Criação de valor - O Cash Value Added como métrica de avaliação da Performance empresarial

Mestrado em Contabilidade e Gestão das Instituições Financeiras

Relatório de estágio em gabinete de engenharia na componente de climatização

Trabalho Final de Mestrado para obtenção do grau de Mestre em Engenharia Mecânica com Especialização em Energia, Climatização e Refrigeração

Perspectives on access to in vitro fertilization in Portugal

OBJECTIVE: To analyze users' reasons for choosing in vitro fertilization treatment in public or private services and to identify their suggestions for improving fertility treatment. METHODS: A qualitative study using an interpretative approach was conducted. Fifteen semi-structured interviews were conducted with patients undergoing in vitro fertilization treatment (nine women, one man and five couples) at home or at their workplace in the districts of Viana do Castelo, Braga, Porto and Lisbon, Portugal, between July 2005 and February 2006. RESULTS: Users evaluated access to in vitro fertilization treatment in public and private services based mainly on their individual experiences and called for more access to less costly, faster and friendlier care with suitable facilities, appropriate time management and caring medical providers. These perceptions were also associated with views on the need for fighting stigmatization of infertility, protecting children's rights and guaranteeing sustainability of health care system. Interviewees sought to balance reduced waiting time and more attentive care with costs involved. The choice of services depended on the users' purchase power and place of residence and availability of attentive care. CONCLUSIONS: Current national policies on in vitro fertilization treatment meet user's demands of promoting access to, and quality, availability and affordability of in vitro fertilization treatment. However, their focus on legal regulation and technical-scientific aspects contrasts with the users' emphasis on reimbursement, insurance coverage and focus on emotional aspects of the treatment. The study showed these policies should ensure insurance coverage, participation of user representatives in the National Council for Assisted Reproductive Technology, promotion of infertility research and certification of fertility laboratories.

O contributo da rotina Ler, contar e mostrar para o desenvolvimento de competências da leitura e de expressão oral

Relatório de estágio apresentado à Escola Superior de Educação de Lisboa para obtenção de grau de mestre em Ensino do 1º e 2º ciclo do Ensino Básico

Dynamic QoS-Aware coalition formation

Users of wireless devices increasingly demand access to multimedia content with speci c quality of service requirements. Users might tolerate di erent levels of service, or could be satis ed with di erent quality combinations choices. However, multimedia processing introduces heavy resource requirements on the client side. Our work tries to address the growing demand on resources and performance requirements, by allowing wireless nodes to cooperate with each other to meet resource allocation requests and handle stringent constraints, opportunistically taking advantage of the local ad-hoc network that is created spontaneously, as nodes move in range of each other, forming a temporary coalition for service execution. Coalition formation is necessary when a single node cannot execute a speci c service, but it may also be bene cial when groups perform more e ciently when compared to a single s node performance.

CIDER - envisaging a COTS communication infrastructure for evolutionary dependable real-time systems

It is foreseen that future dependable real-time systems will also have to meet flexibility, adaptability and reconfigurability requirements. Considering the distributed nature of these computing systems, a communication infrastructure that permits to fulfil all those requirements is thus of major importance. Although Ethernet has been used primarily as an information network, there is a strong belief that some very recent technological advances will enable its use in dependable applications with real-time requirements. Indeed, several recently standardised mechanisms associated with Switched-Ethernet seem to be promising to enable communication infrastructures to support hard real-time, reliability and flexible distributed applications. This paper describes the motivation and the work being developed within the CIDER (Communication Infrastructure for Dependable Evolvable Real-Time Systems) project, which envisages the use of COTS Ethernet as an enabling technology for future dependable real-time systems. It is foreseen that the CIDER approach will constitute a relevant stream of research since it will bring together cutting edge research in the field of real-time and dependable distributed systems and the industrial eagerness to expand Ethernet responsabilities to support dependable real-time applications.

Ventilação mista em edifícios de habitação

Trabalho Final de Mestrado para obtenção do grau de Mestre em Engenharia Civil na Área de Especialização de Edificações

Assigning real-time tasks on heterogeneous multiprocessors with two unrelated types of processors

A preliminary version of this paper appeared in Proceedings of the 31st IEEE Real-Time Systems Symposium, 2010, pp. 239–248.

Edição de revista para público com mais de 50 anos

Projeto de mestrado apresentado à Escola Superior de Comunicação Social como parte dos requisitos para obtenção de grau de mestre em Jornalismo.

Construção de curvas binodais para sistemas ternários, contendo biodiesel, álcool e água

Trabalho Final de Mestrado para obtenção do grau de Mestre em Engenharia Química

Planeamento de rede LTE de baixo custo com uso de repetidor

Trabalho Final de Mestrado para obtenção do grau de Mestre em Engenharia de Electrónica e Telecomunicações

An analysis of the impact of bus contention on the WCET in multicores

The use of multicores is becoming widespread inthe field of embedded systems, many of which have real-time requirements. Hence, ensuring that real-time applications meet their timing constraints is a pre-requisite before deploying them on these systems. This necessitates the consideration of the impact of the contention due to shared lowlevel hardware resources like the front-side bus (FSB) on the Worst-CaseExecution Time (WCET) of the tasks. Towards this aim, this paper proposes a method to determine an upper bound on the number of bus requests that tasks executing on a core can generate in a given time interval. We show that our method yields tighter upper bounds in comparison with the state of-the-art. We then apply our method to compute the extra contention delay incurred by tasks, when they are co-scheduled on different cores and access the shared main memory, using a shared bus, access to which is granted using a round-robin arbitration (RR) protocol.

Task assignment algorithms for two-type heterogeneous multiprocessors

Consider the problem of assigning real-time tasks on a heterogeneous multiprocessor platform comprising two different types of processors — such a platform is referred to as two-type platform. We present two linearithmic timecomplexity algorithms, SA and SA-P, each providing the follow- ing guarantee. For a given two-type platform and a given task set, if there exists a feasible task-to-processor-type assignment such that tasks can be scheduled to meet deadlines by allowing them to migrate only between processors of the same type, then (i) using SA, it is guaranteed to find such a feasible task-to- processor-type assignment where the same restriction on task migration applies but given a platform in which processors are 1+α/2 times faster and (ii) SA-P succeeds in finding 2 a feasible task-to-processor assignment where tasks are not allowed to migrate between processors but given a platform in which processors are 1+α/times faster, where 0<α≤1. The parameter α is a property of the task set — it is the maximum utilization of any task which is less than or equal to 1.

EMMON - EMbedded MONitoring

Despite the steady increase in experimental deployments, most of research work on WSNs has focused only on communication protocols and algorithms, with a clear lack of effective, feasible and usable system architectures, integrated in a modular platform able to address both functional and non–functional requirements. In this paper, we outline EMMON [1], a full WSN-based system architecture for large–scale, dense and real–time embedded monitoring [3] applications. EMMON provides a hierarchical communication architecture together with integrated middleware and command and control software. Then, EM-Set, the EMMON engineering toolset will be presented. EM-Set includes a network deployment planning, worst–case analysis and dimensioning, protocol simulation and automatic remote programming and hardware testing tools. This toolset was crucial for the development of EMMON which was designed to use standard commercially available technologies, while maintaining as much flexibility as possible to meet specific applications requirements. Finally, the EMMON architecture has been validated through extensive simulation and experimental evaluation, including a 300+ nodes testbed.

Real-time scheduling with resource sharing on uniform multiprocessors

Consider the problem of scheduling a set of implicit-deadline sporadic tasks to meet all deadlines on a uniform multiprocessor platform where each task may access at most one of |R| shared resources and at most once by each job of that task. The resources have to be accessed in a mutually exclusive manner. We propose an algorithm, GIS-vpr, which offers the guarantee that if a task set is schedulable to meet deadlines by an optimal task assignment scheme that allows a task to migrate only when it accesses or releases a resource, then our algorithm also meets the deadlines with the same restriction on the task migration, if given processors 4 + 6|R| times as fast. The proposed algorithm, by design, limits the number of migrations per job to at most two. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first result for resource sharing on uniform multiprocessors with proven performance guarantee.