Virtual power producers simulation - negotiating renewable distributed generation in competitive electricity markets

Sustainable development concerns made renewable energy sources to be increasingly used for electricity distributed generation. However, this is mainly due to incentives or mandatory targets determined by energy policies as in European Union. Assuring a sustainable future requires distributed generation to be able to participate in competitive electricity markets. To get more negotiation power in the market and to get advantages of scale economy, distributed generators can be aggregated giving place to a new concept: the Virtual Power Producer (VPP). VPPs are multi-technology and multisite heterogeneous entities that should adopt organization and management methodologies so that they can make distributed generation a really profitable activity, able to participate in the market. This paper presents ViProd, a simulation tool that allows simulating VPPs operation, in the context of MASCEM, a multi-agent based eletricity market simulator.

Orchestration of e-learning services for automatic evaluation of programming exercises

Managing programming exercises require several heterogeneous systems such as evaluation engines, learning objects repositories and exercise resolution environments. The coordination of networks of such disparate systems is rather complex. These tools would be too specific to incorporate in an e-Learning platform. Even if they could be provided as pluggable components, the burden of maintaining them would be prohibitive to institutions with few courses in those domains. This work presents a standard based approach for the coordination of a network of e-Learning systems participating on the automatic evaluation of programming exercises. The proposed approach uses a pivot component to orchestrate the interaction among all the systems using communication standards. This approach was validated through its effective use on classroom and we present some preliminary results.