Engineering hybrid wired/wireless fieldbus networks - a case study

Advances in networking and information technologies are transforming factory-floor communication systems into a mainstream activity within industrial automation. It is now recognized that future industrial computer systems will be intimately tied to real-time computing and to communication technologies. For this vision to succeed, complex heterogeneous factory-floor communication networks (including mobile/wireless components) need to function in a predictable, flawless, efficient and interoperable way. In this paper we re-visit the issue of supporting real-time communications in hybrid wired/wireless fieldbus-based networks, bringing into it some experimental results obtained in the framework of the RFieldbus ISEP pilot.

Position paper on time and event-triggered communication services in the context of e-manufacturing

Modern factories are complex systems where advances in networking and information technologies are opening new ways towards higher efficiency. Such move is being driven by market rules with ever-increasing competition levels, in search for faster time-to-market, improved process yield, non-stop operations, flexible manufacturing and tighter supply-chain coupling. All these aims present a common requirement, i.e. a realtime flow of information, from the plant-floor up to the management, maintenance, suppliers and clients, to support accurate monitoring and control of the factory. This stresses the importance achieved by the communication infrastructure in modern manufacturing industry. This paper presents the authors view concerning the current trends in modern factory communication systems. It addresses the problems of seamlessly integrating different information flows with diverse requirements, mainly in terms of timeliness. In this aspect, the debate between event-triggered and time-triggered communication is revisited as well as the joint support for both types of traffic. Finally, a view of where factory communication systems are moving to is also presented, showing the impact of open and widely available technologies.

Access and use of european information: a comparative analysis

This paper presents some results of a survey on access to European information among a group of 234 users of 55 European Documentation Centres (EDCs), from 21 European Union (EU) Member-States. The findings of the questionnaire made to 88 EDCs' managers, from 26 EU Member-States, will also be analyse. Two different points of view regarding issues related to reasons to access European information, the valued aspects during that access and the use of European databases will be compare.

A Web-Based geographical information system prototype on Portuguese traditional food products

Dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Science in Geospatial Technologies

Bertrand model under incomplete information

We consider a Bertrand duopoly model with unknown costs. The firms' aim is to choose the price of its product according to the well-known concept of Bayesian Nash equilibrium. The chooses are made simultaneously by both firms. In this paper, we suppose that each firm has two different technologies, and uses one of them according to a certain probability distribution. The use of either one or the other technology affects the unitary production cost. We show that this game has exactly one Bayesian Nash equilibrium. We analyse the advantages, for firms and for consumers, of using the technology with highest production cost versus the one with cheapest production cost. We prove that the expected profit of each firm increases with the variance of its production costs. We also show that the expected price of each good increases with both expected production costs, being the effect of the expected production costs of the rival dominated by the effect of the own expected production costs.

Design and implementation of an autonomous, proactive, and reactive software infrastructure to help improving the management level of projects

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

Geography of the Information Society

All every day activities take place in space. And it is upon this that all information and knowledge revolve. The latter are the key elements in the organisation of territories. Their creation, use and distribution should therefore occur in a balanced way throughout the whole territory in order to allow all individuals to participate in an egalitarian society, in which the flow of knowledge can take precedence over the flow of interests. The information society depends, to a large extent, on the technological capacity to disseminate information and, consequently, the knowledge throughout territory, thereby creating conditions which allow a more balanced development, from the both the social and economic points of view thus avoiding the existence of info-exclusion territories. Internet should therefore be considered more than a mere technology, given that its importance goes well beyond the frontiers of culture and society. It is already a part of daily life and of the new forms of thinking and transmitting information, thus making it a basic necessity essential, for a full socio-economic development. Its role as a platform of creation and distribution of content is regarded as an indispensable element for education in today’s society, since it makes information a much more easily acquired benefit.”…in the same way that the new technologies of generation and distribution of energy allowed factories and large companies to establish themselves as the organisational bases of industrial society, so the internet today constitutes the technological base of the organisational form that characterises the Information Era: the network” (CASTELLS, 2004:15). The changes taking place today in regional and urban structures are increasingly more evident due to a combination of factors such as faster means of transport, more efficient telecommunications and other cheaper and more advanced technologies of information and knowledge. Although their impact on society is obvious, society itself also has a strong influence on the evolution of these technologies. And although physical distance has lost much of the responsibility it had towards explaining particular phenomena of the economy and of society, other aspects such as telecommunications, new forms of mobility, the networks of innovation, the internet, cyberspace, etc., have become more important, and are the subject of study and profound analysis. The science of geographical information, allows, in a much more rigorous way, the analysis of problems thus integrating in a much more balanced way, the concepts of place, of space and of time. Among the traditional disciplines that have already found their place in this process of research and analysis, we can give special attention to a geography of new spaces, which, while not being a geography of ‘innovation’, nor of the ‘Internet’, nor even ‘virtual’, which can be defined as one of the ‘Information Society’, encompassing not only the technological aspects but also including a socio-economic approach. According to the last European statistical data, Portugal shows a deficit in terms of information and knowledge dissemination among its European partners. Some of the causes are very well identified - low levels of scholarship, weak investments on innovation and R&D (both private and public sector) - but others seem to be hidden behind socio-economical and technological factors. So, the justification of Portugal as the case study appeared naturally, on a difficult quest to find the major causes to territorial asymmetries. The substantial amount of data needed for this work was very difficult to obtain and for the islands of Madeira and Azores was insufficient, so only Continental Portugal was considered for this study. In an effort to understand the various aspects of the Geography of the Information Society and bearing in mind the increasing generalised use of information technologies together with the range of technologies available for the dissemination of information, it is important to: (i) Reflect on the geography of the new socio-technological spaces. (ii) Evaluate the potential for the dissemination of information and knowledge through the selection of variables that allow us to determine the dynamic of a given territory or region; (iii) Define a Geography of the Information Society in Continental Portugal.

Interoperability frameworks for competencies and learning outcomes: databases vs ontologies

The changes introduced into the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) by the Bologna Process, together with renewed pedagogical and methodological practices, have created a new teaching-learning paradigm: Student-Centred Learning. In addition, the last few years have been characterized by the application of Information Technologies, especially the Semantic Web, not only to the teaching-learning process, but also to administrative processes within learning institutions. On one hand, the aim of this study was to present a model for identifying and classifying Competencies and Learning Outcomes and, on the other hand, the computer applications of the information management model were developed, namely a relational Database and an Ontology.

‘Thy love afar is spite at home' Emerson, Thoreau and Carey: an alternative perspective of communication in US

The conquest of the West by the stagecoaches and then by railway, Ford and the automobile civilization, the Moon landing by Apollo 11, Microsoft, Apple, CNN, Google and Facebook have appeared to us as celebratory examples of the willingness and ability of the US to overcome the distance and the absence through so-called modern progress of transportation and communication. Undoubtedly, the imaginary and the instrumental power associated to transports and communication of the last century and a half are identified with the mental images that the world has of the US. A world that has eagerly imported and copy their technology and technological culture. Beyond the illusions, this attempting, which has always been praised to transcende space and eclipse the time to get to places and peole increasingly distant and fast, has always a dark side: the political control of population, commercial advertising, the spread of the rumors, noise and gossip. However, since at least the nineteenth century, the political project incorporated in modern transportation and communication technologies was not shared by some of the most remarkable thinkers in the US not only in that century, but also in the 20th century. This paper begins by rescue Ralph W. Emerson and Henry D. Thoreau legacy regarding to communication. Emerson conceived communication as a give-and-take with no coordination between the two, and does not involve contact with the other. Thoreau, in turn, argued that modern trasnportation and communications inventions are but pretty toys which distract attention from serious things, nothing more than 'improved means to an end that is not perfected.' Secondly, we show that this skeptical view of the techological improvement of transport and communication was proceed in an original way with James W. Carey, a media studies thinker who became known for his criticism of the transmission view of communication.

Finding a school technological partner: a multicriteria method for school information system producer selection

The choice of an information systems is a critical factor of success in an organization's performance, since, by involving multiple decision-makers, with often conflicting objectives, several alternatives with aggressive marketing, makes it particularly complex by the scope of a consensus. The main objective of this work is to make the analysis and selection of a information system to support the school management, pedagogical and administrative components, using a multicriteria decision aid system – MMASSITI – Multicriteria Method- ology to Support the Selection of Information Systems/Information Technologies – integrates a multicriteria model that seeks to provide a systematic approach in the process of choice of Information Systems, able to produce sustained recommendations concerning the decision scope. Its application to a case study has identi- fied the relevant factors in the selection process of school educational and management information system and get a solution that allows the decision maker’ to compare the quality of the various alternatives.

Estudo de usabilidade das aplicações mobile: caso prático o Meethub

Relatório de estágio apresentado à Escola Superior de Comunicação Social como parte dos requisitos para obtenção de grau de mestre em Audiovisual e Multimédia.

Georeferencing Road Accidents with Google Earth: Transforming Information into Knowledge for Decision Support

Over the last fifty years mobility practices have changed dramatically, improving the way travel takes place, the time it takes but also on matters like road safety and prevention. High mortality caused by high accident levels has reached untenable levels. But the research into road mortality stayed limited to comparative statistical exercises which go no further than defining accident types. In terms of sharing information and mapping accidents, little progress has been mad, aside from the normal publication of figures, either through simplistic tables or web pages. With considerable technological advances on geographical information technologies, research and development stayed rather static with only a few good examples on dynamic mapping. The use of Global Positioning System (GPS) devices as normal equipments on automobile industry resulted in a more dynamic mobility patterns but also with higher degrees of uncertainty on road traffic. This paper describes a road accident georeferencing project for the Lisbon District involving fatalities and serious injuries during 2007. In the initial phase, individual information summaries were compiled giving information on accidents and its majour characteristics, collected by the security forces: the Public Safety Police Force (Polícia de Segurança Pública - PSP) and the National Guard (Guarda Nacional Republicana - GNR). The Google Earth platform was used to georeference the information in order to inform the public and the authorities of the accident locations, the nature of the location, and the causes and consequences of the accidents. This paper also gives future insights about augmented reality technologies, considered crucial to advances to road safety and prevention studies. At the end, this exercise could be considered a success because of numerous consequences, as for stakeholders who decide what to do but also for the public awareness to the problem of road mortality.

A new model for EEZ surveillance and management in Portugal

Management Information Systems 2000, p. 103-111

Geospatial database generation from digital newspapers: use case for risk and disaster domains.

Dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Science in Geospatial Technologies.

The adoption of cloud computing by SMEs: identifying and coping with external factors.

Comunicação apresentada na CAPSI 2011 - 11ª Conferência da Associação Portuguesa de Sistemas de Informação – A Gestão de Informação na era da Cloud Computing, Lisboa, ISEG/IUL-ISCTE/, 19 a 21 de Outubro de 2011.