This paper proposes the joint use of the AHP (Analytic Hierarchy Process) and the ICB (IPMA Competence Baseline), as a tool for the decision-making process of selecting the most suitable managers for projects. A hierarchical structure, comprising the IPMA’s ICB 3.0 contextual, behavioural and technical competence elements, is constructed for the selection of project managers. It also describes the AHP implementation, illustrating the whole process with an example using all the 46 ICB competence elements as model criteria. This tool can be of high interest to decision-makers because it allows comparing the candidates for managing a project using a systematic and rigorous process with a rich set of proven criteria.

The so-called fourth industrial revolution brought a disruptive change in the way that communication technologies, distributed systems, intelligent data management, analytics and computational capability and other technologies are integrated to enable new functions and enhance capabilities not only to production systems, but also in many other domains such as education. Mobile Health (m-Health) education is one of these, where the number of applications and tools for m-Health education is extensive. The SARS-Cov2 (Covid-19) pandemic brought to life immense challenges towards education, technology, and the symbiosis with medicine. This paper introduces 31 of the current state-of-the-art m-Health education applications and analyses the results of an an inquiry to students and junior doctors during the confinement, designed to understanding their knowledge, use and trust regarding these apps. The results show that several applications are well perceived by their users and deserved their trust and confirms a good relation between use and trust on the applications analysed. This analysis open doors to a deeper study to evaluate at which extent improving m-Health education means not only to transmit knowledge but also to developing skills and better practices.

Today’s manufacturing enterprises face enormous competitive pressures stemming from the current dynamic and open business context. Global competition and market demand for customized products and services, delivered ‘just in time’, exert real stress on businesses. Recently, new production paradigms, such as the extended enterprise, as well as agile, virtual and networked manufacturing, have appeared in response to the increasingly dynamic conditions of the marketplace. These new concepts prompt geographically dispersed manufacturers to build alliances with their suppliers and customers in order to work more closely with them. They need to work to build manufacturing networks which bridge large sections of the supply chain. In this context distributed scheduling problems are challenging tasks to researchers and practitioners that have been gaining increasing popularity over the years. This is partly attributed to the fact that multi-site production and networked manufacturing environments are increasing as a consequence of globalization. In this paper a web based system for technologies integration for supporting distributed scheduling in a Virtual Enterprise, by combining a simulation-based approach, with the Hungarian algorithm, for solving job-shop scheduling problems is presented, in order to show how the authors can benefit from this technologies integration for supporting collaborative distributed manufacturing scheduling.

In the aggressive and competitive business environment of today, enterprises are expected to achieve competitive advantages in synergy, under the format of reconfigurable global networked structures, such as the virtual enterprise (VE) organizational model, integrating the optimal resources (products, operations, services) for each of the functions that the enterprise undertakes, in order to produce a product that meets the market requirements. The literature shows that several Internet-based tools can be used to enable some activities of VE integration. However, as we demonstrate, these do not support the reconfiguration dynamics required by this organizational model. Alternatively, the authors propose the market of resources (MR) as an environment to fully support VE integration, coping with its intrinsic requirement of high reconfigurability. Based on a demonstrator developed for the MR and on cost models traducing VE integration, one for the (traditional) Internet-based tools and the other for the MR, to support an analytical simulation, the paper validates the thesis that the traditional tools cannot support agility and dynamics, presenting the MR as a VE enabler, and identifying the domain of situations where the utilization of the MR reveals increased efficiency in terms of search and selection time and cost—designated as opportunities domain.