Abstract
As part of the ongoing climate and energy framework, the European Commission raised recently the 2030 greenhouse gas emission reduction target, moving towards a climate-neutral economy. Transportation represents almost a quarter of Europe’s greenhouse gas emissions, and it is the remaining sector with increasing emissions, above 1990 levels. Considering also the evolving necessity for the reduction of fossil fuels dependency, Europe’s strategy has been designed to support an irreversible shift toward low-emission electric mobility. In this context, the present work assesses the performance of electric mobility in European countries, by using a dynamic analysis in the period 2015–2019, framed in four sustainable dimensions, economy, technology, environment and society. The methodology aggregates several sub-indicators in a composite indicator by using the Data Envelopment Analysis, and evaluates the dynamic change in the sustainable performance through the biennial Malmquist index. Main results indicate that the total productivity change has been improved mainly due to the progression of the frontier that has been observed for all countries from 2018. However, an increasing number of countries have had more difficulties to adopt the best sustainable electric mobility practices, being necessary to design strategies to promote them, mainly in underperforming countries. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Abstract
Global climate changes and the increase in average temperatures are some of the major contemporary problems that have not been considered in the context of external factors to increase accident risk. Studies that include climate information as a safety parameter in machine learning models designed to predict the occurrence of accidents are not usual. This study aims to create a dataset with the most relevant climatic elements, to get better predictions. The results will be applied in future studies to correlate with the accident history in a retail sector company to understand its impact on accident risk. The information was collected from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) climate database and computed by a wrapper method to ensure the selection of the most features. The main goal is to retain all the features in the dataset without causing significant negative impacts on the prediction score. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Abstract
Predicting the performance of a mixture is crucial to designing experiences in product development and formulation research. In this work, an application, MDesign, is proposed to construct models in a mixture design with a practical, educational, and intuitive approach. Developed in MATLAB software, the standalone application aims to contribute to the study of mixtures through the definition of multivariate models of different orders, enabling their statistical analysis to verify the robustness of each of those models. Compared to the obtained results from other applications using data experiments published in the literature, the proposed application presents accurate results and good execution. MDesign can be considered an automatic, robust, and valuable tool to support the mixture design in an industrial context.

Abstract
Assessing the different factors that contribute to accidents in the workplace is essential to ensure the safety and well-being of employees. Given the importance of risk identification in hazard prediction, this work proposes a comparative study between different feature selection techniques (.2 test and Forward Feature Selection) combined with learning algorithms (Support VectorMachine, Random Forest, and Naive Bayes), both applied to a database of a leading company in the retail sector, in Portugal. The goal is to conclude which factors of each database have the most significant impact on the occurrence of accidents. Initial databases include accident records, ergonomic workplace analysis, hazard intervention and risk assessment, climate databases, and holiday records. Each method was evaluated based on its accuracy in the forecast of the occurrence of the accident. The results showed that the Forward Feature Selection-Random Forest pair performed better among the assessed combinations, considering the case study database. In addition, data from accident records and ergonomic workplace analysis have the largest number of features with the most significant predictive impact on accident prediction. Future studies will be carried out to evaluate factors from other databases that may have meaningful information for predicting accidents.

Abstract
Purpose Portugal has been experiencing a continuous growth in tourism activity, with hospitality industry as one of the main tourism sectors. Therefore, the assessment of hotel companies' performance is very important to assist decision processes. The purpose of this paper is to assess the financial performance (FP) of 570 hotel companies operating hotel units in Portugal in 2017. To explore the question of brand affiliation, a comparison was made between hotel companies with similar stars rating and market orientation. In addition, this paper intends to fill a gap in literature studying the Portuguese reality on the subject of brand affiliation. Design/methodology/approach The present study uses a methodology based on data envelopment analysis (DEA) to assess the overall performance for each company, which further decomposed into the within-group performance and the technological gap. The performance of the hotel company is assessed through the aggregation of multiple financial indicators using the composite indicator (CI) derived from the DEA model. A bivariate analysis based on the Tobit regression to test the robustness of brand effect on FP of hotel companies (HC) was also included. Findings The empirical results show that branded companies, on average, have significantly better overall FP than non-branded companies. On the one hand, the brand effect tends to improve the within-group FP of HCs and the brand presents a statistically significant positive effect on the FP. On the other hand, the best practices are observed in both branded and non-branded companies. Practical implications The results of this study illustrate that, globally, the better FP of the branded companies is because of their individual relative companies' performance and a better model of operation given by the brand effect. Brand affiliation will generally allow for a better FP and essentially a better profitability for invested equity, a higher return on sales and a higher value added per employee. Originality/value The study provides important theoretical and practical contributions that can assist the strategic decision of the HCs in choosing to operate independently or to adopt brand affiliation. Also, it is innovative because the FP of branded and non-branded HCs is measured not using a set of individual financial ratios but through a single CI that aggregates those financial ratios, using a DEA model.

Abstract
This work aims to identify the critical production costs, related to raw materials and labor, of ordered inflatable-based products without standardization in order to develop a quantitative model to predict these costs accurately in the early project stage, within the budget step. In order to achieve this goal, it was necessary to understand the production processes and the raw materials, as well as to study the principal theoretical aspects related to cost estimating techniques and methods, cost estimating models, model selection, and validation. Therefore, it is intended to develop a multiple linear regression model, applied to historical quantitative data, to estimate each critical variable concerning the quantity of the main raw material and the labor times for critical processes. Six models were analyzed, in which two models are identified for each critical variable such as the linear meters value of the main raw material used in the product, the main raw material cut time involved in the product and the sew time required by the product. The models were evaluated, selected, and validated, defining the best model for each critical variable. The model parameters were obtained using a train dataset and, afterwards, the results of the selected models were validated using a test dataset. The obtained results, through the proposed methodology, were evaluated and proved to be reliable for use in the early stage of product development within the budget step.