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Supply chain management must appeal to different and more innovative strategies that make possible a better responsiveness to customers’ requirements and needs. The supply chains must be more agile, and also improving its ability to cope with unexpected disturbances, that is, supply chains must be more resilient. The deployment of these two strategies simultaneously will contribute to enhance the supply chain performance and competitiveness. Accordingly, the main objective of this paper is to propose an innovative conceptual model to a better understanding the influence of agile and resilient strategies on supply chain performance and competitiveness. The conceptual model proposed considers a set of agile and resilient practices deployed with consideration for the upstream and downstream supply chain relationships, as well as for the firm inward. In this model a performance measurement system is also proposed which intends to monitor the influence of these practices on operational and economic performance of the supply chain.

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In a Collaborative Network (CN) scenario it would be desirable that CN members could be able to start collaboration within their Virtual Organization Breeding Environments or Professional Virtual Communities in a short time-frame, whenever a new Business Opportunity appears.

As a contribution towards such dynamic scenario, this paper proposes the concepts of Assets Entity, Pro-Active Assets Entity and Integrated Market of Pro-Active Assets Entities. The first concept can be used to model attributes and all functional and intelligent content elements a CN member can provide (its Assets). The second is responsible for the representation and promotion of an Assets Entity. The later offers an adaptation of the market place concept where each Pro-Active Assets Entity registers itself, brokers post their needs and try to find the best providers, through a bidding and negotiation process.

he service concept is widely used in distinct research and application areas. Particularly in Collaborative Networks, Service Orientation represents a main trend in the development of support platforms. Nevertheless, a literature review shows that it does not gather a common understanding, namely from the software and business perspectives. This paper proposes a conceptual framework aiming at contributing to make these two perspectives come closer, through a refinement of the Service concept itself and the usage of Pro-Activeness.

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Spreadsheets are notoriously error-prone. To help avoid the introduction of errors when changing spreadsheets, models that capture the structure and inter-dependencies of spreadsheets at a conceptual level have been proposed. Thus, spreadsheet evolution can be made safe within the confines of a model. As in any other model/instance setting, evolution may not only require changes at the instance level but also at the model level. When model changes are required, the safety of instance evolution can not be guarded by the model alone. Coupled transformation of models and instances are supported by the 2LT platform and have been applied for transformation of algebraic datatypes, XML schemas, and relational database models. We have extended 2LT to spreadsheet evolution. We have designed an appropriate representation of spreadsheet models, including the fundamental notions of formulæ, references, and blocks of cells. For these models and their instances, we have designed coupled transformation rules that cover specific spreadsheet evolution steps, such as extraction of a block of cells into a separate sheet or insertion of columns in all occurrences of a repeated block of cells. Each model-level transformation rule is coupled with instance level migration rules from the source to the target model and vice versa. These coupled rules can be composed to create compound transformations at the model level that induce compound transformations at the instance level. With this approach, spreadsheet evolution can be made safe, even when model changes are involved.

Macromolecular X-ray crystallography is an important and powerful technique in drug discovery, used by pharmaceutical companies in the discovery process of new medicines. The detailed analysis of crystal structures of protein-ligand complexes allows the study of the specific interactions of a particular drug with its protein target at the atomic level. It is used to design and improve drugs. The starting point of these studies is the preparation of suitable crystals of complexes with potential ligands, which can be achieved by using different strategies described in this chapter. In addition, an introduction to X-ray crystallography is given, highlighting the fundamental steps necessary to determine the three-dimensional structure of protein-ligand complexes, as well as some of the tools and criteria to validate crystal structures available in databases.