The R&D Centre ALGORITMI is a research unit of the Engineering School, University of Minho, that develops its activities in the fields of Information Systems, Production and Industrial Electronic. The Centre focuses its activity on projects that explores a strong link with the community, namely the industries and public administration. The University of Minho is located in a highly industrialised region with an important expression on textile and footwear industries, and an emerging field on Information Technology services enterprises, pushed by the e-phenomena age. The automotive industrial field also gained recently an important share of the market. Another external factor that influences our target field of application is the growth of the cities in the region, which introduces several demands for the co-operation of researchers, namely in the filed of logistics, communication, e-government and resources management. The Centre ALGORITMI is organized in Research Groups, responsible to define its own strategy but keeping an open attitude to promote collaboration among its large research team. The coordinator, Henrique Santos (hsantos@dsi.uminho.pt)