Dgenco market balancing - cost repartition under light regulation markets

In this paper we present a new methodology, based in game theory, to obtain the market balancing between Distribution Generation Companies (DGENCO), in liberalized electricity markets. The new contribution of this methodology is the verification of the participation rate of each agent based in Nucléolo Balancing and in Shapley Value. To validate the results we use the Zaragoza Distribution Network with 42 Bus and 5 DGENCO.

ANN based day-ahead spinning reserve forecast for electricity market simulation

Electricity market players operating in a liberalized environment require adequate decision support tools, allowing them to consider all the business opportunities and take strategic decisions. Ancillary services represent a good negotiation opportunity that must be considered by market players. This paper deals with short-term predication of day-ahead spinning reserve (SR) requirement that helps the ISO to make effective and timely decisions. Based on these forecasted information, market participants can use strategic bidding for day-ahead SR market. The proposed concepts and methodologies are implemented in MASCEM, a multi-agent based electricity market simulator. A case study based on California ISO (CAISO) data is included; the forecasted results are presented and compared with CAISO published forecast.

Ancillary service market simulation

Power systems operation in a liberalized environment requires that market players have access to adequate decision support tool, allowing them to consider all the business opportunities and take strategic decisions. Ancillary services represent a good negotiation opportunity that must be considered by market players. For this, decision support tools must include ancillary market simulation. This paper deals with ancillary services negotiation in electricity markets. The proposed concepts and methodologies are implemented in MASCEM, a multi-agent based electricity market simulator. A test case concerning the dispatch of ancillary services using two different methods (Linear Programming and Genetic Algorithm approaches) is included in the paper.

Auction of financial transmission rights in electricity market environment

An auction model is used to increase the individual profits for market players with products they do not use. A Financial Transmission Rights Auction has the goal of trade transmission rights between Bidders and helps them raise their own profits. The ISO plays a major rule on keep the system in technical limits without interfere on the auctions offers. In some auction models the ISO decide want bids are implemented on the network, always with the objective maximize the individual profits for all bidders in the auction. This paper proposes a methodology for a Financial Transmission Rights Auction and an informatics application. The application receives offers from the purchase and sale side and considers bilateral contracts as Base Case. This goal is maximize the individual profits within the system in their technical limits. The paper includes a case study for the 30 bus IEEE test case.

ANN based day-ahead ancillary services forecast for electricity market simulation

Adequate decision support tools are required by electricity market players operating in a liberalized environment, allowing them to consider all the business opportunities and take strategic decisions. Ancillary services (AS) represent a good negotiation opportunity that must be considered by market players. Based on the ancillary services forecasting, market participants can use strategic bidding for day-ahead ancillary services markets. For this reason, ancillary services market simulation is being included in MASCEM, a multi-agent based electricity market simulator that can be used by market players to test and enhance their bidding strategies. The paper presents the methodology used to undertake ancillary services forecasting, based on an Artificial Neural Network (ANN) approach. ANNs are used to day-ahead prediction of non-spinning reserve (NS), regulation-up (RU), and regulation down (RD). Spinning reserve (SR) is mentioned as past work for comparative analysis. A case study based on California ISO (CAISO) data is included; the forecasted results are presented and compared with CAISO published forecast.

Ancillary services market clearing simulation: a comparison between deterministic and heuristic methods

Electricity market players operating in a liberalized environment requires access to an adequate decision support tool, allowing them to consider all the business opportunities and take strategic decisions. Ancillary services represent a good negotiation opportunity that must be considered by market players. For this, decision support tool must include ancillary market simulation. This paper proposes two different methods (Linear Programming and Genetic Algorithm approaches) for ancillary services dispatch. The methodologies are implemented in MASCEM, a multi-agent based electricity market simulator. A test case based on California Independent System Operator (CAISO) data concerning the dispatch of Regulation Down, Regulation Up, Spinning Reserve and Non-Spinning Reserve services is included in this paper.

Market impact of international sporting and cultural events

We study market reaction to the announcements of the selected country hosting the Summer and Winter Olympic Games, the World Football Cup, the European Football Cup and World and Specialized Exhibitions. We generalize previous results analyzing a large number and different types of mega-events, evaluate the effects for winning and losing countries, investigate the determinants of the observed market reaction and control for the ex ante probability of a country being a successful bidder. Average abnormal returns measured at the announcement date and around the event are not significantly different from zero. Further, we find no evidence supporting that industries, that a priori were more likely to extract direct benefits from the event, observe positive significant effects. Yet, when we control for anticipation, the stock price reactions around the announcements are significant.

Desenvolvimento de uma ferramenta de pré-selecção de recursos para empresas ágeis/virtuais

Mestrado em Engenharia Electrotécnica e de Computadores

Os preços de transferência e o âmbito de intervenção do auditor: abordagem e enquadramento

Dissertação de Mestrado apresentado ao Instituto de Contabilidade e Administração do obtenção do grau de Mestre em Auditoria Auditoria, sob orientação de Adalmiro Álvaro Malheiro de Castro Andrade

Controlador dedicado de Ecrãs LCD/TFT

Para dar resposta aos grandes avanços tecnológicos e, consequentemente, à postura mais exigente dos clientes, a empresa Francisco Parracho – Electrónica Industrial, Lda., que tem actividade no ramo dos elevadores, decidiu introduzir no mercado um controlador dedicado de ecrãs Liquid Crystal Display / Thin Film Transistor (LCD / TFT). O objectivo é substituir um sistema suportado por um computador, caracterizado pelas suas elevadas dimensões e custos, mas incontornável até à data, nomeadamente para resoluções de ecrã elevadas. E assim nasceu este trabalho. Com uma selecção criteriosa de todos os componentes e, principalmente, sem funcionalidades inúteis, obteve-se um sistema embebido com dimensões e custos bem mais reduzidos face ao seu opositor. O ecrã apontado para este projecto é um Thin Film Transistor – Liquid Crystal Display (TFT-LCD) da Sharp de 10.4” de qualidade industrial, com uma resolução de 800 x 600 píxeis a 18 bits por píxel. Para tal, foi escolhido um micro-controlador da ATMEL, um AVR de 32 bits que, entre outras características, possui um controlador LCD que suporta resoluções até 2048 x 2048 píxeis, de 1 a 24 bits por píxel. Atendendo ao facto deste produto ser inserido na área dos elevadores, as funcionalidades, quer a nível do hardware quer a nível do software, foram projectadas para este âmbito. Contudo, o conceito aqui exposto é adjacente a quaisquer outras áreas onde este produto se possa aplicar, até porque o software está feito para se tornar bem flexível. Com a ajuda de um kit de desenvolvimento, foram validados os drivers dos controladores e periféricos base deste projecto. De seguida, aplicou-se esse software numa placa de circuito impresso, elaborada no âmbito deste trabalho, para que fossem cumpridos todos os requisitos requeridos pela empresa patrocinadora: - Apresentação de imagens no ecrã consoante o piso; - Possibilidade de ter um texto horizontalmente deslizante;Indicação animada do sentido do elevador; - Representação do piso com deslizamento vertical; - Descrição sumária do directório de pisos também com deslizamento vertical; - Relógio digital; - Leitura dos conteúdos pretendidos através de um cartão SD/MMC; - Possibilidade de actualização dos conteúdos via USB flash drive.

Enterprises' internationalisation strategy: skills in exportation and customs law

Economical development has always been connected to the commercial exchanges between people, due to the necessity to suppress their needs. With the increasing growth of international business and more competitive and demanding markets, exportation has become an important first step to internationalisation. Unlike what happened in the past, companies must be aware that the enrolment in the current global market is risky and requires elaborated technical procedures. Internationalisation should not be treated as an isolated event of business management. The first part of this paper aims to understand the export process and fit it in the current stage of international trade, keeping in mind the framework of export under the customs law. Then, we tried to understand how Portuguese companies should face this process in their internationalisation strategy, and what skills organisations must acquire to be able to export competitively in the current scenario of globalisation. The investigation was based on interviews in companies that, through a process of internationalisation by exportation, have implemented themselves strongly in extern markets. This investigation allowed us to analyse the companies’ motivations to become international, as well as the selection criteria for the export destinations. It was also possible to identify the main obstacles to the internationalisation of Portuguese companies. We concluded that companies that choose exportation as a way to become international acquire specific skills that enable them to become competitive in international trade. However, studies have failed to answer the second initial question about whether the measures implemented by Customs potentiate exports.

Stochastic short-term maintenance scheduling of GENCOs in an oligopolistic electricity market

In the proposed model, the independent system operator (ISO) provides the opportunity for maintenance outage rescheduling of generating units before each short-term (ST) time interval. Long-term (LT) scheduling for 1 or 2 years in advance is essential for the ISO and the generation companies (GENCOs) to decide their LT strategies; however, it is not possible to be exactly followed and requires slight adjustments. The Cournot-Nash equilibrium is used to characterize the decision-making procedure of an individual GENCO for ST intervals considering the effective coordination with LT plans. Random inputs, such as parameters of the demand function of loads, hourly demand during the following ST time interval and the expected generation pattern of the rivals, are included as scenarios in the stochastic mixed integer program defined to model the payoff-maximizing objective of a GENCO. Scenario reduction algorithms are used to deal with the computational burden. Two reliability test systems were chosen to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed model for the ST decision-making process for future planned outages from the point of view of a GENCO.

QoS-based surrogates selection and service proposal formulation in offloading environments

Resource constraints are becoming a problem as many of the wireless mobile devices have increased generality. Our work tries to address this growing demand on resources and performance, by proposing the dynamic selection of neighbor nodes for cooperative service execution. This selection is in uenced by user's quality of service requirements expressed in his request, tailoring provided service to user's speci c needs. In this paper we improve our proposal's formulation algorithm with the ability to trade o time for the quality of the solution. At any given time, a complete solution for service execution exists, and the quality of that solution is expected to improve overtime.

Analysis of stock market indices with multidimensional scaling and wavelets

Stock market indices SMIs are important measures of financial and economical performance. Considerable research efforts during the last years demonstrated that these signals have a chaotic nature and require sophisticated mathematical tools for analyzing their characteristics. Classical methods, such as the Fourier transform, reveal considerable limitations in discriminating different periods of time. This paper studies the dynamics of SMI by combining the wavelet transform and the multidimensional scaling MDS . Six continuous wavelets are tested for analyzing the information content of the stock signals. In a first phase, the real Shannon wavelet is adopted for performing the evaluation of the SMI dynamics, while their comparison is visualized by means of the MDS. In a second phase, the other wavelets are also tested, and the corresponding MDS plots are analyzed.

Supplier's selection model based on an empirical study

The problem of selecting suppliers/partners is a crucial and important part in the process of decision making for companies that intend to perform competitively in their area of activity. The selection of supplier/partner is a time and resource-consuming task that involves data collection and a careful analysis of the factors that can positively or negatively influence the choice. Nevertheless it is a critical process that affects significantly the operational performance of each company. In this work, there were identified five broad selection criteria: Quality, Financial, Synergies, Cost, and Production System. Within these criteria, it was also included five sub-criteria. After the identification criteria, a survey was elaborated and companies were contacted in order to understand which factors have more weight in their decisions to choose the partners. Interpreted the results and processed the data, it was adopted a model of linear weighting to reflect the importance of each factor. The model has a hierarchical structure and can be applied with the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) method or Value Analysis. The goal of the paper it's to supply a selection reference model that can represent an orientation/pattern for a decision making on the suppliers/partners selection process