An Advanced Home ElderCare Service

With the increase of welfare cost all over the developed world, there is a need to resort to new technologies that could help reduce this enormous cost and provide some quality eldercare services. This paper presents a middleware-level solution that integrates monitoring and emergency detection solutions with networking solutions. The proposed system enables efficient integration between a variety of sensors and actuators deployed at home for emergency detection and provides a framework for creating and managing rescue teams willing to assist elders in case of emergency situations. A prototype of the proposed system was designed and implemented. Results were obtained from both computer simulations and a real-network testbed. These results show that the proposed system can help overcome some of the current problems and help reduce the enormous cost of eldercare service

Applying Agile Software Engineering On Medical Ubiquitous Computing (MUC)

Nowadays, people are involved in using computation capabilities to meet their daily life needs although most of the time they may be unaware as to how this actually happens. Ubiquities Computing is considered the future trend for providing unlimited computing capabilities that handle every service in human life. One of the most crucial implementation of Ubiquities Computing is in Medical and Hospital Service. This is due to their great importance in saving people's lives. The huge amount of data and information delivered by MUC systems draw the attention to the necessity of having a new and modern software engineering methodology; Agile Software engineering methodology is highly considered in the matter. In this paper, we present an implementation of applying agile SWE methodology on MUC System, research related issues are also discussed

Plataforma para suporte ao ciclo de vida de organizações virtuais e seleção dinâmica de parceiros e fornecedores

Tese de Doutoramento em Engenharia Industrial e de SistemasAs empresas enfrentam atualmente desafios crescentes motivados pela globalização. Por um lado, veêm crescer o número de concorrentes com os quais terão que competir para manterem a sua quota de mercado, e com quem terão que lidar no contexto de qualquer estratégia de crescimento. Por outro lado, encontram um conjunto alargado de oportunidades de entrada em novos mercados e de potencial aumento de penetração nos mercados em que operam, devido à crescente mitigação de barreiras geográficas, políticas e económicas. As estratégias de diversificação de mercados criam nas empresas a motivação para produzir novos produtos e disponibilizar novos serviços aos seus clientes. Adicionalmente, as estratégias de desenvolvimento de mercado assentes na conquista de clientes em novos segmentos geográficos e demográficos, ou na conquista de clientes potenciais nos segmentos existentes, podem ser suportadas por uma maior diversificação de produtos e maior agilidade ao nível do negócio. A diversificação de produtos e o aumento da agilidade dos processos requerem das empresas a posse de um leque cada vez mais amplo de competências de produção, logísticas, comerciais e de gestão. As pequenas e médias empresas têm cada vez maiores dificuldades em dispor deste leque de competências, de forma integral, na sua estrutura interna, pelo que promovem a criação de relações mais próximas com seus parceiros de negócio e fornecedores, que as complementam. As redes colaborativas são uma importante ferramenta para apoiar as empresas neste processo. Das redes colaborativas de fornecimento até às empresas ágeis virtuais são várias as opções disponíveis para as empresas otimizarem a sua relação com os seus fornecedores e parceiros. Para as implementar, de forma eficiente, as empresas necessitam de ferramentas tecnológicas que lhes permitam identificar, avaliar e selecionar os melhores parceiros e fornecedores num contexto de negócio dinâmico, em mudança constante. Nesta tese de doutoramento é proposta uma plataforma, baseada em agentes de software, para suportar o ciclo de vida das redes colaborativas e organizações virtuais, bem como uma abordagem dinâmica de avaliação de parceiros e fornecedores, que pode apoiar as empresas na otimização das suas relações com os parceiros de negócio.Companies are facing growing challenges motivated by globalization. A globalized market means that the number of companies with which they will need to compete to maintain or enlarge their market share is increased. Additionally, it also brings greater opportunities to conquer new markets and increase existing market shares, since the geographical, political and economical boundaries are gradually being removed. Strategies of market diversification push companies to provide novel products and services to customers, belonging to new geographic and demographic segments. Additionally, market development strategies targeting non-buying customers in selected segments or new buyers in new segments may be paired with increased product diversification and improved business agility. To fulfil the requirements associated with manufacturing a wider range of products and increased agility at process level implies having a wider set of competences available. Small and Medium (SME) companies find it increasingly difficult to have all the required competences in their internal structures; therefore, they need to rely on strategic business partnerships and suppliers to be successful. Collaborative networks are an important tool to assist companies creating and improving their business partnerships. From collaborative supply chains to agile virtual enterprises, companies have several options at their disposal to optimize their relations with business partners and suppliers. When a company decides to develop such a network, it needs decision support tools to select the best partners or suppliers, particularly in today’s spatial-temporal changeable global environments. In this doctoral thesis, a platform based on software agents is proposed, to support the lifecycle of collaborative networks and virtual organizations, along with a dynamic decision approach for supplier and business partner evaluation and selection, which can prove valuable to enable companies to establish strong collaborative business networks