Identificação de factores de risco na implementação de sistemas de segurança alimentar em unidades de restauração de pequena dimensão

O presente trabalho de investigação teve como objectivo principal, avaliar e identificar os factores de risco na implementação de sistemas de segurança alimentar em unidades de restauração de pequena dimensão, na zona centro de Portugal Continental. De modo a alcançar os objectivos propostos, analisou-se uma amostra de estabelecimentos de restauração nas regiões da Grande Lisboa, Alentejo, Ribatejo, Oeste e Setúbal. Aplicou-se um questionário aos responsáveis dos estabelecimentos, de modo a percepcionar e identificar causas de dificuldades, desinteresse e falhas nos procedimentos de implementação dos Sistemas de Segurança Alimentar (SSA). Posteriormente elaborou-se uma listagem de verificação de pré-requisitos, com base na observação directa, com o objectivo de inventariar as falhas e incumprimentos ocorridos com mais frequência por parte dos estabelecimentos.This research work was aimed at assessing and identifying risk factors in the implementation of food safety systems in units of small restaurants, in central Portugal. In order to achieve the proposed objectives, a convenience sample of 30 catering establishments in the Greater Lisbon, Alentejo, Ribatejo, West and Setúbal were analyzed. A questionnaire was applied to the establishments in order to perceive and identify causes of difficulties, lack of interest and failures in the procedures for implementation of Food Safety Systems (FSS). Later, a checklist of prerequisites was prepared, based on direct observation, with the aim of cataloguing the flaws and failures that occurred most frequently in the establishments. The study had as total compliance results, values between 31% and 94% of compliance of pre-requisites. The best rates were found in “Collective Restauration Establishments” compared to the “Simple Restauration Establishments”, yet the reason why the majority (63%) of the establishments implemented FSS was this being mandatory. This study also concludes that the lowest average rates of compliance relate to the provisions applicable to the HACCP System (50%) and the requirements for tools and equipment (61%), while the highest are related to the general requirements for operation (72%) and the general condition of facilities (88%), however there are flaws in the implementation of good practice due to the employees negligence (35%), lack of time for its proper implementation (33%), disinterest (10%), or reduced availability of funds (13%). In conclusion, there is an urgent need to inform more and in a better way the food professionals what the FSS are and its advantages, since the FSS will only be fully implemented if the people involved are competent and believe in the benefits that they can add to food security and quality

ReGS: user-level Reliability in a Grid Environment

Grid environments are ideal for executing applications that require a huge amount of computational work, both due to the big number of tasks to execute and to the large amount of data to be analysed. Unfortunately, current tools may require that users deal themselves with corrupted outputs or early termination of tasks. This becomes incovenient as the number of parallel runs grows to easily exceed the thousands. ReGS is a user-level software designed to provide automatic detection and restart of corrupted or early terminated tasks. ReGS uses a web interface to allow the setup and control of grid execution, and provides automatic input data setup. ReGS allows the automatic detection of job dependencies, through the GRID-ADL task management language. Our results show that besides automatically and effectively managing a huge number of tasks in grid environments, ReGS is also a good monitoring tool to spot grid nodes pitfalls. 1