Abstract
The paper presents the application of temperature acquisition systems integrating thermocouples, a thermographic camera and fibre Bragg grating (FBG) sensors in gas metal arc welding (GMAW) process, MIG ( metal inert gas) welding type. Efficient procedures to use FBG sensors and thermocouples were developed. The paper presents and compares measurements made in welded plates of aluminium alloy 6082-T6. Tests were performed in both plate surfaces and good agreement between the three techniques was found.

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

Abstract
This work shows the changes of bending curvature sensitivity when the same long- period fibre grating has different phase shifts. From the knowledge that the coupling constant is reduced as curvature increases, we theoretically and experimentally assess the possibility that the bend sensitivity follows the grating spectrum evolution during the point- to-point fabrication technique. We also show that control of bend sensitivity can be applied to the simultaneous measurement of bend and temperature.

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
This paper evaluates parameter identification of induction motor (IM) using two different methods. The proposed methods provide an accurate estimation on the parameters for the IM steady state model. Both algorithms were tested with real data and then used to estimate the parameters of the motor. The disturbances in the acquired signals were reduced using some signal processing techniques. The processed signals were then applied in both identification procedures. The first method is based on optimization by nonlinear least squares algorithm that permits establishing convergence constrains, avoiding impossible physical results. The second is an indirect method that allows keeping the physical meaning of the continuous time parameters when converting to discrete time domain. The effectiveness of the proposed methods is verified by experimental tests and results of the methods are discussed.