Abstract
The global economic crisis makes it necessary to increase business competitiveness. Lean is a manufacturing philosophy that deserves the attention of employers and their employees, since its objectives are to increase productivity, reduce waste, and optimize available resources. The 5S method is a lean tool that can improve productivity by improving the organization of the workplace. A brief survey of the market showed that there are several organizations dedicated to training and sharing this type of knowledge but only a few of them have digital tools available. Therefore, the use of a digital serious game that helps to understand the 5S method can effectively support an alternative form of learning. This article proposes a serious game that aims to respond to this need. This practical approach encourages the player to learn by trial and error. Information displayed throughout the game enhances learning, without a cognitive overload for the player. The game's evaluation has shown that our approach is efficient and results in the learning of 5S concepts. © 2013 IEEE.

Abstract

Abstract
The integrated planning of several activities implicated in paper production can lead to remarkable gains in terms of raw materials and resource usage. However, activities such as order assignment, production sequencing and cutting planning are usually addressed separately while ignoring the interactions among these processes. But the quality of the solution resulting from the juxtaposition of the partial solutions is not guaranteed, and may have a significant impact in terms of inefficiency of global performance. This article considers production planning in a pulp and paper industry in order to meet a set of orders of diverse types of products, admitting the possibility of producing simultaneously in two or more paper machines with their own features. The developed approach, ASC-3Steps, considers not only cutting optimisation but also extends itself to the processes of assigning orders to paper machines and production sequencing at each machine. Minimisation of wasted paper is assumed to be the overall goal. A set of computational results based on real data is presented.

Abstract
This paper presents the Stacking Problem, a hard combinatorial optimization problem concerning handling and storage of items in a warehouse, where they are handled by a crane and organized into stacks. We define the problem, study its complexity class, and present a mathematical programming model to solve it. In order to tackle medium- or large-scale instances, we propose a simulation-based algorithm using semi-greedy construction heuristics. This simple approach allows for multiple constructions, finding solutions within reasonable time even for large instances. Three semi-greedy heuristics are proposed and compared in an extensive computational experiment, where we study the relation between the number of constructions and the best solution obtained using each heuristic.

Abstract
Sparse coding is an important optimization problem with numerous applications. In this paper, we describe the problem and the commonly used pursuit methods, and propose a best-first tree search algorithm employing multiple queues for unexplored tree nodes. We assess the effectiveness of our method in an extensive computational experiment, showing its superiority over other methods even for modest computational time. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.

Abstract
In this paper we present the framework Abstraction-Carrying CodE Platform for Timing validation (ACCEPT), designed for timing analysis of embedded real-time systems using the worst-case execution time (WCET) as the safety parameter. In the context of real-time embedded code safety, we describe in detail the component responsible for generating and checking the WCET certificates. In particular, the checking mechanism is efficiently designed so that code consumers can autonomously verify that the received code meet theirs internal real-time requirements. The certificate generation/checking mechanism is inspired in the Abstraction-Carrying Code framework and implemented using Abstract Interpretation and Linear Programming. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.