Abstract

Abstract
The performance of a company depends on the quality of its strategic decisions but depends also on how those decisions are implemented. Companies are composed of different units that can be geographically distributed with different levels of autonomy and local resources. Due to the complexity of the problem many companies use simulation to analyse the performance of critical sectors based on a number of scenarios. This reality requires new approaches that, taking advantage of existing models enables their integration with new models, facilitate their upgrade and allow a distributed execution. In this work we developed a Framework to integrate distributed agent-based simulators (ABMS) with a mechanism of communication TCP/IP to exchange synchronization messages and business messages based on the OASIS standard. The XML standard format was used for coding of all the messages. The communication mechanism of the Framework was developed in order to benefit from distributed computing.

Abstract

Abstract
The availability of patient clinical data can be vital to a more effective diagnosis and treatment, by an healthcare professional. This information should be accessible regardless of context, place, time or where it was collected. In order to share this type of data, many countries have initiated projects aiming to implement Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems. Throughout the years, some were more successful than others but all of them were complex and difficult to materialise. The research involves the study of four international projects - in Canada, Denmark, England and France - launched with the goal of fostering the clinical data sharing in the respective countries, namely by implementing EHR-like systems. Those case studies served as data to identify the critical issues in this area. To address the challenge of sharing clinical information, the authors believe to be necessary to act in three different dimensions of the problem: (1) the engagement of the stakeholders and the alignment of the system development with the business goals (2) the building of complex systems of systems with the capability to evolve and easily admit new peers (3) the interoperability between different systems which use different conventions and standards.

Abstract
Renewable technologies are suitable investments to achieve a low carbon electricity production system and to reduce the external energy dependency of Portugal in a long term period. The aim of this work was to develop and evaluate a variety of scenarios to promote these goals until 2030. A long-term electricity expansion planning model is used to design these scenarios and multi-criteria analysis is applied in the evaluation. The results demonstrated that imposing a minimum contribution of renewable energy sources (RES) for the electricity system, can be more costly than imposing CO2 emissions limitations. Taking into account the technical criteria, scenarios with high coal power share are favoured. However, under a pure social approach, the best scenario would be a 100% RES electricity system. When environmental and economic dimensions are more valued, the best options seems to be the ones with higher investments on natural gas and wind power plants.

Abstract
The two-dimensional cutting stock problem (2DCSP) consists in the minimization of the number of plates used to cut a set of items. In industry, typically, an instance of this problem is considered at the beginning of each planning time period, what may result in solutions of poor quality, that is, excessive waste, when a set of planning periods is considered. To deal with this issue, we consider an integrated problem, in which the 2DCSP is extended from the solution in only a single production planning period to a solution in a set of production planning periods. The main difference of the approach in this work and the ones in the literature is to allow sufficiently large residual plates (leftovers) to be stored and cut in a subsequent period of the planning horizon, which may further help in the minimization of the waste. We propose two integrated integer programming models to optimize the combined two-dimensional cutting stock and lot-sizing problems, minimizing the total cost, which includes material, waste and storage costs. Two heuristics based on the industrial practice to solve the problem were also presented. Computational results for the proposed models and for the heuristics are presented and discussed.