Abstract
In many professional and services industries, firms try to scale up their operations by reproducing practices in new locations through franchising arrangements, especially business format franchising. The classic but still prevailing explanations for franchising related phenomena, especially the initiative of franchising, the propensity to franchise, and the franchise performance, are mostly based on two orders of reasons (or a combination of them): franchising is either explained as a means to deal with resource scarcity or (and) as a mechanism for franchisor and franchisee to align incentives between themselves. However, empirical studies have shown limited support for both such claims, especially in face of the so called plural form, where proprietary and franchised units of the same franchisor co-exist. It may also be argued that the traditional literature on franchising has assumed a high level of homogeneity within and between franchising "networks,'' possibly due to the perception that they tend to be "dominated'' by a high level of standardization and replication of practices, both operative and relational. However, learning processes in such "networks'' have recently been brought in as an attempt to capture other mechanisms that may underlie their operation and sustainability. This article seeks to explore a third perspective to look at franchising "networks,'' by drawing from the literatures on capabilities and industrial networks. Seen from this perspective, business format franchising may involve more than the mere replication or exploitation of a recipe, especially if we take into consideration the partly idiosyncratic nature of both the relationships between actors and their capabilities and intentions. Within this perspective, variety preservation, and not only uniformity, may be recognized by participants as relevant for the performance of the franchise chain. In other words, variety may reflect the need for the refinement of the "package'' throughout time, in more than one ways, together with the gradual development of the network and the learning experiences that take place in that context.

Abstract
In this paper the Wiener-Hammerstein system proposed as a benchmark for the SYSID 2009 benchmark session is identified as a bilinear discrete system. The bilinear approximation relies on both facts that the Wiener-Hammerstein system can be described by a Volterra series which can be approximated by bilinear systems. The identification is performed with an iterative bilinear subspace identification algorithm previously proposed by the authors. In order to increase accuracy, polynomial static nonlinearities are added to the bilinear model input. These Hammerstein type bilinear models are then identified using the same iterative subspace identification algorithm. © 2009 IFAC.

Abstract
This article addresses several variants of the two-dimensional bin packing problem. In the most basic version of the problem it is intended to pack a given number of rectangular items with given sizes in rectangular bins in such a way that the number of bins used is minimized. Different heuristic approaches (greedy, local search, and variable neighbourhood descent) are proposed for solving four guillotine two-dimensional bin packing problems. The heuristics are based on the definition of a packing sequence for items and in a set of criteria for packing one item in a current partial solution. Several extensions are introduced to deal with issues pointed out by two furniture companies. Extensive computational results on instances from the literature and from the two furniture companies are reported and compared with optimal solutions, solutions from other five (meta) heuristics and, for a small set of instances, with the ones used in the companies.

Abstract
The transmission efficiency of photoelectrons emitted from CsI photocathodes operated in Ar-CH4 and Xe-CH4 mixtures is experimentally investigated and compared to Monte Carlo simulation results: the ratio between the number of photoelectrons collected in the gas media and in vacuum is determined as a function of the pressure-reduced electric field E/p at the photocathode surface, for irradiation with the VUV photons from an Hg(Ar) lamp. The addition of a small percentage of CH4 to At and Xe results in a significant increase of the photoelectron transmission, in particular for electric fields below E/p similar to 1 V cm(-1) Torr(-1). Below E/p similar to 0.5 V cm(-1) Torr(-1) the transmission efficiency f in Ar-CH4 Mixtures reaches values higher than in pure CH4, going through a maximum in the range of 10-30% CH4. The addition of 5% and 20% CH4 to Xe increases f by a factor of about 2 and 3, respectively, when compared to pure Xe.

Abstract
According to the conclusions of the study "Smart Portugal 2020", the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) can contribute to a reduction of 15% in our ecological footprint. The role of innovation and the early adoption of solutions that could reduce consumption in all economical sectors will be vital to the 20/20/20 European Strategy [1]. Active network management for generation, storage and demand is one of the basis for the SmartGrid concept, where the actions of all agents connected to the electricity system (generators, consumers and Prosumers) can be intelligently integrated aiming for a sustainable, efficient and secure energy supply system [2]. The implementation of this type of system requires an intelligent control and a management system based on advanced communication and monitoring solutions, as well as on self-healing and pre-fault detection technologies. SmartGrids are, therefore, the most efficient approach to integrate Distributed Generation (DG) and renewable energy sources in a coordinated way with demand management in a sustainable system. This paper describes EDP approach to the EnergyCom infrastructure, with improvement of Quality of Service (QoS) and operational efficiency as main target, and presents the importance of SmartGrids as an answer to the challenges of the Electric Energy Distribution, and its role in the corporate strategy. The 3-phase implementation program of the 3rd generation electric grid in EDP Distribuição is also presented.

Abstract
With so much information available on the web, looking for relevant documents on the Internet has become a difficult task. Temporal features play an important role with the introduction of a time dimension and the possibility to restrict a search by time, recreating a particular moment of a web page set. Despite its importance, temporal information is still under-considered by current search engines, limiting themselves to the capture of the most recent snapshot of the information. In this paper, we describe the architecture of a temporal search engine which uses timelines to browse search results. More specifically, we intend to add a time measure to cluster web page results, by analyzing web page contents, supporting the search of temporal and non-temporal information embedded in web documents.