Equity in access to MRI equipment: the Portuguese case

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is a method of image diagnose proven to be of undeniable importance when it comes to neuro and cardio related diseases. In fact, these diseases (such as: ischemic heart disease, stroke and acute myocardial infection) have high incidence in Portugal. For these reasons, the allocation of this medical technology should not be considered with light thoughts. In fact, making decision of resource allocation in health care can be a very complex and contested matter. The impacts of new technology allocation, such MRI, can be assessed in a variety of ways. However, a fundamental component should always be present: the use of evidence-based decision-making methods. One of these methods is Technology Assessment (TA). This paper aims to characterize the equity on access of the Portuguese population in general, to a specific medical device such as MRI, under the TA point of view. It is hoped to promote a bridge of scientific knowledge between the gap on research and policy-making through TA that can emerge as a tool to aid decision-makers in the organization of health systems. There are gaps in providing healthcare, due to geographical imbalances, with some areas unable to provide certain specialized services, as hospitals in the countryside do not provide all medical specialties. Portugal has also a large independent private sector that provides diagnostic and therapeutic services to NHS users under contracts called conventions. These medical contracts cover ambulatory health facilities for laboratory tests and examinations such as diagnostic tests and Radiology. However, there is no convention from the NHS when concerning the MRI exam. Therefore, this reality can be considered a limitation in the access of the general population to this kind of clinical exam. TA can play an useful and important role in helping the decision-makers to explore potential gains that might be achieved by introducing a more rational decision making into health care management, namely into the Radiology area, regarding the allocation of MRI equipment.

Preventing atomicity violations with contracts

Concurrent programming is a difficult and error-prone task because the programmer must reason about multiple threads of execution and their possible interleavings. A concurrent program must synchronize the concurrent accesses to shared memory regions, but this is not enough to prevent all anomalies that can arise in a concurrent setting. The programmer can misidentify the scope of the regions of code that need to be atomic, resulting in atomicity violations and failing to ensure the correct behavior of the program. Executing a sequence of atomic operations may lead to incorrect results when these operations are co-related. In this case, the programmer may be required to enforce the sequential execution of those operations as a whole to avoid atomicity violations. This situation is specially common when the developer makes use of services from third-party packages or modules. This thesis proposes a methodology, based on the design by contract methodology, to specify which sequences of operations must be executed atomically. We developed an analysis that statically verifies that a client of a module is respecting its contract, allowing the programmer to identify the source of possible atomicity violations.

The optimization of the complaints management system

A Work Project, presented as part of the requirements for the Award of a Masters Degree in Management from the NOVA – School of Business and Economics

Design of a balanced scorecard-type management system for a back-office department in a bank

A Work Project, presented as part of the requirements for the Award of a Masters Degree in Finance from the NOVA – School of Business and Economics

Management of Costa Vicentina as a tourism destination for Portuguese surfers

A Work Project, presented as part of the requirements for the Award of a Masters Degree in Management from the NOVA – School of Business and Economics

Management of Costa Vicentina as tourism destination for foreign surf practitioner and beginners

A Work Project, presented as part of the requirements for the Award of a Masters Degree in Management from the NOVA – School of Business and Economics

Psychological contract in non-governmental organizations

A Work Project, presented as part of the requirements for the Award of a Masters Degree in Management from the NOVA – School of Business and Economics

Analysis of the progress of lifelong learning strategies of Portuguese Economics and Management Schools

A Work Project, presented as part of the requirements for the Award of a Masters Degree in Management from the NOVA – School of Business and Economics

The importance of internship in hotel management: The case study of Esplanade Hotel in Zagreb

A Work Project, presented as part of the requirements for the Award of a Masters Degree in Management from the NOVA – School of Business and Economics

Avaliação de benefícios da integração do BIM nas opera-ções de Facilities Management

Dissertação para obtenção do Grau de Mestre em Engenharia Civil – Perfil de Construção

Service-oriented infrastructure to support the control, monitoring and management of a shop floor system

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

Evaluation and optimization of a session-based middleware for data management

Dissertação para obtenção do Grau de Mestre em Engenharia Informática

Standardization of project management processes

Software development is a discipline that is almost as old as the history of computers. With the advent of the Internet and all of its related technologies, software development has been on high demand. But, and especially in SME (small and medium enterprise), this was not accompanied with a comparable effort to develop a set of sustainable and standardized activities of project management, which lead to increasing inefficiencies and costs. Given the actual economic situation, it makes sense to engage in an effort to reduce said inefficiencies and rising costs. For that end, this work will analyze the current state of software development’s project management processes on a Portuguese SME, along with its problems and inefficiencies in an effort to create a standardized model to manage software development, with special attention given to critical success factors in an agile software development environment, while using the best practices in process modeling. This work also aims to create guidelines to correctly integrate these changes in the existing IS structure of a company.

Interactive spatial decision support for sustainable agroforestry management: a case study in East Kalimantan, Indonesia

Forest managers, stakeholders and investors want to be able to evaluate economic, environmental and social benefits in order to improve the outcomes of their decisions and enhance sustainable forest management. This research developed a spatial decision support system that provides: (1) an approach to identify the most beneficial locations for agroforestry projects based on the biophysical properties and evaluate its economic, social and environmental impact; (2) a tool to inform prospective investors and stakeholders of the potential and opportunities for integrated agroforestry management; (3) a simulation environment that enables evaluation via a dashboard with the opportunity to perform interactive sensitivity analysis for key parameters of the project; (4) a 3D interactive geographic visualization of the economic, environmental and social outcomes, which facilitate understanding and eases planning. Although the tool and methodology presented are generic, a case study was performed in East Kalimantan, Indonesia. For the whole study area, it was simulated the most suitable location for three different plantation schemes: monoculture of timber, a specific recipe (cassava, banana and sugar palm) and different recipes per geographic unit. The results indicate that a mixed cropping plantation scheme, with different recipes applied to the most suitable location returns higher economic, environmental and social benefits.

A CMMI-compliant requirements management and development process

Requirements Engineering has been acknowledged an essential discipline for Software Quality. Poorly-defined processes for eliciting, analyzing, specifying and validating requirements can lead to unclear issues or misunderstandings on business needs and project’s scope. These typically result in customers’ non-satisfaction with either the products’ quality or the increase of the project’s budget and duration. Maturity models allow an organization to measure the quality of its processes and improve them according to an evolutionary path based on levels. The Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) addresses the aforementioned Requirements Engineering issues. CMMI defines a set of best practices for process improvement that are divided into several process areas. Requirements Management and Requirements Development are the process areas concerned with Requirements Engineering maturity. Altran Portugal is a consulting company concerned with the quality of its software. In 2012, the Solution Center department has developed and applied successfully a set of processes aligned with CMMI-DEV v1.3, what granted them a Level 2 maturity certification. For 2015, they defined an organizational goal of addressing CMMI-DEV maturity level 3. This MSc dissertation is part of this organization effort. In particular, it is concerned with the required process areas that address the activities of Requirements Engineering. Our main goal is to contribute for the development of Altran’s internal engineering processes to conform to the guidelines of the Requirements Development process area. Throughout this dissertation, we started with an evaluation method based on CMMI and conducted a compliance assessment of Altran’s current processes. This allowed demonstrating their alignment with the CMMI Requirements Management process area and to highlight the improvements needed to conform to the Requirements Development process area. Based on the study of alternative solutions for the gaps found, we proposed a new Requirements Management and Development process that was later validated using three different approaches. The main contribution of this dissertation is the new process developed for Altran Portugal. However, given that studies on these topics are not abundant in the literature, we also expect to contribute with useful evidences to the existing body of knowledge with a survey on CMMI and requirements engineering trends. Most importantly, we hope that the implementation of the proposed processes’ improvements will minimize the risks of mishandled requirements, increasing Altran’s performance and taking them one step further to the desired maturity level.