Bibliometric analysis for characterization of oil production in Brazilian territory

Scientometrics - The theme related to the oil production in the Brazilian territory is not limited to the extraction means, distribution and use of this product, and involves political, cultural...     

Low-cost deployment proposal to urban mobility in smart cities

Rational use of cars in smart cities can represent an economical and cheaper way to decrease the quantity of cars on the roads to better the life quality of the populations. This paper presents a low-cost deployment proposal called “URCa project” to reach these goals and proposes a paradigm change by sharing the cars considering some logistic aspects including car ride mechanism. Technical feasibility to deploy this solution was checked by means of a proof of concept. The concept was proven by passenger counting and license plate that are essential information in this solution were obtained taking photographs, applying two types of recognition algorithms and sending the results to be stored and evaluated by analytic data processes of a transit regulatory agency showing that this project is technically viable. The low-cost solution was justified by a financial analysis based on both costs (URCa solution and a bridge) that has shown a ratio of 1:10,000.

     

Automated process planning for parametric parts

The available automated CAPP solutions are mostly academic research or specific applications, which cannot be used in different environments. This paper presents a solution for automated process planning for parametric parts included in one CAPP environment with many other software components. It meets the planning requirements of any parts and products in a real industrial environment. This paper provides a brief overview of CAPP and a definition of the parametric parts used. The requirements of the CAPP environment are discussed and its concept and design characteristics are presented. A practical application of the CAPP environment is described in order to validate the proposed solution.     

Evaluation of thermodynamic properties using GAB model to describe the desorption process of cocoa beans

The desorption isotherms and thermodynamic properties of cocoa beans were obtained during the drying process of this product. The isotherms were determined by dynamic method for various temperature (25, 35, 45 and 55 °C) and relative humidity (RH) conditions (30, 40, 50, 60, 70 and 80%). Equilibrium moisture content data were correlated by the Guggenheim–Anderson–de Boer (GAB) model, which presented good fit to the data, according to statistical procedures. Equilibrium moisture content ranged from 5.90 to 16.67 d.b.; it increased with an increment in the RH and decreased with increased temperature at a constant RH. Enthalpy values for each model coefficient were encountered, ranging from ?90.05 to 545.96 kJ kg^?1. The integral isosteric heat of desorption and differential entropy increased with decreased equilibrium moisture content, a tendency also found for Gibbs free energy.     

Multiple biological sequence alignment in heterogeneous multicore clusters with user-selectable task allocation policies

Multiple Sequence Alignment (MSA) is an important problem in Bioinformatics that aims to align more than two sequences in order to emphasize similarity regions. This problem is known to be NP-Hard, so heuristic methods are used to solve it. DIALIGN-TX is an iterative heuristic method for MSA that generates alignments by concatenating ungapped regions with high similarity. Usually, the first phase of MSA algorithms is parallelized by distributing several independent tasks among the nodes. Even though heterogeneous multicore clusters are becoming very common nowadays, very few task allocation policies were proposed for this type of architecture. This paper proposes an MPI/OpenMP master/slave parallel strategy to run DIALIGN-TX in heterogeneous multicore clusters, with several allocation policies. We show that an appropriate choice of the master node has great impact on the overall system performance. Also, the results obtained in a heterogeneous multicore cluster composed of 4 nodes (30 cores), with real sequence sets show that the execution time can be drastically reduced when the appropriate allocation policy is used.     

Mining the impact of evolution categories on object-oriented metrics

Despite the relevance of the software evolution phase, there are few characterization studies on recurrent evolution growth patterns and on their impact on software properties, such as coupling and cohesion. In this paper, we report a study designed to investigate whether the software evolution categories proposed by Lanza can be used to explain not only the growth of a system in terms of lines of code (LOC), but also in terms of metrics from the Chidamber and Kemerer (CK) object-oriented metrics suite. Our results show that high levels of recall (ranging on average from 52 to 72 %) are achieved when using LOC to predict the evolution of coupling and size. For cohesion, we have achieved smaller recall rates (<27 % on average).     

Development and evaluation of active packaging for sliced mozzarella preservation

Antimicrobial films were formed by the incorporation of nisin (NI), natamycin (NA) and a combination of both (NI + NA) into cellulose polymer. Film efficacies were evaluated in vitro against Staphylococcus aureus ATCC 6538, Listeria monocytogenes ATCC 15313, Penicillium sp. and Geotrichum sp. The films were also evaluated on sliced mozzarella cheese against moulds and yeasts, Staphylococcus sp. and psychrotrophic bacteria. Mechanical and microscopic properties of the films and the diffusion of the antimicrobial agents from the film to the cheese were also evaluated. Films containing NI showed an antimicrobial effect in vitro against S. aureus and L. monocytogenes, while films containing NA were effective in vitro against Penicillium sp. and Geotrichum sp. By the ninth day of storage at 12 ± 2°C, the count of yeasts and moulds on cheese covered with films containing NA decreased 2 log10 units compared with the count on cheese with control films. NI film did not show an effect against Staphylococcus sp., but it was effective against psychrotrophic bacteria for 6 days of storage of the cheese. The incorporation of antimicrobial compounds decreased the resistance and elongation of the films and caused changes in their molecular conformation. NI diffusion from the films to the cheese was not detected; however, time‐dependent diffusion of NA from the film containing NI + NA was measured. The incorporation of NI and NA together in the films did not show an effect. The film containing NA showed potential for application as active food packaging for sliced mozzarella cheese. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.