Desenvolvimento de recursos de design em pequenas empresas da indústria automóvel : uma abordagem metodológica

ABSTRACT: This paper reflects part of a broader investigation on the development of methodologies to identify, value and manage design capabilities in order to create a sustainable competitive advantage. With the automotive industry and smaller supplier Portuguese companies as background, this paper explores the resource-based view theory (RBV) and the dynamic capabilities theory as a theoretical construct for a further development of research tools. In the automotive industry, OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturers) continue to control the overall design of the vehicle, as part of the ability to manage the offer portfolio and brand communication. However, the industry have been moving towards an increasing participation of smaller suppliers in product development processes, pushed towards capabilities’ development as a requirement to continue competitive in the OEM’s suppliers network. The role of design and design management capabilities have been explored as strategic resources or core competencies. However, Design is not typically found in smaller supplier firms as resource (as opposed to Design studios in larger companies) but found as a process in resourcecapability combinations, establishing the need for a new research approach. Therefore, the RBV is a tool to value the design process as a sustained competitive advantage. The RBV conceptualizes a framework to determine or identify the strategic resources available or needed within a company. At these lenses, the basis for a sustainable competitive advantage lies in the application of the bundle of valuable resources identified and at the firm's disposal and the combinations with its capabilitiesEste artigo reflete parte de uma investigação mais ampla sobre o desenvolvimento de metodologias para identificar, valorizar e gerir os recursos de design, com o objetivo de criar uma vantagem competitiva sustentável. Com a indústria automóvel e as pequenas empresas portuguesas fornecedoras como pano de fundo, este artigo explora a teoria da Resource Based View (RBV) e a teoria das Dynamic Capabili_es (DCT) como um construto teórico para o desenvolvimento de ferramentas de investigação. Na indústria automóvel, os OEM (fabricantes de equipamentos originais) continuam a controlar o design geral do veículo, como parte da capacidade de gestão do seu portfólio assim como a comunicação de marca. No entanto, o setor tem seguido um caminho para uma participação crescente de fornecedores menores nos processos de desenvolvimento de produto, impulsionados para o desenvolvimento de capacidades como requisito de competitividade na rede de fornecedores dos OEM. O papel dos recursos do design e da gestão do design foram já explorados como recurso estratégicos ou competências fundamentais. No entanto, o Design não é normalmente encontrado em empresas de menor dimensão como recurso (em oposição aos estúdios de Design em empresas maiores), mas sim como um processo de combinações de diferentes capacidades e recursos, estabelecendo a necessidade de uma nova abordagem de pesquisa. Portanto, a RBV é uma ferramenta que visa a valorização do processo de design como uma vantagem competitiva sustentada. A RBV concetualiza uma estrutura para determinar ou identificar os recursos estratégicos disponíveis ou necessários dentro de uma empresa. Deste ponto de vista, a base para uma vantagem competitiva sustentável está na aplicação do conjunto de recursos valiosos identificados e à disposição da empresa em forma de combinações das suas diferentes capacidades e recursos.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Discovery of Fulminic Acid, HCNO, in Dark Clouds

We report on the first detection in space of fulminic acid, HCNO. This isomer of HNCO has been observed in three starless cores, B1, L1544 and L183, and in the low mass star forming region L1527 with a measured abundance ratio of HNCO/HCNO between 40-70. However, HCNO was not detected towards the direction of the cyanopolyyne peak of TMC-1 or towards the Orion Hot Core region. The derived HNCO/HCNO abundance ratio in these cases is greater than 350 and 1000 in TMC-1 and Orion, respectively. We find that CH_2 + NO \to HCNO + H is a key reaction for the formation of fulminic acid. A value of 5.5 10^{-12} cm^3 s^{-1} of the corresponding reaction rate coefficient, as given by Miller et al. (2003), allows to reproduce the observed abundances of fulminic acid in both the observed dark clouds and low mass star forming core, where the determined abundance of HNCO in these regions with respect to molecular hydrogen is 1-5 10^{-10}.Comment: 5 pages, 1 figure, accepted for publication in ApJ

Package ecespa

Documentation for the R-package "ecespa

Optimizing Service Orchestration in OutSystems

The growing demand for continuous development and deployment is causing many to steer away from the traditional monolithic architectural style and opt instead for Service- Oriented Architectures (SOAs). Adopting an architecture that is based on loosely-coupled services leads to enhanced modularity and flexibility, further translated into a philosophy of iterative, evolutionary development. The benefits of this development pattern were also made available in the OutSystems low-code platform, with the introduction of services as a new development building-block. Moreover, the independence innate to the multiple services that comprise a SOA hints at possible opportunities for task parallelism: as long as different remote calls to services don’t interfere with each other, they could be performed in parallel. As an immediate result, there could be speedups in multiple parts of an application’s layers. Idle time waiting for data could be reduced, along with internal business logic that could be carried out faster, factors that would positively impact the overall flow of any application. In this thesis we propose the design and implementation of an optimization process that targets the heart of the SOA: the orchestrator itself, the conductor of service interaction that enables the different business processes involved in a software system. The work produced comprises a set of data analysis and representation techniques that work together with the goal of detecting and informing opportunities for safe parallelism in the interaction and composition of the services that make up software factories. The formal definition of the algorithm is accompanied with a prototype that targets the OutSystems platform, with the achievement of considerable speedups in common scenarios. The results obtained suggest the viability of such a mechanism in the world of SOAs

Photodissociation of HCN and HNC isomers in the 7-10 eV energy range

13 págs.; 11 figs.; 1 tab.The ultraviolet photoabsorption spectra of the HCN and HNC isomers have been simulated in the 7-10 eV photon energy range. For this purpose, the three-dimensional adiabatic potential energy surfaces of the 7 lowest electronic states, and the corresponding transition dipole moments, have been calculated, at multireference configuration interaction level. The spectra are calculated with a quantum wave packet method on these adiabatic potential energy surfaces. The spectra for the 3 lower excited states, the dissociative electronic states, correspond essentially to predissociation peaks, most of them through tunneling on the same adiabatic state. The 3 higher electronic states are bound, hereafter electronic bound states, and their spectra consist of delta lines, in the adiabatic approximation. The radiative lifetime towards the ground electronic states of these bound states has been calculated, being longer than 10 ns in all cases, much longer that the characteristic predissociation lifetimes. The spectra of HCN is compared with the available experimental and previous theoretical simulations, while in the case of HNC there are no previous studies to our knowledge. The spectrum for HNC is considerably more intense than that of HCN in the 7-10 eV photon energy range, which points to a higher photodissociation rate for HNC, compared to HCN, in astrophysical environments illuminated by ultraviolet radiation. ©2016 AIP Publishing LLCThe research leading to these results has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC Grant No. 610256: NANOCOSMOS) and the Spanish Ministerio de Economía y Competividad under Grant Nos. CSD2009-00038, AYA2009-07304, AYA2012-32032, and FIS2014-52172-C2.Peer Reviewe

Development of two monovalent antivenoms against two Moroccan viper venoms– daboia Mauritanica and Cerastes Cerastes

Snake envenomation entails more than 5 million people bitten yearly, out of whom 100,000 died and more than 300,000 are permanently disabled. This prompted the World Health Organization to classify snake envenoming as a neglected tropical disease in 2017. In North Africa, we have more than 400.000 cases of envenomation with 50 deaths per year. These numbers are underestimated with the Cerastes cerastes (Cc) and Macrovipera mauretanica (Mm)are the most medically important snake species. To this day, the only medication for snake envenomation is immunotherapy. The lack of a specific antivenom against Cc and Mm venoms in North Africa, prompted us to develop two monospecific Fab\u272 antivenoms in collaboration with the Butantan Institute in Brazil: one is produced against Moroccan Cc venom and the other against Moroccan Mm. While we determiated the paraspecific cross-reactivity of the antivenoms developped, the in vitro paraspecifity study surprisingly revealed a cross reactivity between the two monospecific Fab\u272 antivenoms developped towards Mm and Cc venoms venoms from Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia Please click Download on the upper right corner to see the full abstract

Generating networks of genetic processors

[EN] The Networks of Genetic Processors (NGPs) are non-conventional models of computation based on genetic operations over strings, namely mutation and crossover operations as it was established in genetic algorithms. Initially, they have been proposed as acceptor machines which are decision problem solvers. In that case, it has been shown that they are universal computing models equivalent to Turing machines. In this work, we propose NGPs as enumeration devices and we analyze their computational power. First, we define the model and we propose its definition as parallel genetic algorithms. Once the correspondence between the two formalisms has been established, we carry out a study of the generation capacity of the NGPs under the research framework of the theory of formal languages. We investigate the relationships between the number of processors of the model and its generative power. Our results show that the number of processors is important to increase the generative capability of the model up to an upper bound, and that NGPs are universal models of computation if they are formulated as generation devices. This allows us to affirm that parallel genetic algorithms working under certain restrictions can be considered equivalent to Turing machines and, therefore, they are universal models of computation.This research was partially supported by TAILOR, a project funded by EU Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under GA No 952215.Campos Frances, M.; Sempere Luna, JM. (2022). Generating networks of genetic processors. Genetic Programming and Evolvable Machines. 23(1):133-155. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10710-021-09423-713315523

Brazilian new patterns of an industrial, technological and foreign trade policy

The objective of this paper is to deepen the discussion about the unavoidable way Brazil has to go through in order to construct a modern industrial and technological policy, based on knowledge and technological innovation, which will work as a stimulator of economic development. The different theories about this subject (SCHUMPETER, 1985; PAVITT, 1998; FREEMAN, 1995; KRUGMAN, 1995; COUTINHO & FERRAZ, 1994; MATIAS-PEREIRA & KRUGLIANSKAS, 2005), so as the principles set by the Brazilian Development Ministry (“Diretrizes de Política Industrial, Tecnológica e de Comércio Exterior”), give support in the search for defining a new model of industrial, technological policy and foreign trade for the country. The strategic role of industrial policy seems to be very evident, if it takes on its co-ordination work involving the productive agents, which are responsible for crucial decisions, such as those related to investments and/or innovation, in a context of great incertitude about the consequences of their decisions in the future. Finally, the conclusion arising from this discussion demonstrates that it is crucial for the country to define a modern industrial policy, which could be able to integrate the incentive to innovation as well as to exports, in order to serve as a tool to foster development. The paper also argues that the feasibility to this policy depends on Government’s ability in supplying agents with a favorable context towards adequate regulation, purchasing policy, availability on financing facilities and fiscal incentives