CESE

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This service promotes the use, by small and medium-sized companies, of innovative solutions based on information systems, communications and electronics.

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    Adoption of digital technologies during the COVID-19 pandemic: Lessons learned from collaborative Academia-Industry R&D case studies
    ( 2021) Ana Cristina Simões ; Ferreira,F ; Hélio Cristiano Castro ; Pedro Senna ; Daniela Sofia Silva ; Gustavo Dalmarco ; 7330 ; 8340 ; 7161 ; 7376 ; 5521
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    An Advanced Agent-Based Order Planning System for Dynamic Networked Enterprises
    ( 2004) César Toscano ; Jorge Pinho de Sousa ; Américo Azevedo ; António Lucas Soares
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    Advanced Services for Supply Chain Design processes in Collaborative Networks
    ( 2012) Rosanna Fornasiero ; Eva A. Coscia ; Salvatore Piccione ; Domenico Rotondi ; João Bastos
    Design and production of small series for specific customer target groups in collaborative networks can help companies to increase their competitiveness. This paper aims to describe a new framework of services for collaborative networking for on-demand productions. After describing the business processes that need to be supported by innovative tools for partner search and collaborative production planning, we describe the developed services and how they are integrated to ease the communication between different activities.
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    Alignment prediction in collaborative networks
    ( 2012) António Henrique Almeida ; Américo Azevedo ; Roberto Piedade Francisco
    Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to study the alignment measurement in collaborative networks, using the fit concept and predictive performance measurement as its main enablers. A performance prediction approach is used in order to control a collaborative business network based not only in present and past performance measurements of each partner, but also taking into account the future behaviour of the intra- and inter-organisational processes performance. Design/methodology/approach - An exploratory case study was applied to a Brazilian collaborative network and mathematical approaches normally used in control theory were adopted to support alignment measurement. Findings - The use of predictive measurements to manage the alignment between the results of inter-organisational processes and performance targets set by the collaborative network.
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    Analysing Collaborative Filtering algorithms in a multi-agent environment
    ( 2014) Tiago Sá Cunha ; Rossetti,RJF ; Soares,C
    The huge amount of online information deprives the user to keep up with his/hers interests and preferences, Recommender Systems appeared to solve this problem, by employing social behavioural paradigms in order to recommend potentially interesting items to users, Among the several kinds of Recommender Systems, one of the most mature and most used in real world applications are known as Collaborative Filtering. These methods recommend items based on the preferences of similar-users, using only a user-item rating matrix. In this pa™ per we explain a methodology to use Multi™Agent based simulation to study the evolution of the data rating matrix and its effect on the performance of several Collaborative Filtering algorithms. Our results show that the best performing methods are user-based and item-based Collaborative Filtering and that the average algorithm performance is surprisingly constant for different rating schemes.
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    Analysing the correlation between social network analysis measures and performance of students in social network-based engineering education
    ( 2016) Putnik,G ; Eric Macieira Costa ; Alves,C ; Castro,H ; Varela,L ; Shah,V
    Social network-based engineering education (SNEE) is designed and implemented as a model of Education 3.0 paradigm. SNEE represents a new learning methodology, which is based on the concept of social networks and represents an extended model of project-led education. The concept of social networks was applied in the real-life experiment, considering two different dimensions: (1) to organize the education process as a social network-based process; and (2) to analyze the students' interactions in the context of evaluation of the students learning performance. The objective of this paper is to present a new model for students evaluation based on their behavior during the course and its validation in comparison with the traditional model of students' evaluation. The validation of the new evaluation model is made through an analysis of the correlation between social network analysis measures (degree centrality, closeness centrality, betweenness centrality, eigenvector centrality, and average tie strength) and the grades obtained by students (grades for quality of work, grades for volume of work, grades for diversity of work, and final grades) in a social network-based engineering education. The main finding is that the obtained correlation results can be used to make the process of the students' performance evaluation based on students interactions (behavior) analysis, to make the evaluation partially automatic, increasing the objectivity and productivity of teachers and allowing a more scalable process of evaluation. The results also contribute to the behavioural theory of learning performance evaluation. More specific findings related to the correlation analysis are: (1) the more different interactions a student had (degree centrality) and the more frequently the student was between the interaction paths of other students (betweenness centrality), the better was the quality of the work; (2) all five social network measures had a positive and strong correlation with the grade for volume of work and with the final grades; and (3) a student with high average tie strength had a higher grade for diversity of work than those with low ties.
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    Analysis and Comparison of Business Process Management Frameworks
    ( 2012) Américo Azevedo ; António Henrique Almeida ; Álvaro Gabriel Caldas
    More and more, the implementation of processes management systems within manufacturing environments not only has increased its popularity, but also has proven that manufacturing productivity can be increased by using better methods for designing, planning and controlling of processes. New technologies and methodologies have been investigated in order to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of company's processes implementation. According to the business process reengineering approach, since the products and services that a company offers to the market are provided through key processes, a flexible manner to graphically (re)design these processes, at different levels of abstraction, represents the road to the success. However, not only the modeling capabilities of a process are required. Due to the fact that management of dynamic processes is an important issue in rapidly changing production systems, a new generation of business process management systems (BPMS) capable of support
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    Application of collaborative information exchange in urban public transport: the Seamless Mobility solution
    ( 2016) Costa,PM ; Tânia Daniela Fontes ; Nunes,AA ; Marta Campos Ferreira ; Vera Lúcia Costa ; Teresa Galvão ; José Luís Borges ; João Falcão Cunha
    Contemporary urban transportation networks are facing challenges to address the growing needs of mobility, all the while improving their economic gains and environmental sustainability. Several studies demonstrate that competitive alternatives to individual private transport are able to address these challenges, such as public transportation services. Thus, the need for optimising their operational efficiency and offer user-centric service delivery arises, with a range of challenges related to the inherent complexity of urban transportation networks as well as the range of dynamic elements involved in such systems. An innovative approach to this problem leverages personal mobile devices in combination with collaborative exchange of information. In this study a system was developed to combine information provided by travellers with data from public transport operators. The result is a rich model of the transportation network that enables the distribution of information in a personalized way and in real-time: the Seamless Mobility solution. Large-scale and expensive infrastructures, such as existing ticketing systems, constitute a threat to such flexibility and traveller access to services. As a result, a distributed architecture was targeted with the goal of integrating personal mobile devices in the infrastructure, with benefits for travellers and transport operators. The proposed solution integrates a broad scope of challenges, including application of secure mobile payments methods, data aggregation from different components and distribution based on relevance techniques. With the implementation of this solution we expect to positively impact the way travellers and transport operators interact, and contribute towards mobility services that are more agile and adequate, taking into account that mobility patterns vary from person to person, seasonally, and even throughout a day. (C) 2016 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.
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    An application of the lean production tool standard work
    ( 2015) Braganca,S ; Eric Macieira Costa
    Standard Work is a very useful tool of the Lean Production paradigm to specify standards and to establish the best methods and sequences for each process and for each worker, helping to reduce wastes. Despite its usefulness, this tool is often underused, neglected and misunderstood. Apart from that, there is a lack of literature about Standard Work. It is possible to find many papers on Lean Production in general and on some Lean tools, but there are few that focus on or describe in detail this particular tool. The main purpose of this paper is to prove the validity and show the importance and the applicability of Standard Work. The main aspects and ideas to understand this tool are described, as well as the benefits of applying it in a real world manufacturing environment. In this paper, an application example is given on a production unit of an elevators company, following the Action-Research methodology. The main findings are that Standard Work is effectively a good tool to normalize work procedures, allowing increased flexibility and production, and decreased wastes and assembly errors.
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    Architecture Model for a Holistic and Interoperable Digital Energy Management Platform
    ( 2020) Pedro Senna ; António Henrique Almeida ; Barros,AC ; Ricardo Jorge Bessa ; Américo Azevedo ; 7330 ; 2160 ; 4882 ; 5264
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    AToMRS: A Tool to Monitor Recommender Systems
    ( 2016) Costa,A ; Tiago Sá Cunha ; Carlos Manuel Soares
    Recommender systems arose in response to the excess of available online information. These systems assign, to a given individual, suggestions of items that may be relevant. These system's monitoring and evaluation are fundamental to the proper functioning of many business related services. It is the goal of this paper to create a tool capable of collecting, aggregating and supervising the results obtained from the recommendation systems' evaluation. To achieve this goal, a multi-granularity approach is developed and implemented in order to organize the different levels of the problem. This tool also aims to tackle the lack of mechanisms to enable visually assessment of the performance of a recommender systems' algorithm. A functional prototype of the application is presented, with the purpose of validating the solution's concept.
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    autoBagging: Learning to Rank Bagging Workflows with Metalearning
    ( 2017) Pinto,F ; Vítor Manuel Cerqueira ; Carlos Manuel Soares ; João Mendes Moreira
    Machine Learning (ML) has been successfully applied to a wide range of domains and applications. One of the techniques behind most of these successful applications is Ensemble Learning (EL), the field of ML that gave birth to methods such as Random Forests or Boosting. The complexity of applying these techniques together with the market scarcity on ML experts, has created the need for systems that enable a fast and easy drop-in replacement for ML libraries. Automated machine learning (autoML) is the field of ML that attempts to answers these needs. We propose autoBagging, an autoML system that automatically ranks 63 bagging workflows by exploiting past performance and metalearning. Results on 140 classification datasets from the OpenML platform show that autoBagging can yield better performance than the Average Rank method and achieve results that are not statistically different from an ideal model that systematically selects the best workflow for each dataset. For the purpose of reproducibility and generalizability, autoBagging is publicly available as an R package on CRAN.
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    Balancing a Mixed-Model Assembly System in the Footwear Industry
    ( 2017) Sadeghi,P ; Rebelo,RD ; José Soeiro Ferreira
    Portuguese footwear industry has improved dramatically to become one of the main world players. This work is part of a project in cooperation with a large footwear company, operating a new automated assembly equipment, integrating various lines. Balancing such lines implies going from an almost manual preparation executed by experienced operators, to a planning supported by optimisation systems. These complex mixed-model lines have distinctive characteristics, which make balancing a unique problem. The paper proposes the ASBsm – Assembly System Balancing Solution Method, a new method that integrates a constructive heuristic and an improvement heuristic, which takes inspiration from Tabu Search. The solutions obtained, based on real instances, are quite encouraging when compared with other effected factory solutions. Consequently, the balances obtained by ASBsm are now being implemented and articulated with sequencing methods. © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2017.
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    Building an extended ontological perspective on Service Science
    ( 2014) Dragoicea,M ; Borangiu,T ; João Falcão Cunha ; Oltean,VE ; José Faria ; Radulescu,S
    This paper presents an approach accounting for the classification of the main knowledge resources related to the new Science of Service. The main knowledge categories are defined as concepts integrated in an extended Service Science ontology. The ontology derived from several sources was captured using UML and Protégé, and then, through a RDF/OWL transformation, a semantically annotated wiki has been directly implemented offering an execution of the ontology together with implemented use cases. Further, a dedicated application was developed - the Service Science Knowledge Environment (SSKE) - in order to grant user access to different knowledge categories created along with the proposed ontology. The SSKE is a cloud based collaborative software service, aiming at providing co-created knowledge resources shared by academia, industry and government organizations. This application can be accessed through the Web (http://sske.cloud.upb.ro/) and it can be used for managing service related knowledge. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014.
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    Building an informal ontology to support collaborative network operation: a case study
    ( 2010) António Lucas Soares ; Cristovão Sousa ; Carla Pereira
    Regarding collaborative networks as social-technical systems, information and knowledge sharing implies sharing a set of common conceptual structures across organizations. Through this paper, we describe a case study on how to construct meaningful collective conceptualizations, by means of a new approach based on conceptual blending theory.
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    Can Metalearning Be Applied to Transfer on Heterogeneous Datasets?
    ( 2016) Catarina Félix Oliveira ; Carlos Manuel Soares ; Alípio Jorge
    Machine learning processes consist in collecting data, obtaining a model and applying it to a given task. Given a new task, the standard approach is to restart the learning process and obtain a new model. However, previous learning experience can be exploited to assist the new learning process. The two most studied approaches for this are meta-learning and transfer learning. Metalearning can be used for selecting the predictive model to use on a new dataset. Transfer learning allows the reuse of knowledge from previous tasks. However, when multiple heterogeneous tasks are available as potential sources for transfer, the question is which one to use. One approach to address this problem is metalearning. In this paper we investigate the feasibility of this approach. We propose a method to transfer weights from a source trained neural network to initialize a network that models a potentially very different target dataset. Our experiments with 14 datasets indicate that this method enables faster convergence without significant difference in accuracy provided that the source task is adequately chosen. This means that there is potential for applying metalearning to support transfer between heterogeneous datasets.
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    Cargo dynamic stability in the container loading problem -a physics simulation tool approach
    ( 2017) António Galrão Ramos ; João Tiago Jacob ; Justo,JF ; José Fernando Oliveira ; Rui Pedro Rodrigues ; António Miguel Gomes
    The container loading problem (CLP) is a real-world driven, combinatorial optimisation problem that addresses the maximisation of space usage in cargo transport units. The research conducted on this problem failed to fulfill the real needs of the transportation industry, owing to the inadequate representation of practical-relevant constraints. The dynamic stability of cargo is one of the most important practical constraints. It has been addressed in the literature in an over-simplified way which does not translate to real-world stability. This paper proposes a physics simulation tool based on a physics engine, which can be used to translate real-world stability into the CLP. To validate the tool, a set of benchmark tests is proposed and the results obtained with the physics simulation tool are compared to the state-of-the-art simulation engineering software Abaqus Unified FEA. Analytical calculations have been also conducted, and it was also possible to conclude that the tool proposed is a valid alternative. Copyright © 2017 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.
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    Case studies on collaboration, technology and performance factors in business networks
    ( 2013) Luís Carneiro ; António Lucas Soares ; Patricio,R ; Américo Azevedo ; Jorge Pinho de Sousa
    This paper presents part of the findings of a research project aiming at characterising high-performance collaborative business networks and at defining the conditions required for their creation and management. The project adopted a multiple case study research strategy and three different business networks are presented in this paper. Empirical studies have been performed in Northern Portugal. The results of the study include operational definitions based on a comprehensive literature review, a conceptual reference framework for the analysis of high-performance collaborative networks and recommendations for the creation and management of such networks.
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    A case study evaluating the impact of human behavior on a manufacturing process in-line with automatic processes by means of a simulation model
    ( 2013) Silva,E ; Donauer,M ; Américo Azevedo ; Pecas,P ; Henriques,E
    In many manufacturing systems human resources are essential in some cognitive intensive tasks while the more repetitive ones are assigned to automatic systems. If on the one hand, automation has a deterministic pace; humans are known by a flexible and variable work manner. Therefore, a reliable description of both hardware and human components is required for designing such manufacturing systems. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of the variable throughput of a manual process in a production flow that contains automatic processes upstream and downstream. With regard to the description of human behavior, two sources of variability were considered: natural and abnormal variability. Natural variability refers to the differences in terms of processing times that can be found among individuals. Organizational aspects such delays in shift changing and breaks along the shift, are referred as abnormal variability, and were also investigated by means of an analytical and simulation models.
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    Circle covering using medial axis
    ( 2013) Pedro Filipe Rocha ; Rui Pedro Rodrigues ; Toledo,FMB ; António Miguel Gomes
    A good representation of a simple polygon, with a desired degree of approximation and complexity, is critical in many applications. This paper presents a method to achieve a complete Circle Covering Representation of a simple polygon, through a topological skeleton, the Medial Axis. The aim is to produce an efficient circle representation of irregular pieces, while considering the approximation error and the resulting complexity, i.e. the number of circles. This will help to address limitations of current approaches to some problems, such as Irregular Placement problems, which will, in turn, provide a positive economic and environmental impact where similar problems arise. © 2013 IFAC.