Convergence to the European Energy Policy in European countries: case studies and comparison

Purpose – Our paper aims at analyzing how different European countries cope with the European Energy Policy, which proposes a set of measures (free energy market, smart meters, energy certificates) to improve energy utilization and management in Europe. Design/methodology/approach – The paper first reports the general vision, regulations and goals set up by Europe to implement the European Energy Policy. Later on, it performs an analysis of how some European countries are coping with the goals, with financial, legal, economical and regulatory measures. Finally, the paper draws a comparison between the countries to present a view on how Europe is responding to the emerging energy emergency of the modern world. Findings – Our analysis on different use cases (countries) showed that European countries are converging to a common energy policy, even though some countries appear to be later than others In particular, Southern European countries were slowed down by the world financial and economical crisis. Still, it appears that contingency plans were put into action, and Europe as a whole is proceeding steadily towards the common vision. Research limitations/implications – European countries are applying yet more cuts to financing green technologies, and it is not possible to predict clearly how each country will evolve its support to the European energy policy. Practical implications – Different countries applied the concepts and measures in different ways. The implementation of the European energy policy has to cope with the resulting plethora of regulations, and a company proposing enhancement regarding energy management still has to possess robust knowledge of the single country, before being able to export experience and know-how between European countries. Originality/Value – Even though a few surveys on energy measures in Europe are already part of the state-of-the-art, organic analysis diagonal to the different topics of the European Energy Policy is missing. Moreover, this paper highlights how European countries are converging on a common view, and provides some details on the differences between the countries, thus facilitating parties interesting into cross-country export of experience and technology for energy management.

Non-preemptive and SRP-based fullypreemptive scheduling of real-time Software Transactional Memory

Recent embedded processor architectures containing multiple heterogeneous cores and non-coherent caches renewed attention to the use of Software Transactional Memory (STM) as a building block for developing parallel applications. STM promises to ease concurrent and parallel software development, but relies on the possibility of abort conflicting transactions to maintain data consistency, which in turns affects the execution time of tasks carrying transactions. Because of this fact the timing behaviour of the task set may not be predictable, thus it is crucial to limit the execution time overheads resulting from aborts. In this paper we formalise a FIFO-based algorithm to order the sequence of commits of concurrent transactions. Then, we propose and evaluate two non-preemptive and one SRP-based fully-preemptive scheduling strategies, in order to avoid transaction starvation.

On the analysis of data emerging in non-linear and complex systemscomparison of two X-Ray prony spectra

New arguments proving that successive (repeated) measurements have a memory and actually remember each other are presented. The recognition of this peculiarity can change essentially the existing paradigm associated with conventional observation in behavior of different complex systems and lead towards the application of an intermediate model (IM). This IM can provide a very accurate fit of the measured data in terms of the Prony's decomposition. This decomposition, in turn, contains a small set of the fitting parameters relatively to the number of initial data points and allows comparing the measured data in cases where the “best fit” model based on some specific physical principles is absent. As an example, we consider two X-ray diffractometers (defined in paper as A- (“cheap”) and B- (“expensive”) that are used after their proper calibration for the measuring of the same substance (corundum a-Al2O3). The amplitude-frequency response (AFR) obtained in the frame of the Prony's decomposition can be used for comparison of the spectra recorded from (A) and (B) - X-ray diffractometers (XRDs) for calibration and other practical purposes. We prove also that the Fourier decomposition can be adapted to “ideal” experiment without memory while the Prony's decomposition corresponds to real measurement and can be fitted in the frame of the IM in this case. New statistical parameters describing the properties of experimental equipment (irrespective to their internal “filling”) are found. The suggested approach is rather general and can be used for calibration and comparison of different complex dynamical systems in practical purposes.