Knowledge Management Techniques to Augment Textual CBR (PhD Thesis)

The past decade had witnessed an unprecedented growth in the amount of available digital content, and its volume is expected to continue to grow the next few years. Unstructured text data generated from web and enterprise sources form a large fraction of such content. Many of these contain large volumes of reusable data such as solutions to frequently occurring problems, and general know-how that may be reused in appropriate contexts. In this work, we address issues around leveraging unstructured text data from sources as diverse as the web and the enterprise within the Case-based Reasoning framework. Case-based Reasoning (CBR) provides a framework and methodology for systematic reuse of historical knowledge that is available in the form of problemsolution
pairs, in solving new problems. Here, we consider possibilities of enhancing Textual CBR systems under three main themes: procurement, maintenance and retrieval. We adapt and build upon the stateof-the-art techniques from data mining and natural language processing in addressing various challenges therein. Under procurement, we investigate the problem of extracting cases (i.e., problem-solution pairs) from data sources such as incident/experience
reports. We develop case-base maintenance methods specifically tuned to text targeted towards retaining solutions such that the utility of the filtered case base in solving new problems is maximized. Further, we address the problem of query suggestions for textual case-bases and show that exploiting the problem-solution partition can enhance retrieval effectiveness by prioritizing more useful query suggestions. Additionally, we illustrate interpretable clustering as a tool to drill-down to domain specific text collections (since CBR systems are usually very domain specific) and develop techniques for improved similarity assessment in social media sources such as microblogs. Through extensive empirical evaluations, we illustrate the improvements that we are able to
achieve over the state-of-the-art methods for the respective tasks.

Time-lapse Monitoring of the Slopes of a Heritage Earthwork by Means of Near-surface Seismic Techniques

A significant portion of UK’s infrastructures earthworks was built more than 100 years ago, without modern construction standards: poor maintenance and the change of precipitations pattern experienced in the past decades are currently compromising their stability, leading to an increasing number of failures. To address the need for a reliable and time-efficient monitoring of earthworks at risk of failure we propose here the use of two established seismic techniques for the characterization of the near surface, MASW and P-wave refraction. We have regularly collected MASW and P-wave refraction data, from March 2014 to February 2015, along 4 reduced-scale seismic lines located on the flanks of a heritage railway embankment located in Broadway, SW of England. We have observed a definite temporal variability in terms of phase velocities of SW dispersion curves and of P-wave travel times. The accurate choice of ad-hoc inversion strategies has allowed to reconstruct reliable VP and VS models through which it is potentially possible to track the temporal variations of geo-mechanical properties of the embankment slopes. The variability over time of seismic data and seismic velocities seems to correlate well with rainfall data recorded in the days immediately preceding the date of acquisition.

"Arqueologias" das aprendizagens em Capelins (Santo António) - Alandroal (1997-2007)

Esta dissertação de mestrado desenvolveu-se no âmbito do projecto “Arqueologia” das Aprendizagens no concelho de Alandroal, que teve, como objectivo primordial, a identificação e caracterização do universo de aprendizagens institucionais disponíveis e concretizadas pela comunidade do território em estudo (Freguesia de Capelins (Santo António) /Alandroal), na década 1997 – 2007. Foram inquiridas, nesta freguesia, 16 instituições e identificadas 30 aprendizagens institucionais, que tiveram maior ocorrência nos anos de 2004, 2005 e 2006. Embora seja uma freguesia essencialmente rural, a área de actividade da maioria das instituições identificadas inscreve-se no sector do comércio por grosso e a retalho e de reparação de veículos automóveis e motociclos. São, na sua maioria, instituições de natureza privada e reveladoras de organização, no que respeita à sua organização. No entanto, o relacionamento interinstitucional foi pouco dinâmico, existindo um fraco trabalho em rede. Quando existiram parcerias, estas ocorreram extra freguesia e, até mesmo, extra concelho. Seguindo uma análise quantitativa dos dados extraídos da aplicação dos questionários, com recurso a análise estatística, conclui-se que os processos de aprendizagem das instituições inquiridas da freguesia de Capelins apresentam características centradas nas próprias instituições promotoras dessas mesmas aprendizagens, assentes na formação do pessoal, com carácter formal e não formal e relacionaram-se com as áreas de administração pública e defesa, alojamento e restauração e ainda com a área do comércio por grosso e a retalho; ABSTRACT: This dissertation developed under the project "Archaeology" of Learning in the county of Alandroal, which had as its primary objective, the identification and characterization of the universe of available institutional learning and implemented by the community of the area under study (Parish of capelin (San Antonio) / Alandroal), in the decade from 1997 to 2007. Were surveyed in this parish, and 16 institutions identified 30 institutional learning, which have a higher occurrence in the years 2004, 2005 and 2006. Although it is an essentially rural, the parish area of activity of most institutions identified in the sector of wholesale and retail trade and repair of motor vehicles and motorcycles. Are, for the most part, private institutions and revealing of organization, with regard to its organization. However, the interinstitutional relationship was weak and there is a little dynamic networking. When partnered, this extra parish occurred and even extra municipality. Following a quantitative analysis of data taken from the application of questionnaires, using statistical analysis, it is concluded that the learning processes of the institutions surveyed in the parish of Capelins characteristics focused on promoting institutions of those learnings, based on staff training, formal and non-formal nature and related to the areas of public administration and defense, hotels and restaurants and also the area of wholesale and retail trade.

Dependable wireless real-time communications for open environments

Wireless communication technologies have become widely adopted, appearing in heterogeneous applications ranging from tracking victims, responders and equipments in disaster scenarios to machine health monitoring in networked manufacturing systems. Very often, applications demand a strictly bounded timing response, which, in distributed systems, is generally highly dependent on the performance of the underlying communication technology. These systems are said to have real-time timeliness requirements since data communication must be conducted within predefined temporal bounds, whose unfulfillment may compromise the correct behavior of the system and cause economic losses or endanger human lives. The potential adoption of wireless technologies for an increasingly broad range of application scenarios has made the operational requirements more complex and heterogeneous than before for wired technologies. On par with this trend, there is an increasing demand for the provision of cost-effective distributed systems with improved deployment, maintenance and adaptation features. These systems tend to require operational flexibility, which can only be ensured if the underlying communication technology provides both time and event triggered data transmission services while supporting on-line, on-the-fly parameter modification. Generally, wireless enabled applications have deployment requirements that can only be addressed through the use of batteries and/or energy harvesting mechanisms for power supply. These applications usually have stringent autonomy requirements and demand a small form factor, which hinders the use of large batteries. As the communication support may represent a significant part of the energy requirements of a station, the use of power-hungry technologies is not adequate. Hence, in such applications, low-range technologies have been widely adopted. In fact, although low range technologies provide smaller data rates, they spend just a fraction of the energy of their higher-power counterparts. The timeliness requirements of data communications, in general, can be met by ensuring the availability of the medium for any station initiating a transmission. In controlled (close) environments this can be guaranteed, as there is a strict regulation of which stations are installed in the area and for which purpose. Nevertheless, in open environments, this is hard to control because no a priori abstract knowledge is available of which stations and technologies may contend for the medium at any given instant. Hence, the support of wireless real-time communications in unmanaged scenarios is a highly challenging task. Wireless low-power technologies have been the focus of a large research effort, for example, in the Wireless Sensor Network domain. Although bringing extended autonomy to battery powered stations, such technologies are known to be negatively influenced by similar technologies contending for the medium and, especially, by technologies using higher power transmissions over the same frequency bands. A frequency band that is becoming increasingly crowded with competing technologies is the 2.4 GHz Industrial, Scientific and Medical band, encompassing, for example, Bluetooth and ZigBee, two lowpower communication standards which are the base of several real-time protocols. Although these technologies employ mechanisms to improve their coexistence, they are still vulnerable to transmissions from uncoordinated stations with similar technologies or to higher power technologies such as Wi- Fi, which hinders the support of wireless dependable real-time communications in open environments. The Wireless Flexible Time-Triggered Protocol (WFTT) is a master/multi-slave protocol that builds on the flexibility and timeliness provided by the FTT paradigm and on the deterministic medium capture and maintenance provided by the bandjacking technique. This dissertation presents the WFTT protocol and argues that it allows supporting wireless real-time communication services with high dependability requirements in open environments where multiple contention-based technologies may dispute the medium access. Besides, it claims that it is feasible to provide flexible and timely wireless communications at the same time in open environments. The WFTT protocol was inspired on the FTT paradigm, from which higher layer services such as, for example, admission control has been ported. After realizing that bandjacking was an effective technique to ensure the medium access and maintenance in open environments crowded with contention-based communication technologies, it was recognized that the mechanism could be used to devise a wireless medium access protocol that could bring the features offered by the FTT paradigm to the wireless domain. The performance of the WFTT protocol is reported in this dissertation with a description of the implemented devices, the test-bed and a discussion of the obtained results.

Acoustic oceanographic buoy telemetry system: an ‘advanced’ sonobuoy that meets acoustic rapid environmental assessment requirements

The Acoustic Oceanographic Buoy (AOB) Telemetry System has been designed to meet acoustic rapid environmental assessment requirements. It uses a standard institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers 802.11 wireless local area network (WLAN) to integrate the air radio network (RaN) and a hydrophone array and acoustic source to integrate the underwater acoustic network (AcN). It offers advantages including local data storage, dedicated signal processing, and global positioning system (GPS) timing and localization. The AOB can also be integrated with other similar systems, due to its WLAN transceivers, to form a flexible network and perform on-line high speed data transmissions. The AOB is a reusable system that requires less maintenance and can also work as a salt-water plug-and-play system at sea as it is designed to operate in free drifting mode. The AOB is also suitable for performing distributed digital signal processing tasks due to its digital signal processor facility.

Processos de cuidar em enfermagem:idosos com hipertenção arterial

Tese de doutoramento, Enfermagem, Universidade de Lisboa, com a participação da Escola Superior de Enfermagem, 2014

Redução das emissões de CO2 em redes ópticas

Num mundo em que as redes de telecomunicações estão em constante evolução e crescimento, o consumo energético destas também aumenta. Com a evolução tanto por parte das redes como dos seus equipamentos, o custo de implementação de uma rede tem-se reduzido até ao ponto em que o maior obstáculo para o crescimento das redes é já o seu custo de manutenção e funcionamento. Nas últimas décadas têm sido criados esforços para tornar as redes cada fez mais eficientes ao nível energético, reduzindo-se assim os seus custos operacionais, como também a redução dos problemas relacionados com as fontes de energia que alimentam estas redes. Neste sentido, este trabalho tem como objectivo principal o estudo do consumo energético de redes IP sobre WDM, designadamente o estudo de métodos de encaminhamento que sejam eficientes do ponto de vista energético. Neste trabalho formalizámos um modelo de optimização que foi avaliado usando diferentes topologias de rede. O resultado da análise mostrou que na maioria dos casos é possível obter uma redução do consumo na ordem dos 25%.

Increase of the delivered energy probability in DES using a fuzzy probabilistic modeling

The paper proposes a methodology to increase the probability of delivering power to any load point by identifying new investments in distribution energy systems. The proposed methodology is based on statistical failure and repair data of distribution components and it uses a fuzzy-probabilistic modeling for the components outage parameters. The fuzzy membership functions of the outage parameters of each component are based on statistical records. A mixed integer nonlinear programming optimization model is developed in order to identify the adequate investments in distribution energy system components which allow increasing the probability of delivering power to any customer in the distribution system at the minimum possible cost for the system operator. To illustrate the application of the proposed methodology, the paper includes a case study that considers a 180 bus distribution network.

Ant colony search algorithm for the optimal power flow problem

To maintain a power system within operation limits, a level ahead planning it is necessary to apply competitive techniques to solve the optimal power flow (OPF). OPF is a non-linear and a large combinatorial problem. The Ant Colony Search (ACS) optimization algorithm is inspired by the organized natural movement of real ants and has been successfully applied to different large combinatorial optimization problems. This paper presents an implementation of Ant Colony optimization to solve the OPF in an economic dispatch context. The proposed methodology has been developed to be used for maintenance and repairing planning with 48 to 24 hours antecipation. The main advantage of this method is its low execution time that allows the use of OPF when a large set of scenarios has to be analyzed. The paper includes a case study using the IEEE 30 bus network. The results are compared with other well-known methodologies presented in the literature.

Fuzzy Monte Carlo mathematical model for load curtailment minimization in transmission power systems

This paper presents a methodology which is based on statistical failure and repair data of the transmission power system components and uses fuzzyprobabilistic modeling for system component outage parameters. Using statistical records allows developing the fuzzy membership functions of system component outage parameters. The proposed hybrid method of fuzzy set and Monte Carlo simulation based on the fuzzy-probabilistic models allows catching both randomness and fuzziness of component outage parameters. A network contingency analysis to identify any overloading or voltage violation in the network is performed once obtained the system states by Monte Carlo simulation. This is followed by a remedial action algorithm, based on optimal power flow, to reschedule generations and alleviate constraint violations and, at the same time, to avoid any load curtailment, if possible, or, otherwise, to minimize the total load curtailment, for the states identified by the contingency analysis. In order to illustrate the application of the proposed methodology to a practical case, the paper will include a case study for the Reliability Test System (RTS) 1996 IEEE 24 BUS.

Avaliação técnica e econômica de um biodigestor de fluxo tubular: estudo de caso do modelo implantado na etec "orlando quagliato" em Santa Cruz do Rio Pardo, SP

Pós-graduação em Agronomia (Energia na Agricultura) - FCA

Manutenção preditiva e pró-activa: filosofias alternativas ou complementares: estudo de caso

Trabalho Final de Mestrado para obtenção do grau de Mestre em Engenharia Mecânica Ramo Manutenção e Produção

Reabilitação do edifício localizado na rua Miguel Bombarda nº 69 em Loulé

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

Estratégias e internacionalização na manutenção e produção

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

Normalização de equipamento médico, requisitos técnicos e metrológicos

Os hospitais necessitam de desenvolver programas de gestão de equipamentos médicos, onde contenha informação pertinente e uma metodologia de planeamento eficaz, para a aquisição do equipamento médico novo, assim como otimizar o controlo metrológico destes equipamentos. Para tal foi fornecida informação sobre os aspetos mais relevantes a ter em conta na compra do equipamento médico, como as especificações e funcionalidades necessárias, normas a que o equipamento deve obedecer, garantias, manutenção e calibração/verificação quando aplicável. A escolha dos equipamentos médicos incidiu sobre os esfigmomanómetros e os monitores de sinais vitais. Estudou-se o funcionamento destes equipamentos e prosseguiu-se depois para a realização de entrevistas aos seus utilizadores, com o intuito de perceber a satisfação, os critérios e as necessidades relativas aos equipamentos existentes na ULSM. Em seguida foram realizadas as fichas de normalização onde se definiram as características físicas, fisiológicas e tecnológicas associadas a ambos os tipos de dispositivos médicos. Posteriormente estudaram-se as normas com as quais os equipamentos devem estar em conformidade para garantir o bom funcionamento. Por fim pesquisou-se quais os requisitos metrológicos, técnicos e os procedimentos de verificação a que os equipamentos devem obedecer. Este documento irá servir como suporte para a aquisição e controlo dos equipamentos médicos aqui estudados, melhorando a sua gestão, manutenção e controlo metrológico.