Abstract
Education, like many institutions in contemporary society, faces significant challenges to the completion of its mission. This is especially true of higher education, which is often expected to be and seen as a facilitator of social and cultural advancement. Gamification is a relatively new concept intending to use elements from video games in non-game applications. Education is therefore an area with high potential for application of this concept since it seeks to promote people's motivation and engagement. The research in progress aims at creating a model for applying gamification in a course of Human Resources Management for Engineers, where testing and validating the results of that application can be possible. This paper presents the state of the art of gamification in higher education, as well as some guidelines and main features of a gamification framework to be applied in the course of a Masters in Engineering.

Abstract
Despite the technological advances, healthcare systems still face several issues. One of the most important is the lack of communication between systems or the communication process speed. If the information about a patient is not promptly shared in time between services, it may jeopardise the practicioner-pacient relationship. In a worse scenario, the system can even become a handicap and turn the Healthcare processes down into a state of total uselessness. A lot has been done in Portugal to enable the interconnection of external healthcare applications with the ones used in the National Health Service. In this article we present an architecture to facilitate this interconnection. Based on a REST architecture and HL7 communication standards, it connects two current solutions, one for melanoma and one for blood donors, with a central healthcare data repository of the National Healthcare Service. © 2015 AISTI.

Abstract
Many combinatorial optimization problems (COPs) encountered in real-world logistics, transportation, production, healthcare, financial, telecommunication, and computing applications are NP-hard in nature. These real-life COPs are frequently characterized by their large-scale sizes and the need for obtaining high-quality solutions in short computing times, thus requiring the use of metaheuristic algorithms. Meta-heuristics benefit from different random-search and parallelization paradigms, but they frequently assume that the problem inputs, the underlying objective function, and the set of optimization constraints are deterministic. However, uncertainty is all around us, which often makes deterministic models oversimplified versions of real-life systems. After completing an extensive review of related work, this paper describes a general methodology that allows for extending metaheuristics through simulation to solve stochastic COPs. 'Simheuristics' allow modelers for dealing with real-life uncertainty in a natural way by integrating simulation (in any of its variants) into a metaheuristic-driven framework. These optimization-driven algorithms rely on the fact that efficient metaheuristics already exist for the deterministic version of the corresponding COP. Simheuristics also facilitate the introduction of risk and/or reliability analysis criteria during the assessment of alternative high-quality solutions to stochastic COPs. Several examples of applications in different fields illustrate the potential of the proposed methodology. (c) 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.

Abstract
This paper intends to give some insights on the performance comparison of two main conversion system technologies from a set of wind farms from two major promoters in the Portuguese wind energy sector. Conversion system technologies under analysis are based on the generator type, synchronous and asynchronous, which are the basis of the dominant technological trends in actual market. The performance assessment is accomplished using Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) methodology, by computing the Malmquist index for group's comparison. From the obtained results, it is possible to conclude that farms with conversion systems based on synchronous generators have a better performance than the ones using conversion systems based on asynchronous generators. These conclusions may support the decision makers in repowering and overpowering processes.

Abstract

Abstract
This study proposes an integrated methodology to provide insights regarding the efficiency of wind farms of two major promoters in the Portuguese energy sector. The focus of the wind farms performance assessment is on the operating stage which corresponds to the electrical energy production process. In a first stage, Data Envelopment Analysis is used to measure the efficiency of wind farms in producing electrical energy from the resources available and exogenous variables. This method is complemented by bootstrapping to refine the efficiency estimates. In a second stage, the factors which may influence the performance of wind farms are investigated by using truncated regression with bootstrapping. The methodology proposed may be used by promoters in management of wind farms and may also be useful to regulator agents on the supervision of the energy market.