Abstract
Public transport systems face the challenge of attracting users to fight the lost in market share, mostly due to the increasing use of private cars. Therefore, the concepts of 'quality' and 'customer' must change and the focus must be on meeting people's needs. At the same time, transport systems should be flexible enough to respond to changes in people's requirements and needs. Thus, the aim for public transport must be enhancing quality of the service. This requires a clear understanding of travel behaviour and consumer needs and expectations. Accordingly, there is an increasing awareness of the importance of including service quality indicators and quality specifications in contracts between operators and public transport authorities. The development of quality measures in the designing of contracts for public transport raises important aspects that must be considered. This paper examines issues concerning the definition of service quality measures for public transport. This will give a better understanding of pertinent questions and of improvement strategies open to public transport management. Next, it outlines some critical aspects that must be considered when including such measures in contracts between operators and public transport authorities.

Abstract
Purpose - To provide the basis for the development of a specific benchmarking methodology for the foundry industry. Design/methodology/approach - The methodology was developed with the support of the Portuguese Foundry Association (APF). The project was structured in two stages: developing the model for the performance assessment (including performance indicators specially designed for the foundry companies); and conducting a pilot benchmarking exercise in order to validate the model. Both stages received the contribution of eight relevant national foundries. Findings - Provides information about expectations of the benchmarking partners group. Make available a specific benchmarking model for assessing the foudries' performance based on critical factors. Provides foundry-oriented indicators. Confirms that benchmarking is a time-consuming tool, demanding continuous commitment of the top-managers. Research limitations/implications - A limitation of the study is the number of benchmarking partners (eight foundries). The statistical analysis of the results based on this small sample was not practicable, preventing the definition of the presumed causal relations between improvement practices and performance outcomes. Practical implications - The benchmarking model is now available at the APF. From now on, this institution can provide its members with a tool for promoting the co-operation among companies and to enhance and enlarge significantly the available information about this sector. This activity will, certainly, help to improve organisations' performance, upgrading the competitiveness of the metalcasting industry in Portugal. Originality/value - This paper helps the development of benchmarking in the metalcasting industry in which the number of published studies is very limited. © Emerald Group Publishing Limited.

Abstract
The Intensive Care Units (ICUs) of several Portuguese hospitals have been using the intensive.care information system (ICS) for the past three years. This system was developed under specification of Medical Doctors (MDs) from ICUs. As the main focus of the initial project was on adding functionality to the system, little attention was given to non-functional requirements such as usability. This paper describes the current ICS and the results of preliminary interviews with its main stakeholders to determine high-level functional and non-functional evolution requirements. The objective of the overall study is to propose usability requirements for such system, in particular from MDs and nurses, its main users. A prototype of an improved user interface will be evaluated to support the development of the next version of the system. The interviews with a key developer and several MDs resulted so far in the conclusion that ICS is a very helpful tool but requires improvements in several modules, such as Patient Entrance and Patient Evolution. However, more advanced modules, such as Infections Management, will also require some adaptations of work processes in ICUs, in order to benefit from the full support that ICS can provide.

Abstract
This paper develops measures, based on the Malmquist index, that enable the decision making units' internal inefficiencies to be distinguished from those associated with their group (or program) characteristics. The applicability of these measures is illustrated with the assessment of bank branches' performance. The analysis involves the construction of an index reflecting the relative performance of branches in four different regions, which can be decomposed into an index for the comparison of within-group efficiency spread, evaluating internal managerial efficiencies, and an index for the comparison of frontier productivity, reflecting the impact of environmental factors and regional managerial policies on branches' productivity.

Abstract
We compare two link analysis ranking methods of web pages in a site. The first, called Site Rank, is an adaptation of PageRank to the granularity of a web site and the second, called Popularity Rank, is based on the frequencies of user clicks on the outlinks in a page that are captured by navigation sessions of users through the web site. We ran experiments on artificially created web sites of different sizes and on two real data sets, employing the relative entropy to compare the distributions of the two ranking methods. For the real data sets we also employ a nonparametric measure, called Spearman's footrule, which we use to compare the top-ten web pages ranked by the two methods. Our main result is that the distributions of the Popularity Rank and Site Rank are surprisingly close to each other, implying that the topology of a web site is very instrumental in guiding users through the site. Thus, in practice, the Site Rank provides a reasonable first order approximation of the aggregate behaviour of users within a web site given by the Popularity Rank.

Abstract
This paper describes the study on example selection in regression problems using mu-SVM (Support Vector Machine) linear as prediction algorithm. The motivation case is a study done on real data for a problem of bus trip time prediction. In this study we use three different training sets: all the examples, examples from past days similar to the day where prediction is needed, and examples selected by a CART regression tree. Then, we verify if the CART based example selection approach is appropriate on different regression data sets. The experimental results obtained are promising.