Abstract
After a continuously development in on-line availability, most of the countries are close to reach the highest point of public services maturity. The future of e-Gov should now go through accessibility questions and m-Gov, providing a new set of user-centred services, personalized and based on alerts that could be programmed taking into account knowledge based in the localization of the user. In this article we will analyze the stage of e-Gov in Europe based in a report of the European Commission, which allows, the realization of a comparative analysis of the evolution occurred between 2004 and 2006 in the 28 countries part of the study. Following, we analyze the case of Portugal, pointing out some of the reasons to the success of the measures applied. Finally we project the future of e-Gov in terms of accessibility questions, platform access independence and user-centred services.

Abstract
In Portugal, e-Gov is considered to be a key feature in the process of continuously developing an Information Society becoming itself a vital process in the context of modernizing public administration. Its higher priority it's to improve the quality of public services through the use of ICT (Information and Communications Technology). Although some great examples, Portugal still presents some low values in the main measures of ICT, when compared to the majority of European countries, The low investment, a almost inexistence in ICT qualification and the reduced knowledge that enterprises and citizens have about e-Gov potentiality's, are some of the obstacles to a higher success of e-Gov. In this context, we consider important to verify, as they are going to be the futures employees of public administration, the knowledge of public administration high students have about e-Gov, what it's the importance they gave to it, what services they now, use and propose.

Abstract
This paper considers the single machine scheduling problem with linear earliness and quadratic tardiness costs, and no machine idle time. Several dispatching heuristics are proposed, and their performance is analysed on a wide range of instances. The heuristics include simple scheduling rules, as well as a procedure that takes advantage of the strengths of these rules, Linear early/quadratic tardy dispatching rules are also considered, as well as a greedy-type procedure. Extensive experiments are performed to determine appropriate values for the parameters required by some of the heuristics. The computational tests show that the best results are given by the linear early/quadratic tardy dispatching rule. This procedure is also quite efficient, and can quickly solve even very large instances. [Received 15 December 2006; Revised 20 July 2007; Accepted 24 July 2007]

Abstract
The apparent tardiness cost heuristic is one of the best performing dispatch rules for the weighted tardiness scheduling problem. This heuristic uses a lookahead parameter that has previously been set at a fixed value. We propose two different approaches for determining an appropriate value for this parameter. In the first approach, a function is used to map several instance statistics into an adequate value. The second method uses the characteristics of the current workload to determine an appropriate value each time a scheduling decision is to be made. The computational results show that the new procedures outperform the fixed value approach over a wide range of test instances and workload characteristics. The new versions are therefore suited for application in scheduling systems, since they are capable of adjusting themselves to changes in the workload, and provide important savings over the current fixed value implementations.

Abstract
In this paper, we consider the single machine earliness/tardiness scheduling problem with release dates and no unforced idle time. We analyse the performance of a varied set of heuristics. This set includes simple scheduling rules, early/tardy dispatching heuristics, a greedy procedure and a decision theory heuristic. Two different approaches are considered to calculate a lookahead parameter used in the early/tardy dispatching heuristics, and extensive experiments were performed to determine an appropriate value for this parameter. We also propose an improvement procedure that uses some dominance rules to improve the solution obtained by the heuristics. The computational results show that the use of the improvement step is recommended, since it reduces the objective function value with little additional computational effort. The best results were given by the decision theory heuristic, but this procedure is computationally expensive and therefore limited to small and medium size instances. For large instances, one of the early/tardy dispatching heuristics is then the heuristic of choice.

Abstract
In this paper, we consider the single machine earliness/tardiness scheduling problem with job-independent penalties, and no machine idle time. Several dispatching heuristics are proposed, and their performance is analysed on a wide range of instances. The heuristics include simple scheduling rules, as well as a procedure that takes advantage of the strengths of each of those rules. We also consider early/tardy dispatching procedures, and a heuristic method based on existing adjacent precedence conditions. An improvement procedure that can be used to improve the schedules generated by the heuristics is also proposed. The computational tests show that the best results are given by the early/tardy dispatching rules. These heuristics are also quite fast, and are capable of quickly solving even very large instances. The use of the improvement procedure is recommended, since it improves the solution quality, with little additional computational effort.