Sustainability of systems interoperability in dynamic business networks

Dissertação para obtenção do Grau de Doutor em Engenharia Electrotécnica e de ComputadoresCollaborative networked environments emerged with the spread of the internet, contributing to overcome past communication barriers, and identifying interoperability as an essential property to support businesses development. When achieved seamlessly, efficiency is increased in the entire product life cycle support. However, due to the different sources of knowledge, models and semantics, enterprise organisations are experiencing difficulties exchanging critical information, even when they operate in the same business environments. To solve this issue, most of them try to attain interoperability by establishing peer-to-peer mappings with different business partners, or use neutral data and product standards as the core for information sharing, in optimized networks. In current industrial practice, the model mappings that regulate enterprise communications are only defined once, and most of them are hardcoded in the information systems. This solution has been effective and sufficient for static environments, where enterprise and product models are valid for decades. However, more and more enterprise systems are becoming dynamic, adapting and looking forward to meet further requirements; a trend that is causing new interoperability disturbances and efficiency reduction on existing partnerships. Enterprise Interoperability (EI) is a well established area of applied research, studying these problems, and proposing novel approaches and solutions. This PhD work contributes to that research considering enterprises as complex and adaptive systems, swayed to factors that are making interoperability difficult to sustain over time. The analysis of complexity as a neighbouring scientific domain, in which features of interoperability can be identified and evaluated as a benchmark for developing a new foundation of EI, is here proposed. This approach envisages at drawing concepts from complexity science to analyse dynamic enterprise networks and proposes a framework for sustaining systems interoperability, enabling different organisations to evolve at their own pace, answering the upcoming requirements but minimizing the negative impact these changes can have on their business environment

Towards Industry 4.0 | A case study of BIM Deployment in Ornamental Stones Sector

The transition witnessed from the Third to the Fourth Industrial Age leads to the emergence of paradigms such as BIM, seeking efficiency in Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC) through a global approach and procurement oriented towards standardized products and I4.0, where production comes to be supported by Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS). Integrated in the AEC supply chain, the ornamental stone sector shows Portugal to be the eighth country in OS trade worldwide, and the second per capita, with its competitiveness coming from customization BIM represents threats for its business sustainability. Supported by the Service Science, the main objective of this research is to conceptualize an empirical framework, which, when applied to a sample of Ornamental Stone companies, allows a conclusive answer how to keep their competitive advantage of products customization in BIM-standardized procurement environment. By monitoring the entire sequence of events, it was found that the Ornamental Stone companies can retain their main current competitive advantage of customizing their products, which leads us to conclude that Industry 4.0 technologies, appears to respond positively to threat raised from BIM procurement

Testes Projetivos e Testes Não Projetivos: a Testoteca ISMT

O presente estudo tem como objetivo principal descrever e caraterizar os instrumentos de avaliação psicológica mais utilizados em Portugal, com destaque para os instrumentos de avaliação da personalidade. Desses instrumentos serão identificados os que existem até Janeiro 2015 na Testoteca do Instituto Superior Miguel Torga. Deste modo, realizou-se uma Revisão Sistemática com recurso à plataforma CEGOC, a artigos disponíveis na Web e à Testoteca ISMT, sendo a amostra final de 110 instrumentos de avaliação psicológica. A presente revisão permitiu observar que em Portugal existem com publicação, pelo menos, 27 instrumentos de avaliação da personalidade, 57 instrumentos de avaliação cognitiva e 26 instrumentos de avaliação de comportamentos e atitudes diversas. Concluiu-se que a avaliação psicológica é extremamente auxiliada por instrumentos de diagnóstico acurados, tal como depende da boa utilização dos mesmos por parte do psicólogo. Contudo, como a legislação portuguesa não tem nenhuma espécie de punição para a má utilização dos instrumentos de avaliação psicológica por profissionais de outras áreas, nem proíbe que os mesmos lhe tenham acesso, é necessário que os testes se mantenham no domínio dos psicólogos e não sejam partilhados com profissionais que deles possam fazer uma utilização errada e ilegítima. / The present study as a main objective to describe and feature the psychological assessment tools most used in Portugal, with emphasis on the assessment instruments for personality. This instruments will be identified that there are up to 2015 in Testoteca of the Instituto Superior Miguel Torga. In this way, a systematic review using CEGOC platform, the articles available on the Web and Testoteca ISMT, being the final sample of 112 psychological assessment tools. This review allowed us to conclude that, in Portugal there are 27 personality assessment tools, 57 Cognitive assessment tools and 26 different assessment tools. It was concluded that the psychological assessment is extremely aided by diagnostic tools for accurate, as depends on the good use of the same by the psychologist.However, as the Portuguese legislation has no kind of punishment for the misuse of psychological assessment instruments by professionals of other areas, nor forbids that the same you have access, it is necessary that the tests are maintained in the field of psychologists and are not shared with professionals who make a wrong and illegitimate use

MDA-based interoperability establishment using language independent information models

Nowadays, more and more enterprises realize that one important step to success in their business is to create new and innovative products. Many times the solution to do that is to abandon the idea of an enterprise as an "isolated island", and get collaboration with others: worldwide non-hierarchical networks are characterized by collaboration and non-centralized decision making. This paper proposes a conceptual model common to the entire business network, in a framework that enables the abstraction of individual models at their meta-level and increase language independency and interoperability, keeping all the enterprise software's integrity intact. The strategy presented allows an incremental mapping construction, to achieve growing integration.publishersversionpublishe