Browsing by Issue Date, starting with "2022-04-26"
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- Development of a conceptual model integrating management systems and the Shingo Model towards operational excellencePublication . Carvalho, Mariana; Sá, José Carlos; Marques, Pedro Alexandre; Santos, Gilberto; Pereira, António MárioTo remain competitive in the marketplace, organizations are seeking the adoption of management models and tools that will allow them to find better and more effective practices to reinvent themselves, and continuously improve their business processes and product’s quality in a sustainable way, hence pursuing the ultimate goal of reaching enterprise excellence. The purpose of this paper is to present a conceptual model that relates the requirements of the ISO Management System Standards with the dimensions and guiding principles of the Shingo Model for Operational Excellence. The proposed approach allows an organization with and existing management system based on one or more ISO Management System Standards to adopt and perform an assessment tool to evaluate its level of maturity regarding the adoption of the best practices and behaviours prescribed by the Shingo Model, which is a novelty contribution of this research. The validation of the proposed assessment tool took place in a Portuguese organization from the automotive sector, having comprised two moments: in the first one, an external assessor performed a set of behavioural observations that acted as a base to assign a score, while in the second moment such score was internally obtained through a survey that was filled by the organization’s employees. The results reveal that these two methods converge to similar conclusions, hence confirming that the proposed model has the potential to enable an organization to assess the maturity level of its management system regarding the adoption of the guiding principles of the Shingo Model for Operational Excellence. A limitation of this research is that the model was only validated in a single company.
- Musical and cognitive abilities in children from disadvantaged backgroundsPublication . Boal-Palheiros, G.; Figueira, Pedro; Castro, São LuísHuman beings are born with several abilities which are amenable to change. A growing number of studies have focused on the relations between musical and cognitive abilities but research with children from disadvantaged communities is scarce. This study explored the relations between musical and cognitive abilities in disadvantaged children. Participants were 169 children from deprived neighborhoods, attending the second year of primary education in public schools that do not offer music education. Children’s musical abilities (perception) were measured with the Melody, Rhythm, and Memory tests of Montreal Battery for the Evaluation of Musical Abilities and their cognitive abilities, with five WISC-III subtests (Similarities, Vocabulary, Cubes, Picture Arrangement, and Digits). Parental level of education was obtained from a questionnaire on the socio-economic status of children’s families. Results revealed (1) few and weak correlations between musical and cognitive abilities; (2) stronger correlations of Socioeconomic Status (SES) with cognitive than with musical abilities; (3) digit span predicts all musical abilities; 4) a clear factorial distinction between musical and cognitive abilities. Overall, results suggest that disadvantaged children’s musical and cognitive abilities, as measured by the present instruments, are partly independent regarding processing components.
- Improving the Performance of Cooperative Platooning with Restricted Message Trigger ThresholdsPublication . Vasconcelos Filho, Ênio; Santos, Pedro Miguel; Severino, Ricardo; Koubaa, Anis; Tovar, EduardoCooperative Vehicular Platooning (Co-VP) is one of the most prominent and challenging applications of Intelligent Traffic Systems. To support such vehicular communications, the ETSI ITS G5 standard specifies event-based communication profiles, triggered by kinematic parameters such as speed. The standard defines a set of threshold values for such triggers but no careful assessment in realistic platooning scenarios has been done to confirm the suitability of such values. In this work, we investigate the safety and performance limitations of such parameters in a realistic platooning co-simulation environment. We then propose more conservative threshold values, that we formalize as a new profile, and evaluate their impact in the longitudinal and lateral behaviour of a vehicular platoon as it carries out complex driving scenarios. Furthermore, we analyze the overhead introduced in the network by applying the new threshold values. We conclude that a pro-active message transmission scheme leads to improved platoon performance for highway scenarios, notably an increase greater than 40% in the longitudinal performance of the platoon, while not incurring in a significant network overhead. The obtained results also demonstrated an improved platoon performance for semi-urban scenarios, including obstacles and curves, where the heading error decreases in 26%, with slight network overhead.