are not designed to the cooperation. Typically each subsystem automates specific processes, and establishes closed application domains, therefore it is very difficult to integrate it with other subsystems in order to respond to the needed process dynamics. Furthermore, to cope with ever growing marketcompetition and demands, it is necessary for manufacturing/enterprise systems to increase their responsiveness based on up-to-date knowledge and in-time data gathered from the diverse information and control systems. These have created new challenges for manufacturing sector, and even bigger challenges for collaborative manufacturing. The growing complexity of the information and communication technologies when coping with innovative business services based on collaborative contributions from multiple stakeholders, requires novel and multidisciplinary approaches. Service orientation is a strategic approach to deal with such complexity, and various stakeholders' information systems. Services or more precisely the autonomous computational agents implementing the services, provide an architectural pattern able to cope with the needs of integrated and distributed collaborative solutions. This paper proposes a service-oriented framework, aiming to support a virtual organizations breeding environment that is the basis for establishing short or long term goal-oriented virtual organizations. The notion of integrated business services, where customers receive some value developed through the contribution from a network of companies is a key element.

Intelligent Bio-Inspired system for manufacturing scheduling under uncertainties

A novel approach to scheduling resolution by combining Autonomic Computing (AC), Multi-Agent Systems (MAS), Case-based Reasoning (CBR), and Bio-Inspired Optimization Techniques (BIT) will be described. AC has emerged as a paradigm aiming at incorporating applications with a management structure similar to the central nervous system. The main intentions are to improve resource utilization and service quality. In this paper we envisage the use of MAS paradigm for supporting dynamic and distributed scheduling in Manufacturing Systems with AC properties, in order to reduce the complexity of managing manufacturing systems and human interference. The proposed CBR based Intelligent Scheduling System was evaluated under different dynamic manufacturing scenarios.

Ancillary service market simulation

Power systems operation in a liberalized environment requires that market players have access to adequate decision support tool, allowing them to consider all the business opportunities and take strategic decisions. Ancillary services represent a good negotiation opportunity that must be considered by market players. For this, decision support tools must include ancillary market simulation. This paper deals with ancillary services negotiation in electricity markets. The proposed concepts and methodologies are implemented in MASCEM, a multi-agent based electricity market simulator. A test case concerning the dispatch of ancillary services using two different methods (Linear Programming and Genetic Algorithm approaches) is included in the paper.

A probabilistic methodology for distributed generation location in isolated electrical service area

Distributed generation unlike centralized electrical generation aims to generate electrical energy on small scale as near as possible to load centers, interchanging electric power with the network. This work presents a probabilistic methodology conceived to assist the electric system planning engineers in the selection of the distributed generation location, taking into account the hourly load changes or the daily load cycle. The hourly load centers, for each of the different hourly load scenarios, are calculated deterministically. These location points, properly weighted according to their load magnitude, are used to calculate the best fit probability distribution. This distribution is used to determine the maximum likelihood perimeter of the area where each source distributed generation point should preferably be located by the planning engineers. This takes into account, for example, the availability and the cost of the land lots, which are factors of special relevance in urban areas, as well as several obstacles important for the final selection of the candidates of the distributed generation points. The proposed methodology has been applied to a real case, assuming three different bivariate probability distributions: the Gaussian distribution, a bivariate version of Freund’s exponential distribution and the Weibull probability distribution. The methodology algorithm has been programmed in MATLAB. Results are presented and discussed for the application of the methodology to a realistic case and demonstrate the ability of the proposed methodology for efficiently handling the determination of the best location of the distributed generation and their corresponding distribution networks.

Análise de eficiência energética de transportes rodoviários

Projecto para obtenção do grau de Mestre em Engenharia Informática e de computadores

GuideMe: service for consulting, publication and recommendation of touristic locations

Trabalho de Projeto realizado para obtenção do grau de Mestre em Engenharia Informática e de Computadores

Benchmarking de uma aproximação de ticketing as a service (Taas)

Dissertação de natureza científica realizada para obtenção do grau de Mestre em Engenharia de Redes de Computadores e Multimédia

Public relations in part-time : full-time service: estratégia de comunicação para o lançamento de um novo modelo de negócio ds relações públicas em Portugal

O presente trabalho visa propor uma estratégia para a construção e lançamento de um novo modelo de negócio para a atuação das Relações Públicas em Portugal, numa proposta direcionada para as micro e pequenas empresas. Entre o serviço in house e a consultadoria clássica existe um espaço não coberto em Portugal: um serviço in house partilhado. Apresenta-se aqui este projeto de serviço de Relações Públicas para aqueles para quem é incomportável assumir nos seus quadros um Técnico de Comunicação.

Descoberta de conhecimento em Logs de tentativas de intrusão. Um estudo de caso em Instituições de Ensino Superior

Perante a evolução constante da Internet, a sua utilização é quase obrigatória. Através da web, é possível conferir extractos bancários, fazer compras em países longínquos, pagar serviços sem sair de casa, entre muitos outros. Há inúmeras alternativas de utilização desta rede. Ao se tornar tão útil e próxima das pessoas, estas começaram também a ganhar mais conhecimentos informáticos. Na Internet, estão também publicados vários guias para intrusão ilícita em sistemas, assim como manuais para outras práticas criminosas. Este tipo de informação, aliado à crescente capacidade informática do utilizador, teve como resultado uma alteração nos paradigmas de segurança informática actual. Actualmente, em segurança informática a preocupação com o hardware é menor, sendo o principal objectivo a salvaguarda dos dados e continuidade dos serviços. Isto deve-se fundamentalmente à dependência das organizações nos seus dados digitais e, cada vez mais, dos serviços que disponibilizam online. Dada a mudança dos perigos e do que se pretende proteger, também os mecanismos de segurança devem ser alterados. Torna-se necessário conhecer o atacante, podendo prever o que o motiva e o que pretende atacar. Neste contexto, propôs-se a implementação de sistemas de registo de tentativas de acesso ilícitas em cinco instituições de ensino superior e posterior análise da informação recolhida com auxílio de técnicas de data mining (mineração de dados). Esta solução é pouco utilizada com este intuito em investigação, pelo que foi necessário procurar analogias com outras áreas de aplicação para recolher documentação relevante para a sua implementação. A solução resultante revelou-se eficaz, tendo levado ao desenvolvimento de uma aplicação de fusão de logs das aplicações Honeyd e Snort (responsável também pelo seu tratamento, preparação e disponibilização num ficheiro Comma Separated Values (CSV), acrescentando conhecimento sobre o que se pode obter estatisticamente e revelando características úteis e previamente desconhecidas dos atacantes. Este conhecimento pode ser utilizado por um administrador de sistemas para melhorar o desempenho dos seus mecanismos de segurança, tais como firewalls e Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS).

E-Learning as a shared service in shared services centers

Book Subtitle International Conference, CENTERIS 2010, Viana do Castelo, Portugal, October 20-22, 2010, Proceedings, Part II

Risk factors for cesarean section by category of health service

OBJECTIVE: To analyze the rate of cesarean section and differences in risk factors by category of health service, either public or private. METHODS: A cross-sectional study was carried out including all pregnant women in labor admitted to hospitals in the city of Rio Grande, Southern Brazil, between January 1 and December 31, 2007. A pre-coded and pre-tested questionnaire was used to collect on social, demographic, obstetric and newborn care information. Two regression models were constructed: one for public users and the other one for private ones. Poisson regression was used in each model in the multivariate analysis. Prevalence rates and 95% confidence intervals were calculated for each adjusted factor. RESULTS: The rate of cesarean section was 43% and 86% among public and private users. Sociodemographic factors and twin births have a more significant impact among public users as well as number of pregnancies (25% vs. 13% reduction in public and private users, respectively) and previous cesarean section (86% vs. 24% increase in public and private users, respectively). Prenatal care visits and hospital admissions affected the outcome only in women users of public services. CONCLUSIONS: Cesarean section rates were high in both groups studied, but it was twice as high among women cared in the private sector. Associated factors differ in magnitude by category of service used.

Utilization of different encryption schemes for securing SCADA component communication

A vital role is being played by SCADA Communication for Supervisory Control and Data acquisition (SCADA) Monitoring Ststems. Devices that are designed to operate in safety-critical environments are usually designed to failsafe, but security vulnerabilities could be exploited by an attacker to disable the fail-safe mechanisms. Thus these devices must not onlybe designed for safety but also for security. This paper presents a study of the comparison of different Encryption schemes for securing SCADA Component Communication. The encryption schemes such as Symetric Key Encrypton in Wireless SCADA Environment, Assymmetric-key Encryption to Internet SCADA, and the Cross Crypto Scheme Cipher to secure communication for SCADA are analysed and the outcome is evaluated.

Run-time monitoring in real-time operating systems

Embedded systems are increasingly complex and dynamic, imposing progressively higher developing time and costs. Tuning a particular system for deployment is thus becoming more demanding. Furthermore when considering systems which have to adapt themselves to evolving requirements and changing service requests. In this perspective, run-time monitoring of the system behaviour becomes an important requirement, allowing to dynamically capturing the actual scheduling progress and resource utilization. For this to succeed, operating systems need to expose their internal behaviour and state, making it available to external applications, and a runtime monitoring mechanism must be available. However, such mechanism can impose a burden in the system itself if not wisely used. In this paper we explore this problem and propose a framework, which is intended to provide this run-time mechanism whilst achieving code separation, run-time efficiency and flexibility for the final developer.

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.