The thesis describes a method for the design and implementation of manufacturing control software using structured Petri nets. An earlier design method is presented from which a more formal approach is developed, and a definition for structured Petri nets is given. This definition is then compared to other classes of Petri net found in the literature. A comparison is also made between the proposed design method and other methods described in the literature. The structured Petri nets are then used to create a control structure, which is shown to have properties that allow the detection and diagnosis of faults originating both in the hardware and the software of the system. A detailed discussion is also presented concerning the implementation of structured Petri nets on various types of manufacturing controller and on general-purpose computers. In particular, results are presented from experiments with various implementation methods on programmable logic controllers. Conclusions are then drawn on the various aspects of the work and details of further research possibilities are described.

Nailfold capillaroscopy is a useful tool to diagnose endocrine, cardiovascular, neuropsychiatric, rheumatic and other diseases. Diagnoses are made on the presence or absence of certain types of capillary loops which are classified according to their shape. We have surveyed six clinicians, asking them to classify 217 capillary loops, in order to establish quantitative nailfold capillary loop classification criteria. The participating clinicians were not unanimous about the classification of any capillary, and there was no consensus about the class of 17% of the capillary loops. Some of the clinicians classified two occurrences of the same shape differently. This clearly demonstrates the need for well established classification criteria. Nailfold capillary loop classes can be divided into two major groups: Descriptive Classes (DC); "cuticulis", "open", "tortuous", "crossed", "bizarre" and "bushy", and Label Classes; "enlarged", "elongated" and "giant". Furthermore label classes can be divided into two groups, Width Anomaly Classes (WAC); "enlarged" and "giant", and Length Anomaly Class (LAC), "elongated". While descriptive classes give information about the shape of a loop, label classes emphasise dimensional anomalities of a loop. Assignment of a loop with one the descriptive or label classes causes information loss about the dimensions or shape, respectively. In order to preserve as much information as possible within a class, we propose a new class system that contains 17 classes which are the combination of WAC, LAC and DC. We propose quantitative classification criteria for commonly used classes: "cuticulis", "open", "tortuous", "elongated" and "giant". Although the class "enlarged" can be expressed quantitatively, inappropriate assignments of "enlarged" by the paricipating clinicians have not allowed us to set quantitative classification criteria. While definition of the class "crossed" is purely qualitative, a classification mechanism that is neither qualitative nor quantitative is proposed for "bizarre" and "bushy" loops. We propose the use of pattern recognition algorithms that are based on the evaluation of the capillary shape parameters such as loop length, loop width, limb width, the curvature, orientation, etc., to classify capillaries. By the use of mathematical morphology, skeletonization, topological relations, feature vectors, in an hierarchical structure, the software TANCCAS (The Automated Nailfold Capillary Classification and Analysis System) has been developed to calculate the shape parameters and to classify the capillary loops. These algorithms have been implemented on a Pentium PC and have resulted in an 88% accuracy level which is compared to participating clinicians' overall classifications of the test images.

Usability evaluation results in several usability problems and the non-UE developer is often not a part of the evaluation as it might deter the participant from reporting all the errors and also, conducting usability evaluation is a usability engineer's responsibility. Thus the evaluator needs to create unambiguous usability problem reports, which will help the developer fix the usability problems. This research involves the development and evaluation of the Usability Problem Diagnosis tool, which supports problem diagnosis through analysis and storage in a common database shared between the evaluation and the development team. This tool uses the User Action Framework as an underlying knowledge base to support problem diagnosis. / Master of Science

Made available in DSpace on 2014-06-11T19:26:17Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0 Previous issue date: 2010-12-20Bitstream added on 2014-06-13T18:54:33Z : No. of bitstreams: 1 orti_ps_me_bauru.pdf: 811706 bytes, checksum: 3b16ecf79e62cce83f9304c500ee0fce (MD5) / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES) / Um dos grandes desafios da empresa moderna é manter-se atualizada e pró-ativa no mercado em que atua para poder obter vantagens competitivas e diferenciarem-se no mercado, agregando valor aos seus produtos e serviços. A Gestão do Conhecimento e a Educação Corporativa têm sido grandes recursos nesse sentido, devido ao fato de estimularem e possibilitarem o processo de criação, captação, codificação, armazenamento e distribuição de conhecimento em toda a organização. Apesar da importância dessas atividades encontram-se poucos recursos de métricas para a gestão de desempenho dessas atividades tal como as exigentes em outras áreas como Gestão da Qualidade, Governança Corporativa, Tecnologia da Informação, entre outros. Um dos recursos utilizados pelas empresas na busca pela excelência em gestão, os modelos de maturidade, que constituem na descrição dos níveis de evolução no que se referem a processos, pessoas, tecnologia e a organização como um todo. Devido à importância desses temas para a vida organizacional propôs-se uma ferramenta de diagnóstico de gestão dos estágios de maturidade desses processos tanto internamente, quanto comparado às melhores práticas do mercado em seus vários processos de trabalho, podendo assim, planejar suas ações, implantar melhorias, inovar e, com isso, obter uma gestão consistente e crescimento consciente e focado nos objetivos planejados. Esta pesquisa pretende, portanto, fazer um estudo de caso exploratório sobre a viabilidade e efetividade de uma ferramenta de diagnóstico de modelos de maturidade em educação corporativa - uma das áreas ainda pouco parametrizadas dentro das organizações - para que haja uma melhor avaliação, compreensão e desenvolvimento dessas atividades, tal como as demais áreas que já possuem modelos de maturidade melhor estruturados e de forma prática e detalhada / One of the main challenges of modern business is to keep updated and pro-active in the market in which operates in order to gain competitive advantage and differentiate themselves in the market, adding value to their products and services. In this paper we discuss the importance of Knowledge Management and Organization Learning as resources in assisting the search for competitive advantage, because they allow the process of creating, capturing, encoding, storage and distribution of knowledge across the organization. Despite the importance of knowledge Management and Organization Learning, there are few resources of performance metrics for such activities, as those in other areas such as Quality Management, Corporate Governance, Information technology, among others. Organization Learning is one of the resources used by companies in pursuit of excellence in management and it is used to disseminate knowledge in the organization and ofter its employees opportunities for learning that enables a better understanding of the realities and challenges of organization, by creating appropriate responses to the strategic challenges presented. Maturity models have been used in various fiels of knowledge to ofter a description of levels of development as they relate to processes, people and organization as one. They constitute a benchmark for organization as one. They constitute a benchmark for organization to evaluate their progress on certain issues, projects and processes, as well to comparate themselves to the best practices in the market field in question. Because of the importance of these issues to organizational life, this work presents a bibliographic study on the topic of maturity models and their applicability in the area of Organization Learning, proposing a diagnostic tool of maturity to maturity levels for monitoring of internal practices and comparison to best market practices in ... (Complete abstract click electronic access below)

因應資訊化作業，大型企業組織透過企業資源規劃系統來整合組織內部與外部的資訊，以促進各種不同的商業功能間資訊的流動與交換。企業資源規劃系統中的主要模組包括商業流程管理。傳統商業流程管理著重在商業處理的自動化。先進的商業流程管理整合了流程邏輯與商業邏輯的功能，以有助於商業策略的規劃。商業流程管理的生命週期包括流程設計、系統配置、流程啟動、診斷四個階段。現有的研究多集中在前三個階段，較少與診斷有關的研究。本篇論文針對商業流程管理系統，研發系統發生錯誤時的診斷工具。本論文提出了診斷模型。此模型由使用者反應的問題中，定義錯誤類別、歸納使用者外部資訊，由商業規則和資料庫綱要中參考整合限制，並對應到系統的內部資訊。我們也開發了追蹤工具，追蹤錯誤可能的發生點，並依不同類別進行問題偵錯。除了針對本身的工作流程中的活動，也對前後的活動進行搜尋，以縮小錯誤偵測的範圍，協助資訊人員有效率排除錯誤。本論文根據一家電子公司的商業流程管理系統的個案研究，顯示我們所提出的診斷模型與追蹤工具有助於問題的偵錯。 關鍵字: 商業流程管理、診斷工具、商業邏輯 / An Enterprise Resource Panning (ERP) system integrates internal and external information andfacilitates the flow of information between all business functions inside and outside an organization. One of the main components of an ERP is the Business Process Management (BPM). Traditional BPM focues on the automation of business processes while advanced BPM has been extended to integrate with process logics and business logics for business strategy. The life cycle of a BPM system consists of process design, system configuration process enactment and diagnosis phases.Much research has been done on the first three phases. Little attension has been paid to the diagnosis phase. This thesis focuses on the design and implementation of a diagnosis tool for BPM systems. We propose a diagnosis model to represent the external and internal view of an error event. This diagnosis model is helpful for the troibleshouting to capture the status of an error event. Moreover, a bug tracer system is devlopement based on the proposed diagnosis model to diagnose the problem of workflow activities, and also trace before and after activities in the workflow, narrow the scope of error detection. Case studies from an electronic company demonstrate that the proposed diagnosis model and the tracer tool are helpful for troubleshooting. Keywords: Business Process Management, Diagnosis Tool, Business Logic

Orientador: João Pedro Albino / Banca: Davi Noboru Nakano / Banca: Manoel Henrique Salgado / Resumo: Um dos grandes desafios da empresa moderna é manter-se atualizada e pró-ativa no mercado em que atua para poder obter vantagens competitivas e diferenciarem-se no mercado, agregando valor aos seus produtos e serviços. A Gestão do Conhecimento e a Educação Corporativa têm sido grandes recursos nesse sentido, devido ao fato de estimularem e possibilitarem o processo de criação, captação, codificação, armazenamento e distribuição de conhecimento em toda a organização. Apesar da importância dessas atividades encontram-se poucos recursos de métricas para a gestão de desempenho dessas atividades tal como as exigentes em outras áreas como Gestão da Qualidade, Governança Corporativa, Tecnologia da Informação, entre outros. Um dos recursos utilizados pelas empresas na busca pela excelência em gestão, os modelos de maturidade, que constituem na descrição dos níveis de evolução no que se referem a processos, pessoas, tecnologia e a organização como um todo. Devido à importância desses temas para a vida organizacional propôs-se uma ferramenta de diagnóstico de gestão dos estágios de maturidade desses processos tanto internamente, quanto comparado às melhores práticas do mercado em seus vários processos de trabalho, podendo assim, planejar suas ações, implantar melhorias, inovar e, com isso, obter uma gestão consistente e crescimento consciente e focado nos objetivos planejados. Esta pesquisa pretende, portanto, fazer um estudo de caso exploratório sobre a viabilidade e efetividade de uma ferramenta de diagnóstico de modelos de maturidade em educação corporativa - uma das áreas ainda pouco parametrizadas dentro das organizações - para que haja uma melhor avaliação, compreensão e desenvolvimento dessas atividades, tal como as demais áreas que já possuem modelos de maturidade melhor estruturados e de forma prática e detalhada / Abstract: One of the main challenges of modern business is to keep updated and pro-active in the market in which operates in order to gain competitive advantage and differentiate themselves in the market, adding value to their products and services. In this paper we discuss the importance of Knowledge Management and Organization Learning as resources in assisting the search for competitive advantage, because they allow the process of creating, capturing, encoding, storage and distribution of knowledge across the organization. Despite the importance of knowledge Management and Organization Learning, there are few resources of performance metrics for such activities, as those in other areas such as Quality Management, Corporate Governance, Information technology, among others. Organization Learning is one of the resources used by companies in pursuit of excellence in management and it is used to disseminate knowledge in the organization and ofter its employees opportunities for learning that enables a better understanding of the realities and challenges of organization, by creating appropriate responses to the strategic challenges presented. Maturity models have been used in various fiels of knowledge to ofter a description of levels of development as they relate to processes, people and organization as one. They constitute a benchmark for organization as one. They constitute a benchmark for organization to evaluate their progress on certain issues, projects and processes, as well to comparate themselves to the best practices in the market field in question. Because of the importance of these issues to organizational life, this work presents a bibliographic study on the topic of maturity models and their applicability in the area of Organization Learning, proposing a diagnostic tool of maturity to maturity levels for monitoring of internal practices and comparison to best market practices in ... (Complete abstract click electronic access below) / Mestre

Cette recherche est basée sur l’idée que le tourisme stimule l’essor économique d’une région en créant de la valeur ajoutée, améliorant ainsi le niveau de vie de ses habitants (Bensahel, Donsimoni, 1999: 27). Son but est de démontrer que le tourisme peut être un moteur de développement pour la région étudiée. Notre hypothèse principale est que dans une région riche en ressources exploitables touristiquement mais dont le niveau de développement est faible (PIB en dessous de la moyenne européenne) la multiplication des projets touristiques de mise en valeur des ressources permettrait de stimuler et de soutenir le développement de la région tout en respectant les principes du développement durable. La thèse est divisée en deux parties. La première est conceptuelle et méthodologique et se focalise sur l’aménagement basé sur le projet territorial de développement touristique. La deuxième partie est consacrée aux étapes principales d’un projet territorial de développement touristique : diagnostic territorial et propositions de développement futur. Pour le diagnostic territorial nous avons conçu un outil permettant de calculer la valeur touristique totale des divisions territoriales et d’analyser les données collectées concernant les pratiques touristiques déjà en œuvre dans la région. Cet outil nous a permis d’identifier 4 systèmes touristiques localisés qui peuvent être considérés comme modèle d’organisation de la région des Souscarpates situées entre les Vallées de l’Olt et du Motru. / The current research is based on the assumption that tourism stimulates the economic growth of an area through creating the added value, thus, enhancing the standard of living in the area in question (Bensahel, Donsimoni, 1999: 27). We aim to demonstrate that in the targeted area tourism can (re)produce development. Noticing the weak development (DGP below the European average) in a region rich in resources that may be exploited through tourism, we think that the multiplication of such projects may boost and support the development of the region, in compliance with the principles of sustainability. The thesis is divided in two main parts. The former, conceptual and methodological in nature, focuses on territorial planning, based on the territorial project for tourism development. The latter is concerned with the main stages of a territorial project for tourism development : territorial diagnosis and future development proposal. In the case of territorial diagnosis, we designed a tool to calculate the total touristic value of the territorial divisions in question and to collect data using a survey of tourism practices in the area. The findings allowed us to identify 4 local tourism systems that we suggest as touristic organisation types in the Sub-Carpathians, situated between the Olt Valley and the Motru Valley.

<p dir="ltr">The gastrointestinal tract harbors a diverse range of microorganisms, collectively constituting the gut microbiome. <a href="" target="_blank">The maintenance of a symbiotic relationship between the host and these microorganisms is essential to gastrointestinal health. Disruption of the ecological balance within the gut microbiome can result in discomfort or pathological conditions.</a> <a href="" target="_blank">This dissertation explores these alterations within the gastrointestinal tract as potential indicators for specific gastrointestinal diseases.</a> <a href="" target="_blank">In pursuit of this, I collaborated with others to develop a smart ingestible capsule that offers a non-invasive method for enhancing the effectiveness of differential diagnosis and treatment strategies for Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD). </a>My contributions encompassed conducting <i>in vitro</i> protein sampling and extraction experiments, as well as enteric coating dissolution tests. Following thorough characterization of the capsule, I advanced to <i>ex vivo</i> sampling experiments. As a proof of concept, the capsule's sampling capabilities have been rigorously validated both <i>in vitro</i> and <i>ex vivo</i> using calprotectin, a key biomarker for monitoring and managing IBD. Future research may explore integrating this technology with other sensors for diverse chemical and gas sensing capabilities, aiming to refine the differential diagnostics of Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS) and IBD.</p><p dir="ltr">Simultaneously, the potential transmission of pathogenic microorganisms from the gastrointestinal tract to the environment through fecal matter can lead to substantial public health implications if adequate surveillance is not in place. These pathogens can contaminate water and food sources from various origins, exacerbating the problem. Furthermore, conventional laboratory-based assays, while effective, have extensive turnaround times and require skilled scientists to operate them. In response to this challenge, I have undertaken the development of point-of-care assays, aiming to streamline the detection of fecal contamination. This innovation is designed to mitigate the limitations associated with traditional methods by offering a more rapid and user-friendly approach. The primary objective is to enhance the accessibility of these assays, enabling on-site personnel with varying levels of expertise to utilize them effectively. Through the widespread adoption of these point-of-care assays, the overarching goal is to ensure the consistent provision of safe and reliable water and food supplies to the public.</p>