Abstract

Abstract
Companies use multiple solutions of information technologies and information systems to support their activities. Among the systems adopted by companies we can find Enterprise Resource Planning systems, Customer Relationship Management systems, Business Intelligence systems and many others. Such systems assure a wide spectrum of activities, ranging from operational support to the strategic support of the company. With the purpose of identifying and characterizing which systems the large Portuguese companies have been implementing, in which systems they intend to invest in short-term and which is the current role of information technology in the organization, we developed a study with the participation of several chief information officers. The findings of this study reveal that in Portuguese large companies the adoption of Enterprise Resource Planning systems are consolidated, while the adoption of systems like Business Intelligence, Collaboration, Workflow and Groupware will increase in the near future.

Abstract

Abstract
This work addresses the coordinated operation of an autonomous underwater vehicle and an autonomous surface vessel and its main goal is the development of an infrastructure that allows the surface vessel to dynamically position itself above the underwater vehicle while the later one is collecting data and navigating in long baseline mode using a set of beacons installed in the operation area. Besides a formal statement of the coordination problem, we present results both from real experiments and from simulations that illustrate the proposed solution.

Abstract

Abstract
This paper describes a Synthetic Aperture Sonar (SAS) system being developed at the University of Porto to be used in a small autonomous boat for the survey of shallow water environments, such as rivers, deltas, estuaries and dams. Its purpose is to obtain high resolution echo reflectivity maps through synthetic aperture techniques, taking advantage of the high precision navigation system of the boat. In the future the production of bottom tomography maps is also considered through the use of interferometric imaging techniques.