Desenvolvimento de uma ferramenta de suporte à implementação prática de conceitos do lean manufacturing

A presente Dissertação de Mestrado surge no âmbito da Unidade Curricular de Projeto/Dissertação/Estágio, referente ao 2º ano do Mestrado em Engenharia e Gestão Industrial do Instituto Superior de Engenharia do Porto. O projeto de investigação, intitulado “Desenvolvimento de um manual de suporte à implementação prática de conceitos do Lean Manufacturing”, tem como principal objetivo desenvolver e validar um manual de auxílio à implementação prática de conceitos do LM. Na atualidade, o Lean Manufacturing (LM) é um dos modelos de gestão mais procurado pelas organizações para promover o seu crescimento e desenvolvimento, no entanto muitas delas têm dificuldade em implementar de forma correta os seus conceitos, principalmente, devido à falta de conhecimento, más práticas de aplicação e por não possuírem um suporte com as metodologias standard da sua aplicação nos momentos de implementação. Posto isto, o que se pretende neste projeto é desenvolver e testar um Manual de Instruções Lean (MIL) com a informação necessária para implementar alguns dos conceitos do LM. O objetivo é que o manual sirva de suporte aos utilizadores nos momentos em que implementam as ferramentas do LM. Para a realização deste projeto seguiu-se a metodologia investigação-ação, visto que é uma metodologia normalmente utilizada em projetos que pretendem resolver problemas práticos e sociais através da investigação, o que é o caso. Através desta metodologia, inicialmente, efetuouse a definição do problema e dos objetivos do trabalho. De seguida, realizou-se um planeamento de ações. Posteriormente, executou-se o plano, sendo de destacar as etapas de seleção das ferramentas do LM a incluir no MIL (Kaizen, Standard Work, 5´s, SMED, Kanban e VSM), desenvolvimento e validação do manual. Depois, observaram-se os resultados e efetuaram-se os ajustes necessários. Por fim, teceram-se as devidas conclusões e identificaram-se projetos futuros de melhoria. Na fase de validação, o MIL foi aprovado por duas peritas na área do LM, testado por três potenciais utilizadores, que aplicaram as ferramentas Kaizen, 5´s e VSM em ambientes industriais, e avaliado por vinte e nove pessoas através da realização de um questionário online. Além disto, para monitorizar os resultados do questionário desenvolveu-se uma dashboard em Power Bi e um fluxo em Power Automate para agilizar o processo. Os conteúdos do MIL foram aprovados com sucesso pelos experts Lean, as ferramentas testadas foram corretamente implementadas com o auxílio do manual e apresentaram resultados bastante significativos, como por exemplo, a redução de cerca de 62% do tempo de identificação de materiais e os incrementos de 55% e 57% das pontuações dos 5´s nos postos de trabalho e, por fim, as avaliações efetuadas ao MIL pelos questionados foram bastante positivas e, no geral, acima do objetivo definido. Assim, todos estes resultados, permitem concluir que o projeto foi desenvolvido com sucesso e que a utilização do Manual de Instruções Lean no processo de implementação de ferramentas do LM tem um efeito bastante positivo. Por fim, elaborou-se um artigo científico, o qual foi submetido na revista científica Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute (MDPI).This Master's Dissertation is part of the Project/Dissertation/Internship Curricular Unit, referring to the second year of the Master's Degree in Industrial Engineering and Management at the Instituto Superior de Engenharia do Porto. This research project, entitled “Development of a support manual for the practical implementation of Lean Manufacturing concepts”, has as main objective to develop and validate a manual to aid the practical implementation of LM concepts. Currently, Lean Manufacturing (LM) is one of the management models most required by organizations to promote their growth and development, however many of them have difficulty implementing its concepts correctly, mainly due to lack of knowledge, bad application practices and for not having a support with the standard methodology of its application in the moments of implementation. That said, the aim of this project is to develop and test a Lean Instruction Manual with the necessary information to implement some of the LM concepts. The goal is for the manual to serve as a support for users when implementing the LM tools. To carry out this project, the research-action methodology was followed, since it is a methodology normally used in projects that intend to solve practical and social problems through research, which is the case. Through this methodology, initially, the problem and objectives of the work were defined. Then, action planning was carried out. Subsequently, the plan was executed, highlighting the steps of selecting the LM tools to include in the manual (Kaizen, Standard Work, 5's, SMED, Kanban and VSM), development and validation of the manual. Afterwards, the results were observed and the necessary adjustments were made. Finally, the appropriate conclusions and future improvement projects were identified. In the validation phase, the manual was approved by two experts in the field of LM, tested by three potential users, who applied the Kaizen, 5's and VSM tools in industrial environments, and evaluated by twenty-nine people through an online questionnaire. In addition, to monitor the results of the questionnaire, a Power Bi dashboard and a Power Automate flow were developed to streamline the process. The contents of the manual were successfully approved by Lean experts, the tested tools were correctly implemented with the help of the manual and presented very significant results, for example, a reduction of about 62% in material identification time and increases in 55% and 57% of the scores of the 5's in the workstations and, finally, the assessments made to the manual by the respondents were very positive and, in general, above the defined objective. Thus, all these results allow us to conclude that the project was successfully developed and that the use of the Lean Instruction Manual in the process of implementing LM tools has an extremely positive effect. Finally, a scientific article was elaborated, which was submitted in the scientific journal Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute (MDPI)

Segmentation of kidney and renal collecting system on 3D computed tomography images

Surgical training for minimal invasive kidney interventions (MIKI) has huge importance within the urology field. Within this topic, simulate MIKI in a patient-specific virtual environment can be used for pre-operative planning using the real patient's anatomy, possibly resulting in a reduction of intra-operative medical complications. However, the validated VR simulators perform the training in a group of standard models and do not allow patient-specific training. For a patient-specific training, the standard simulator would need to be adapted using personalized models, which can be extracted from pre-operative images using segmentation strategies. To date, several methods have already been proposed to accurately segment the kidney in computed tomography (CT) images. However, most of these works focused on kidney segmentation only, neglecting the extraction of its internal compartments. In this work, we propose to adapt a coupled formulation of the B-Spline Explicit Active Surfaces (BEAS) framework to simultaneously segment the kidney and the renal collecting system (CS) from CT images. Moreover, from the difference of both kidney and CS segmentations, one is able to extract the renal parenchyma also. The segmentation process is guided by a new energy functional that combines both gradient and region-based energies. The method was evaluated in 10 kidneys from 5 CT datasets, with different image properties. Overall, the results demonstrate the accuracy of the proposed strategy, with a Dice overlap of 92.5%, 86.9% and 63.5%, and a point-to-surface error around 1.6 mm, 1.9 mm and 4 mm for the kidney, renal parenchyma and CS, respectively.NORTE-01-0145-FEDER0000I3, and NORTE-01-0145-FEDER-024300, supported by Northern Portugal Regional Operational Programme (Norte2020), under the Portugal 2020 Partnership Agreement, through the European Regional Development Fund (FEDER), and also been funded by FEDER funds, through Competitiveness Factors Operational Programme (COMPETE), and by national funds, through the FCT-Fundacao para a Ciência e Tecnologia, under the scope of the project POCI-01-0145-FEDER-007038. The authors acknowledge FCT-Fundação para a Ciância e a Tecnologia, Portugal, and the European Social Found, European Union, for funding support through the Programa Operacional Capital Humano (POCH).info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

A system for the generation of in-car human body pose datasets

Published online: 8 October 2020With the advent of autonomous vehicles, detection of the occupants’ posture is crucial to tackle the needs of infotainment interaction or passive safety systems. Generative approaches have been recently proposed for human body pose in-car detection, but this type of approaches requires a large training dataset for a feasible accuracy. This requirement poses a difficulty, given the substantial time required to annotate such large amount of data. In the in-car scenario, this requirement risk increases even further, since a robust human body pose ground-truth system capable of working in it is needed but inexistent. Currently, the gold standard for human body pose capture is based on optical systems, requiring up to 39 visible markers for a plug-in gait model, which in this case are not feasible given the occlusions inside the car. Other solutions, such as inertial suits, also have limitations linked to magnetic sensitivity and global positioning drift. In this paper, a system for the generation of images for human body pose detection in an in-car environment is proposed. To this end, we propose to smartly combine inertial and optical systems to suppress their individual limitations: By combining the global positioning of 3 visible head markers provided by the optical system with the inertial suit’s relative human body pose, we obtain an occlusion-ready, drift-free full-body global positioning system. This system is then spatially and temporally calibrated with a time-of-flight sensor, automatically obtaining in-car image data with (multi-person) pose annotations. Besides quantifying the inertial suit inherent sensitivity and accuracy, the feasibility of the overall system for human body pose capture in the in-car scenario was demonstrated. Our results quantify the errors associated with the inertial suit, pinpoint some sources of the system’s uncertainty and propose how to minimize some of them. Finally, we demonstrate the feasibility of using system generated data (which was made publicly available), independently or mixed with two publicly available generic datasets (not in-car), to train 2 machine learning algorithms, demonstrating the improvement in their algorithmic accuracy for the in-car scenario.This work is supported by: European Structural and Investment Funds in the FEDER component, through the Operational Competitiveness and Internationalization Programme (COMPETE 2020) [Project n.º 002797; Funding Reference: POCI-01-0247-FEDER-002797]

MAMMALS IN PORTUGAL : A data set of terrestrial, volant, and marine mammal occurrences in P ortugal

Mammals are threatened worldwide, with 26% of all species being includedin the IUCN threatened categories. This overall pattern is primarily associatedwith habitat loss or degradation, and human persecution for terrestrial mam-mals, and pollution, open net fishing, climate change, and prey depletion formarine mammals. Mammals play a key role in maintaining ecosystems func-tionality and resilience, and therefore information on their distribution is cru-cial to delineate and support conservation actions. MAMMALS INPORTUGAL is a publicly available data set compiling unpublishedgeoreferenced occurrence records of 92 terrestrial, volant, and marine mam-mals in mainland Portugal and archipelagos of the Azores and Madeira thatincludes 105,026 data entries between 1873 and 2021 (72% of the data occur-ring in 2000 and 2021). The methods used to collect the data were: live obser-vations/captures (43%), sign surveys (35%), camera trapping (16%),bioacoustics surveys (4%) and radiotracking, and inquiries that represent lessthan 1% of the records. The data set includes 13 types of records: (1) burrowsjsoil moundsjtunnel, (2) capture, (3) colony, (4) dead animaljhairjskullsjjaws, (5) genetic confirmation, (6) inquiries, (7) observation of live animal (8),observation in shelters, (9) photo trappingjvideo, (10) predators dietjpelletsjpine cones/nuts, (11) scatjtrackjditch, (12) telemetry and (13) vocalizationjecholocation. The spatial uncertainty of most records ranges between 0 and100 m (76%). Rodentia (n=31,573) has the highest number of records followedby Chiroptera (n=18,857), Carnivora (n=18,594), Lagomorpha (n=17,496),Cetartiodactyla (n=11,568) and Eulipotyphla (n=7008). The data setincludes records of species classified by the IUCN as threatened(e.g.,Oryctolagus cuniculus[n=12,159],Monachus monachus[n=1,512],andLynx pardinus[n=197]). We believe that this data set may stimulate thepublication of other European countries data sets that would certainly contrib-ute to ecology and conservation-related research, and therefore assisting onthe development of more accurate and tailored conservation managementstrategies for each species. There are no copyright restrictions; please cite thisdata paper when the data are used in publications.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

PROT-OVT: Plano Regional de Ordenamento do Territorio do Oeste e Vale do Tejo

Os princípios, objectivos e orientações consagrados no Programa Nacional da Política de Ordenamento do Território (PNPOT), aprovado pela Lei n.º 58/2007, de 4 de Setembro, são desenvolvidos nos vários planos regionais de ordenamento do território (PROT) que, por sua vez, constituem um quadro de referência estratégico para os planos directores municipais (PDM). No processo de elaboração e revisão articulada destes três pilares fundamentais do sistema de gestão territorial, em que assenta a política de ordenamento do território e do urbanismo, cabe aos PROT uma posição de charneira fundamental. O significado e as potencialidades dos PROT são ainda significativamente ampliados pela articulação com a revisão dos PDM. Face a uma nova geração de PDM, que se pretendem mais estratégicos, os PROT fornecem um quadro de referência estratégica de longo prazo que permite aos municípios estabelecerem as suas opções de desenvolvimento e definirem regras de gestão territorial compatíveis com o modelo consagrado para a região. Os PROT, além de um pilar da política de desenvolvimento territorial, são documentos fundamentais para a definição dos programas de acção das intervenções co-financiadas pelos Fundos Estruturais e de Coesão da União Europeia. Os PROT são instrumentos de desenvolvimento territorial e de natureza estratégica. Em matéria de conteúdo, estabelecem a estrutura regional do sistema urbano, das redes de infra‑estruturas e dos equipamentos de interesse regional e definem os objectivos e princípios quanto à localização das actividades e os grandes investimentos públicos; as suas normas fixam o quadro estratégico, as orientações de carácter genérico e as directrizes para o ordenamento do território regional. O PROT do Oeste e Vale do Tejo (PROT OVT) visa, neste contexto, a espacialização de estratégias de desenvolvimento territorial nos territórios das NUTS III do Oeste, Médio Tejo e Lezíria do Tejo. Por isso, ocupa, entre o nível nacional e o nível municipal, uma posição chave para a definição das estratégias e das opções de desenvolvimento e de ordenamento regional. O PROT OVT é pois um instrumento privilegiado para promover a reflexão estratégica do desenvolvimento do Oeste e do Vale do Tejo e acolher a tomada de decisão quanto às opções de desenvolvimento territorial [...]info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Mammals in Portugal: a data set of terrestrial, volant, and marine mammal occurrences in Portugal

Mammals are threatened worldwide, with ~26% of all species being included in the IUCN threatened categories. This overall pattern is primarily associated with habitat loss or degradation, and human persecution for terrestrial mammals, and pollution, open net fishing, climate change, and prey depletion for marine mammals. Mammals play a key role in maintaining ecosystems functionality and resilience, and therefore information on their distribution is crucial to delineate and support conservation actions. MAMMALS IN PORTUGAL is a publicly available data set compiling unpublished georeferenced occurrence records of 92 terrestrial, volant, and marine mammals in mainland Portugal and archipelagos of the Azores and Madeira that includes 105,026 data entries between 1873 and 2021 (72% of the data occurring in 2000 and 2021). The methods used to collect the data were: live observations/captures (43%), sign surveys (35%), camera trapping (16%), bioacoustics surveys (4%) and radiotracking, and inquiries that represent less than 1% of the records. The data set includes 13 types of records: (1) burrows | soil mounds | tunnel, (2) capture, (3) colony, (4) dead animal | hair | skulls | jaws, (5) genetic confirmation, (6) inquiries, (7) observation of live animal (8), observation in shelters, (9) photo trapping | video, (10) predators diet | pellets | pine cones/nuts, (11) scat | track | ditch, (12) telemetry and (13) vocalization | echolocation. The spatial uncertainty of most records ranges between 0 and 100 m (76%). Rodentia (n =31,573) has the highest number of records followed by Chiroptera (n = 18,857), Carnivora (n = 18,594), Lagomorpha (n = 17,496), Cetartiodactyla (n = 11,568) and Eulipotyphla (n = 7008). The data set includes records of species classified by the IUCN as threatened (e.g., Oryctolagus cuniculus [n = 12,159], Monachus monachus [n = 1,512], and Lynx pardinus [n = 197]). We believe that this data set may stimulate the publication of other European countries data sets that would certainly contribute to ecology and conservation-related research, and therefore assisting on the development of more accurate and tailored conservation management strategies for each species. There are no copyright restrictions; please cite this data paper when the data are used in publications

Optical Fiber Tweezers Fabricated by Guided Wave Photo-Polymerization

In this work the use of guided wave photo-polymerization for the fabrication of novel polymeric micro tips for optical trapping is demonstrated. It is shown that the selective excitation of linear polarized modes, during the fabrication process, has a direct impact on the shape of the resulting micro structures. Tips are fabricated with modes LP02 and LP21 and their shapes and output intensity distribution are compared. The application of the micro structures as optical tweezers is demonstrated with the manipulation of yeast cells

Kidney segmentation in ultrasound, magnetic resonance and computed tomography images: a systematic review

Background and objective: Segmentation is an essential step in computer-aided diagnosis and treatment planning of kidney diseases. In recent years, several researchers proposed multiple techniques to segment the kidney in medical images from distinct imaging acquisition systems, namely ultrasound, magnetic resonance, and computed tomography. This article aims to present a systematic review of the different methodologies developed for kidney segmentation. Methods: With this work, it is intended to analyze and categorize the different kidney segmentation algorithms, establishing a comparison between them and discussing the most appropriate methods for each modality. For that, articles published between 2010 and 2016 were analyzed. The search was performed in Scopus and Web of Science using the expressions “kidney segmentation” and “renal segmentation”. Results: A total of 1528 articles were retrieved from the databases, and 95 articles were selected for this review. After analysis of the selected articles, the reviewed segmentation techniques were categorized according to their theoretical approach. Conclusions: Based on the performed analysis, it was possible to identify segmentation approaches based on distinct image processing classes that can be used to accurately segment the kidney in images of different imaging modalities. Nevertheless, further research on kidney segmentation must be conducted to overcome the current drawbacks of the state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, a standardization of the evaluation database and metrics is needed to allow a direct comparison between methods.This work was funded by projects NORTE-01-0145-FEDER000013, and NORTE-01-0145-FEDER-024300, supported by Northern Portugal Regional Operational Programme (Norte2020), under the Portugal 2020 Partnership Agreement, through the European Regional Development Fund (FEDER), and also been funded by FEDER funds, through Competitiveness Factors Operational Programme (COMPETE), and by national funds, through the FCT— Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia, under the scope of the project POCI-01-0145-FEDER-007038. The authors acknowledge FCT—Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, Portugal, and the European Social Found, European Union, for funding support through the Programa Operacional Capital Humano (POCH) in the scope of the PhD grants SFRH/BD/93443/2013 (S. Queirós) and SFRH/BD/95438/2013 (P. Morais).info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio