Ana I. Pereira

• PhD in Numerical Methods
• Polytechnic Institute of Bragança

The detection of glucose is crucial for diagnosing diseases such as diabetes and enables timely medical intervention. In this study, a disposable enzymatic screen-printed electrode electrochemical biosensor enhanced with machine learning (ML) for quantifying glucose in serum is presented. The platinum working surface was modified by chemical adsorp...

This paper introduces the iMath platform, designed to facilitate active learning in Mathematics education. The platform is under development and aims to be globally accessible within a few months. One goal is to provide an artificial intelligence-driven tool to support higher education students and lectures in mathematics. The platform will be free...

Monitoring campaigns of contaminants of emerging concern (CECs) in surface waters is of utmost importance in evaluating the anthropogenic impact on riparian ecosystems. Beyond identifying pollutants and threats, treatment solutions are also needed to mitigate the adverse effects caused by polluted water discharged into the environment. For years, g...

In urban environments, last-mile item delivery relies heavily on trucks, causing issues like noise pollution and traffic congestion. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) offer a promising solution to these challenges. This study compares the effectiveness of delivery using trucks versus drones. Two customer datasets, one clustered and one random, were u...

Olive trees play a crucial role in the global agricultural landscape, serving as a primary source of olive oil production. However, olive trees are susceptible to several diseases, which can significantly impact yield and quality. This study addresses the challenge of improving the diagnosis of diseases in olive trees, specifically focusing on acul...

The automotive industry is witnessing a surge in the production of electric vehicles (EVs) driven by stringent emission regulations. Despite this growth, heavy-duty truck fleets, particularly in waste collection, remain predominantly combustion-based ones. Waste collection is critical in urban environments, presenting unique challenges due to confi...

The dataset includes all the necessary files for solving the Capacitated Waste Collection Problem with Time Windows. The file "Time_windows.csv" contains the time windows used in this study, taking into account lunch breaks (12 p.m. to 2 p.m.), coffee breaks (4 p.m. to 5 p.m.), and the overall working hours (8 a.m. to 7 p.m.). These time windows we...

Low-density polyethylene (LDPE) was used in this work to grow carbon nanotubes (CNTs) by chemical vapor deposition (CVD) over catalysts based on Ni, Fe and Al, synthesized either by co-precipitation (C) or wet impregnation (I) methods, with CNT yields in the range of 16-33%. The morphology of the CNTs was directly influenced by the route used for t...

Monitoring campaigns of contaminants of emerging concern (CECs) in surface waters is of utmost importance in evaluating the anthropogenic impact on riparian ecosystems. Beyond identifying pollutants and threats, treatment solutions are also needed to mitigate the adverse effects caused by polluted water discharged into the environment. For years, g...

In this paper, we explore the application of powdered carbon and 3D-printed carbon monoliths prepared by carbonization of a tailored photopolymer. We demonstrate the efficiency of the developed carbonaceous samples in removing paracetamol (PCM) and sulfamethoxazole (SMX), used as model contaminants. Our results demonstrate that carbon samples are a...

Numerous studies in waste management propose solutions to the Waste Collection Problem, often focusing on constraints such as time windows and truck capacity. Travel times between points play a vital role in optimizing waste collection. However, the methods for determining them are frequently omitted. Another parameter that has a great influence on...

This dataset consists of two sets of potential delivery clients in residential areas of Bragança, Portugal. The first set was generated randomly, while the second set was created using the DBSCAN clustering technique based on the distance between points. Random payloads were assigned to these locations, and the dataset can be utilized to optimize l...

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have emerged as valuable tools in precision agriculture due to their ability to provide timely and detailed information over large agricultural areas. In this sense, this work aims to evaluate the semi-autonomous navigation capacity of a multirotor UAV when applied in the field of precision agriculture. For this, a s...

Low-density polyethylene (LDPE) was used in this work to grow carbon nanotubes (CNTs) by chemical vapor deposition (CVD) over catalysts based on Ni, Fe and Al, which were previously synthesized by co-precipitation or wet impregnation methods. The as-synthesized CNTs were tested as catalysts in the catalytic wet peroxide oxidation (CWPO) of paraceta...

Robotics competitions are highly strategic tools to engage and motivate students, cultivating their curiosity and enthusiasm for technology and robotics. These competitions encompass various disciplines, such as programming, electronics, control systems, and prototyping, often beginning with developing a mobile platform. This paper focuses on desig...

Identifying the maturation stage is an added value for olive oil producers and consumers, whether this is done to predict the best harvest time, give us more information about the olive oil, or even adapt techniques and extraction parameters in the olive oil mill. In this way, the proposed work presents a new method to identify and count the number...

The last few years have been marked by the insertion of renewable technologies in the global energy matrix, such as wind and solar energy, which are considered clean energies with low environmental impact. Wind turbines, responsible for the energy conversion process, are complex equipment that are expensive and susceptible to numerous failures. Mon...

Considering the rising energy needs and the depletion of conventional energy sources, microgrid systems combining wind energy and solar photovoltaic power with diesel generators are promising and considered economically viable for usage. To evaluate system cost and dependability, optimizing the size of microgrid system elements, including energy st...

This study focuses on the analysis of emulsion pictures to understand important parameters. While droplet size is a key parameter in emulsion science, manual procedures have been the traditional approach for its determination. Here we introduced the application of YOLOv7, a recently launched deep-learning model, for classifying emulsion droplets. A...

Worldwide, forests have been harassed by fire in recent years. Either by human intervention or other reasons, the history of the burned area is increasing considerably, harming fauna and flora. It is essential to detect an early ignition for fire-fighting authorities can act quickly, decreasing the impact of forest damage impacts. The proposed syst...

People are living longer, promoting new challenges in healthcare. Many older adults prefer to age in their own homes rather than in healthcare institutions. Portugal has seen a similar trend, and public and private home care solutions have been developed. However, age-related pathologies can affect an elderly person’s ability to perform daily tasks...

This paper presents an approach to address the challenges of manual inspection using multirotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) to detect olive tree flies (Bactrocera oleae). The study employs computer vision techniques based on the You Only Look Once (YOLO) algorithm to detect insects trapped in yellow chromotropic traps. Therefore, this research e...

Active learning is a modern educational strategy that involves students in the learning process through diverse interactive and participatory activities. The MathE platform is an international online platform created to support students and lecturers in the Mathematics teaching and learning process. This platform offers a tool to aid and engage stu...

Weather change plays an important role in work-related accidents, it impairs people’s cognitive abilities, increasing the risk of injuries and accidents. Furthermore, weather conditions can cause an increase or decrease in daily sales in the retail sector by influencing individual behaviors. The increase in transactions, in turn, leads employees to...

The Machine Learning approach is used in several application domains, and its exploitation in predicting accidents in occupational safety is relatively recent. The present study aims to apply different Machine Learning algorithms for classifying the occurrence or non-occurrence of accidents at work in the retail sector. The approach consists of obt...

Research have been driven by the increased demand for delivery and pick-up services to develop new formulations and algorithms for solving Vehicle Routing Problems (VRP). The main objective is to create algorithms that can identify paths considering execution time in real-world scenarios. This study focused on using the Guided Local Search (GLS) me...

Higher education institutions are promoting the adoption of innovative methodologies and instructional approaches to engage and promote personalized learning paths to their students. Several strategies based on gamification, artificial intelligence, and data mining are adopted to create an interactive educational setting centred around students. Wi...

MathE is a mathematical platform developed under the MathE project (mathe.pixel-online.org). The dataset has 9546 answers to questions in the Mathematical topics taught in higher education. The file has eight features, named: Student ID, Student Country, Question ID, Type of answer (correct or incorrect), Question level (basic or advanced), Math To...

Notably, real problems are increasingly complex and require sophisticated models and algorithms capable of quickly dealing with large data sets and finding optimal solutions. However, there is no perfect method or algorithm; all of them have some limitations that can be mitigated or eliminated by combining the skills of different methodologies. In...

This paper introduces the Kabsch Marker Estimation Algorithm (KMEA), a new, robust multi-marker localization method designed for Autonomous Mobile Robots (AMRs) within Industry 4.0 (I4.0) settings. By integrating the Kabsch Algorithm, our approach significantly enhances localization robustness by aligning detected fiducial markers with their known...

Catalytic wet peroxide oxidation (CWPO) is a low-cost wastewater treatment technology with proven efficiency in removing several contaminants. Still, most catalysts tested in this process are in powder form, instead of being investigated different configurations to ensure continuous flow mode operation at low-pressure drops. Here, we explore the ap...

Clustering algorithm has the task of classifying a set of elements so that the elements within the same group are as similar as possible and, in the same way, that the elements of different groups (clusters) are as different as possible. This paper presents the Multi-objective Clustering Algorithm (MCA) combined with the NSGA-II, based on two intra...

According to the World Health Organization forecast, over 55 million people worldwide have dementia, and about 10 million new cases are detected yearly. Early diagnosis is essential for patients to plan for the future and deal with the disease. Machine Learning algorithms allow us to solve the problems associated with early disease detection. This...

Sustainable mobility is a goal for several countries. This kind of mobility depends not only on personal motivation but also on government actions. Encouraging people, particularly children and younger, to raise awareness of the importance and benefits of using sustainable transport, like bicycles, is crucial to developing a sustainable society. Th...

Indoor Air Quality (IAQ) pertains to the air quality within a specific space and is directly linked to the well-being and comfort of its occupants. In line with this objective, this research presents a real-time system dedicated to monitoring and predicting IAQ, encompassing both thermal comfort and gas concentration. The system initiates with a da...

In this poster, I have presented some preliminary results obtained for waste collection route optimization using 8 algorithms. Among them, half were heuristic, and the other half were metaheuristic. The results demonstrated that metaheuristic algorithms have better performance for this application.

In retail sector there is a high number of work accidents causing economic losses, musculoskeletal injuries, among other prob-lems. To avoid future injuries and accidents, it is essential to develop intelligent systems to minimize the risk of accidents, providing a zero accidents culture in these sectors. This work concentrates efforts to highlight...

The aging of the world population has been a constant, which leads to a growing demand for home healthcare (HHC). In this sense, health and/or social entities perform the health support service at home, which has been an asset in increasing the quality of life of these people. However, HHC services urgently need to be modernized in their planning a...

The European Parliament has reinforced waste disposal laws to encourage the circular economy model. In this regard, companies in charge of municipal solid waste management systems (MSWMS) have several targets to meet in the next few years, which will demand for smarter solutions. One opportunity that has been explored by scholars is route optimizat...

Energy consumption has been increasing in the last years and thus, energy efficiency is one of the most important topics actually. Besides, the consumption and energy generation forecast help in efficiency optimization. This paper presents the development of a system for forecasting surplus power generation to be used by residential loads connected...

This paper analyzes the application of a population-based algorithm and its improvement in solving an optimal power flow problem. Simulations were performed on a 14-bus IEEE network modified to include renewable energy sources-based power plants: a wind park and two photovoltaic solar parks. In this scenario, the high penetration of intermittent en...

Although different actions to prevent accidents at work have been implemented in companies, the number of accidents at work continues to be a problem for companies and society. In this way, companies have explored alternative solutions that have improved other business factors, such as predictive analysis, an approach that is relatively new when ap...

Studies dealing with route optimization have received considerable attention in recent years due to the increased demand for transportation services. For decades, scholars have developed robust algorithms designed to solve various Vehicle Routing Problems (VRP). In most cases, the focus is to present an algorithm that can overcome the shortest dist...

Proper waste management has been recognized as a tool for the green transition towards a more sustainable economy. For instance, most studies dealing with municipal solid wastes in the literature focus on environmental aspects, proposing new routes for recycling, composting and landfilling. However, there are other aspects to be improved in the sys...

The exponential growth in energy demand is leading to massive energy consumption from fossil resources causing a negative effects for the environment. It is essential to promote sustainable solutions based on renewable energies infrastructures such as microgrids integrated to the existing network or as stand alone solution. Moreover, the major focu...

Science exhibitions are an effective tool for tech research and education, both in the production and design stages as well as in informal settings such as science centers and science museums, as they are used to promote informal learning in visitors. This is exploratory research to base an analysis of innovative exhibits. We believe unequivocally...

In recent decades, urban mobility has assumed a need for adaptation due to the more significant congestion experienced in cities and the growing focus on sustainability. Several solutions are proposed to help citizens move around in an urban environment. Most are not yet aware of the universal and accessible aspect that these solutions must have. T...

The robot presented in this paper was developed with the main focus on participating in robotic competitions. Therefore, the subsystems here presented were developed taking into account performance criteria instead of simplicity. Nonetheless, this paper also presents background knowledge in some basic concepts regarding robot localization, navigati...

This work deals with developing feasible valorization technologies to prepare carbon nanotubes (CNTs) from plastic solid waste and demonstrate their application in catalytic wet peroxide oxidation (CWPO). CNTs were synthesized by catalytic chemical vapor deposition (CCVD) at 850 ºC, considering low-density polyethylene (LDPE), high-density polyethy...

This work provides a systematic literature review based on an up-to-date assessment of the concepts, procedures and operational management in home health care (HHC). Worldwide, and especially in Portugal, there is a growing demand for HHC services, whether health or social, often supported by private or public institutions of social solidarity or h...

The future is envisaged to have renewable energy resources replacing conventional sources of energy like fossil fuels. In this direction wind and solar energy is emerging to be a vital source of green energy. Although these resources are a promising aspect in providing clean and cheap electrical energy, one demerit is that it is intermittent and th...

The existing wind energy potential in Portugal makes way for developing electrical energy in the northern region. In this work, wind speed data were statistically investigated using Weibull distribution to identify the characteristics of converting wind energy in Serra da Nogueira mountain in the Municipality of Braganca. An hourly wind speed time...

The last few years have been marked by the transition of the world energy matrix, predominantly with wind and solar sources considered clean energies. Wind turbines, responsible for the energy conversion process, are complex and expensive equipment susceptible to several failures due to multiple factors. Monitoring turbine components can assist in...

The use of several distributed generators as well as the energy storage system in a local microgrid require an energy management system to maximize system efficiency, by managing generation and loads. The main purpose of this work is to find the optimal set-points of distributed generators and storage devices of a microgrid, minimizing simultaneous...

The MathE platform is an online educational platform that aims to help students who struggle to learn college mathematics as well as students who wish to deepen their knowledge on subjects that rely on a strong mathematical background, at their own pace. The MathE platform is currently being used by a significant number of users, from all over the...

Increasing population in cities combined with efforts to obtain more sustainable living spaces will require a smarter Solid Waste Management System (SWMS). A critical step in SWMS is the collection of wastes, generally associated with expensive costs faced by companies or municipalities in this sector. Some studies are being developed for the optim...

Forests worldwide have been devastated by fires. Forest fires cause incalculable damage to fauna and flora. In addition, a forest fire can lead to the death of people and financial damage in general, among other problems. To avoid wildfire catastrophes is fundamental to detect fire ignitions in the early stages, which can be achieved by monitoring...

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) are a suitable solution for monitoring growing cultures due to the possibility of covering a large area and the necessity of periodic monitoring. In inspection and monitoring tasks, the UAV must find an optimal or near-optimal collision-free route given initial and target positions. In this sense, path-planning strate...

Developing innovative systems and operations to monitor forests and send alerts in dangerous situations, such as fires, has become, over the years, a necessary task to protect forests. In this work, a Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is employed for forest data acquisition to identify abrupt anomalies when a fire ignition starts. Even though a low-pow...

The recent advances in precision agriculture are due to the emergence of modern robotics systems. For instance, unmanned aerial systems (UASs) give new possibilities that advance the solution of existing problems in this area in many different aspects. The reason is due to these platforms’ ability to perform activities at varying levels of complexi...

Population in cities is growing worldwide, which puts the systems that offer basic services to citizens under pressure. Among these systems, the Municipal Solid Waste Management System (MSWMS) is also affected. Waste collection and transportation is the first task in an MSWMS, carried out traditionally in most cases. This approach leads to ineffici...

Navigation is one of the most important tasks for a mobile robot and the localisation is one of its main requirements. There are several types of localisation solutions such as LiDAR, Radio-frequency and acoustic among others. The well-known line follower has been a solution used for a long time ago and still remains its application, especially in...

Prediction of solar irradiation and wind speed are essential for enhancing the renewable energy integration into the existing power system grids. However, the deficiencies caused to the network operations provided by their intermittent effects need to be investigated. Regarding reserves management, regulation, scheduling, and dispatching, the inter...

Forests are remote areas with uneven terrain, so it is costly to map the range of signals that enable the implementation of systems based on wireless and long-distance communication. Even so, the interest in Internet of Things (IoT) functionalities for forest monitoring systems has increasingly attracted the attention of several researchers. This w...

The identification of olive-tree cultivars is a lengthy and expensive process, therefore, the proposed work presents a new strategy for identifying different cultivars of olive trees using their leaf and machine learning algorithms. In this initial case, four autochthonous cultivars of the Trás-os-Montes region in Portugal are identified (Cobranços...

This research proposes positioning obstacle detection sensors by multirotor unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) dedicated to detailed inspections in high voltage towers. Different obstacle detection sensors are analyzed to compose a multisensory architecture in a multirotor UAV. The representation of the beam pattern of the sensors is modeled in the Co...

Municipal Solid Waste Management Systems (MSWMS) worldwide are currently facing pressure due to the rapid growth of the population in cities. One of the biggest challenges in this system is the inefficient expenditure of time and fuel in waste collection. In this regard, cities/municipalities in charge of MSWMS could take advantage of information a...

Three-dimensional scanning is a task of great importance for our modern society and has brought significant advances in the precision of material inventory. These sensors map the material surface continuously, allowing real-time inventory monitoring. Most technologies are expensive because this process is complex, and even inexpensive ones are cons...

Life in society has initiated a search for comfort and security in social centers. This search generated revolutions within the knowledge about the technologies involved, making the environments automated and integrated. Along with this increase, ecological concerns have also arisen, which have been involved since the design of intelligent building...

The urge for robust and reliable localization systems for autonomous mobile robots (AMR) is increasing since the demand for these automated systems is rising in service, industry, and other areas of the economy. The localization of AMRs is one of the crucial challenges, and several approaches exist to solve this. The most well-known localization sy...

Home health care (HHC) management needs to plan their operations to synchronize professionals and allocate resources to perform several HHC services needed by patients. The growing demand for this type of service dictates the interest of all the stakeholders (professionals and patients) in finding high-quality daily solutions and logistics. Routing...

MathE is an international online platform that aims to provide a resource for in-class support as well as an alternative instrument to teach and study mathematics. This work focuses on the investigations of the students’ behavior when answering the training questions available in the platform. In order to draw conclusions about the value of the pla...

Assessing the different factors that contribute to accidents in the workplace is essential to ensure the safety and well-being of employees. Given the importance of risk identification in hazard prediction, this work proposes a comparative study between different feature selection techniques (χ2 test and Forward Feature Selection) combined with lea...

Production scheduling is a crucial task in the manufacturing process. In this way, the managers must decide the job's production schedule. However, this task is not simple, often requiring complex software tools and specialized algorithms to find the optimal solution. In this work, a multi-objective optimization model was developed to explore produ...

Forests worldwide have been suffering from fires damages, provoking incalculable losses in fauna and flora, economic losses, people and animals’ deaths, among other problems. To avoid forest fires catastrophes, it is fundamental to develop innovative operations, such as a forest fire monitoring system. This work concentrates efforts on defining the...

The increase in life expectancy has led to a growing demand for Home Health Care (HHC) services. However, some problems can arise in the management of these services, leading to high computational complexity and time-consuming to obtain an exact and/or optimal solution. This study intends to contribute to an automatic multi-criteria decision-suppor...

This work presents a methodology for characterizing ultrasonic and LASER sensors aimed at detecting obstacles within the context of electrical inspections by multirotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). A set of four ultrasonic and LASER sensor models is evaluated against eight target components, typically found in high-voltage towers. The results s...

Robotic competitions are an excellent way to promote innovative solutions for the current industries’ challenges and entrepreneurial spirit, acquire technical and transversal skills through active teaching, and promote this area to the public. In other words, since robotics is a multidisciplinary field, its competitions address several knowledge to...

The poster was presented at the 2022 MIT Portugal conference, carrying some of the results obtained so far in the PhD project "Optimization of municipal solid waste management systems towards sustainability". So far, route optimization showed potential results for saving resources in waste collection task using the metaheuristic algorithms availabl...

Global climate changes and the increase in average temperatures are some of the major contemporary problems that have not been considered in the context of external factors to increase accident risk. Studies that include climate information as a safety parameter in machine learning models designed to predict the occurrence of accidents are not usua...

University lecturers have been encouraged to adopt innovative methodologies and teaching tools in order to implement an interactive and appealing educational environment. The MathE platform was created with the main goal of providing students and teachers with a new perspective on mathematical teaching and learning in a dynamic and appealing way, r...