Abstract
The need of a functional integration in the manufacturing area (Production, Quality, Maintenance), outlooking for a new manufacturing agility, causes the emergence of concerns with reliability, maintenance and security of the manufacturing equipments at the shop-floor. Several models and methodologies, encompassing technical, human, social and organisational aspects such as Total Preventive Maintenance (TPM) or Continuous Improvement (Kaizen), are today available to help in implementing new paradigms in this area. In this paper, we briefly relate our experiences in the development of a maintenance management information system in a shoes manufacturing company, highlighting the socio-organisational context influence on this development. This project was part of the ESPRIT project Real-I-CIM, aimed at providing low cost shop floor advanced management tools, inside an open and distributed architecture.

Abstract
Operating as a corporate information system, intranets can give employees point-and-click access to a comprehensive range of resources. Moreover, they can facilitate the communication between different business processes in the company, such as marketing and sales, engineering, manufacturing and distribution. On the other hand, by adopting the proper security measures, controlled access to sensitive information can be given to partners, suppliers and customers, giving feasibility to an electronic data interchange (EDI) scenario using the internet as its communication infrastructure. Here we present an overview of the potential security problems faced by any industrial enterprise trying to become a "global enterprise", as well as the technologies behind the presently available solutions.

Abstract
This paper presents an overview of the evolution of manufacturing systems integrating infrastructures and standards, ranging from industrial network standards(1) such as MAP(2) and CNMA(3), that essentially support hardware integration, distributed platforms like OSF/DCE4 and OMG/CORBA(5) promoting industrial applications integration, up to integration frameworks like CIMOSA(6) which try to encompass all the aspects linked to business integration. This overview has a particular emphasis on the integrating infrastructure concepts towards enterprise integration. The advantages and constraints of a CIMOSA integrating infrastructure implementation using OSF/DCE is also presented and discussed.

Abstract
The classical long range distribution network planning problem consists on deciding network investments to meet future demands at a minimum cost, while attending technical constraints. The decisions whether to construct or reinforce substations and branches lead to a mixed integer programming problem with a great number of decision variables. Besides, the network injections have a fuzzy nature on account of the non availability of statistical data in what concerns future loads (namely in new areas and due to the presence of independent producers. Moreover several objectives must be taken into account. This leads to a fuzzy multiobjective, mixed integer problem. This paper presents a case study, adapted from a real network, that illustrates the application of an integrated methodology to deal with the planning problem. This case study aims into illustrating the proposed methodology and to point out its flexibility to adapt to the planner's needs.

Abstract
For a greenhouse located at UTAD-University, the methods used to estimate (in real-time) the parameters of the inside air temperature model will be described. The structure and the parameters of the climate discrete-time dynamic model were previously identified using data acquired during two different periods of the year. Several experiments showed that the second-order models identified achieve a close agreement between simulated and experimental data. Later, it was found that parameters change with varying operational conditions. Thus, for an efficient use of these models in real-time control, a recursive identification technique was implemented for the estimation of the parameters. Copyright (C) 1997 Elsevier Science Ltd.

Abstract