Abstract
The growing demand for virtual urban models in emerging areas of interest has promoted a variety of techniques for automating the creation of virtual scenes with a high level of realism. However, visualization is not always the only aim in many applications. Increasingly, urban systems are also required for management, analysis, or interaction with very different types of information. Three-dimensional (3D) urban entities should maintain neighbor relations, and being inserted in a geospatial database in order to enable associative queries, one of the most important features associated with 3D urban geographic information system (GIS). Additional challenges are found when these three-dimensional models are implemented in web-based systems. This paper proposes a method for automatic modeling of buildings and street surfaces of entire real cities by combining computer graphics, computational geometry, and GIS techniques. The sources of information employed are two-dimensional (2D) GIS and its associated digital elevation models (DEMs) in order to provide real terrain features. The virtual environment supports web-based navigation and data interaction. The case study was performed in Jaen, Spain, a hilly city with more than 1,000 blocks of buildings. The 3D city model was generated using the public data provided by the general cadastral office of Jaen and the DEM information of this area. The topological relations between the geometric urban entities were inserted in the spatial database and the graphics and thematic information could be accessed through the Internet. All these features are highly desirable for decision making in urban planning. DOI: 10.1061/(ASCE)UP.1943-5444.0000131. (C) 2013 American Society of Civil Engineers.

Abstract
The operating theater is the biggest hospital budget expenditure. The usage of surgery related resources and its intrinsic planning must be carefully devised in order to achieve better operational performance. However, from long to short term planning, the decision processes inherent to the operating theater are often the subject of empiricism. Moreover, the current hospital information systems available in Portuguese public hospitals lack a decision support system component, which could assist in achieving better planning solutions. This work reports the development of a centralized system for the operating theater planning to support decision-making tasks of surgeons, chief specialty managers, and hospital administration. Its main components concern surgery scheduling, operating theater's resource allocation and performance measurement. The enhancement of the planning processes, the increase of policy compliance, and the overall performance of the operating theater compared to the former methodologies are also discussed. © 2013, IGI Global.

Abstract
In this paper we present a quality model based on the software engineering paradigms, which is applied to evaluate digital learning content, specifically, games for mobile platforms. The model is called Quantitative Evaluation Framework (QEF), and measures system quality throughout its development life cycle. QEF evaluates the educational software quality, particularly the digital learning content (ISO 9126 is the standard of reference) in a three-dimensional space. Every dimension aggregates a set of factors. A factor is a component that represents the system performance from a particular point of view. The quality of a given system is defined and evaluated in our tri-dimensional Cartesian quality space in relation to a hypothetical ideal system represented in our quality space by the coordinates (1, 1, 1). Copyright © 2013 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.

Abstract
Causality plays a central role as a building block in solving important problems in distributed systems, such as replication, debugging, group communication and global snapshots. To be useful, causality must be realised by actual mechanisms that can track it and encode it. Existing causality tracking mechanisms, such as vector clocks and version vectors, rely on mappings from globally unique identifiers to integer counters. In a system with a well known set of entities these identifiers can be pre-configured and given distinct positions in a vector or distinct names in a mapping. Identity management is more problematic in dynamic systems, with a large and highly variable number of entities, being worsened when network partitions occur. Present solutions for causality tracking are not appropriate to these increasingly common scenarios. This work introduces novel causality tracking mechanisms that can be used in scenarios with a dynamic number of entities. These allow completely decentralised creation of entities (processes or replicas) with no need for global identifiers or global coordination. These mechanisms have a variable size representation that adapts automatically to the number of entities, growing or shrinking appropriately. This book is the published version of the first half of my PhD thesis, and focus its discourse on logical clock systems and the challenges of autonomous operation.

Abstract
In this paper it is intended to solve an Economical Dispatch (ED) problem with a new tool, named Sensing Cloud Optimization (SCO). It is a technique based on clouds of particles which allow a dynamic change in search space. It has appropriate heuristic characteristic to solve not convex, not differentiable and highly constrained optimisation problems. It is provided with a statistical analysis which determines the cloud's dimension with dynamic adjustments in search space in order to accelerate the convergence and to avoid to get trapped in local minima. Two case studies are presented in which SCO demonstrated good performances reaching lower cost values where compared with other techniques.

Abstract
Controlling, maintaining, and improving quality is a central topic in manufacturing. Total Quality Management (TQM) provides several tools and techniques to deal with quality related topics, which are not always applicable. With the increased use of Information Technology (IT) in manufacturing there is a higher availability of data with great potential of further improvements. At the same time this results in higher requirements for data storage and processing with demanding, time consuming sessions for interpretation. Without suitable tools and techniques knowledge remains hidden in databases. This paper presents a methodology to help analyzing root causes of nonconformities (NCs) through a pattern identification approach. Hereby a methodology of Knowledge Discovery in Databases (KDD) is adapted and used as a quality tool. As the core element of the KDD methodology, the data mining, a well-known statistical measure from the field of economics—the Herfindahl–Hirschman Index (HHI)—is integrated. After presenting the theoretical background a new methodology is proposed and validated through an application case of the automotive industry. Results are obtained and presented in the form of patterns in matrices. They suggest that concentration indices may indicate possible root causes of NCs and invite for further investigations. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2013.