Currently, there is high energy consumption in the buildings sector, in Portugal, which implies
an obstacle to the accomplishment of purposes intrinsic to the assumptions of sustainable development
and construction.
Therefore, efforts should be made to allow the construction of energy efficient buildings,
which is based on the adoption of a set of passive and/or active techniques that strive to reduce the
energy consumption of buildings throughout its life cycle, while ensuring comfort for its occupants.
The main objective of this dissertation is to evaluate passive and active proposals for
improving energy efficiency in residential buildings, based on the calculation of energy savings
associated with air conditioning and the payback period. To this end it was established a case study,
using as a base model a building unit of a multifamily building. The initial assessment of energetic
performance of this case study and its comparison after the implementation of improvement strategies
was done through a dynamic analysis using the EnergyPlus software.
The following solutions were evaluated: application of thermal insulation inside the cavity
wall, application of ETICS, more efficient glazing solutions, changing the building's solar orientation,
fixed shading devices application, definition of a pattern of night ventilation in the summer and use of
more efficient electrical equipment and lighting.
It was found that the use of these systems improves the energy efficiency of buildings, such as
the case study, despite of having different payback periods.

The present work deals with the use of innovation indicators in the decision-making process. It intends to contribute to the discussion on the construction, use and analysis of indicator systems and also to evaluate its weight on decision-making in innovation. The goal is to help understand how innovation indicators can influence technology policy and through it, society at large. This work will start by analysing the use of indicators (their problems and consistency) and other sources of information that contribute to build the opinions of innovation decision makers. This will be followed by a survey and interviews with main innovation actors. The results will shed light on the impact of the use of indicators by the innovation community – both in terms of technology policy and in the social sphere. Proposals and implications for the future will be advanced, hopefully adding new contributions to the governance of the science, technology and innovation field.

In order to understand the decision-making process in a Radiology Department, taking the Magnetic Resonance Equipment as an example, this paper reports a project to be followed. It is a guideline for future work development regarding Technology Assessment in Radiology. The Theoretical Framework is divided is three big issues. The first is “Technology Assessment”. Starting with the definition of some important concepts, the history and development of Technology Assessment will be addressed. The aim of this issue is to give a general main idea concerning TA contextualization. Doing a transposition of this subject to health area, it is also important to understand the particularities of Health Technology Assessment, second issue. Portugal framework on this subject will also be addressed. As so, the Portuguese National Health System is characterized and the decision-making stakeholders identified, has well as the competences for the decision-making process in general. The third issue is Decision-Making and its aim is to give a general elucidation on decision-making matters. To accomplish this, a research methodology was outlined, so that six research questions could be answered and five hypotheses could be accepted or refuted, in the future. With this research methodology, the Portuguese state of the art Magnetic Resonance equipment existence will be studied, using a survey as a resource. In the future, a mapping stakeholder technique will be used to identify the decision making key stakeholders and a survey will be applied to map theirs skills and competences in the process, where a pre-test was already applied. The results of this pre-test are presented.

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Software transactional memory is a promising programming model that adapts many concepts borrowed from the databases world to control concurrent accesses to main memory (RAM). This paper discusses how to support revertible operations, such as memory allocation and release, within software libraries that will be used in software memory transactional contexts. The proposal is based in the extension of the transaction life cycle state diagram with new states associated to the execution of user-defined handlers. The proposed approach is evaluated in terms of functionality and performance by way of a use case study and performance tests. Results demonstrate that the proposal and its current implementation are flexible, generic and efficient

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The normal way of introducing the notion of derivative is by means of the limit of an incremental ratio that can assume three forms, depending the used translations as we saw in Chaps. 1 and 4. On the other hand, in those derivatives the limit operation is done over a set of points uniformly spaced: a linear scale was used. Here we present an alternative derivative, that is valid only for t {\ensuremath{>}} 0 or t {\ensuremath{<}} 0 and uses an exponential scale