Multi-agent Simulation of Bilateral Contracting in Competitive Electricity Markets

Traditional vertically integrated power utilities around the world have evolved from monopoly structures to open markets that promote competition among suppliers and provide consumers with a choice of services. Market forces drive the price of electricity and reduce the net cost through increased competition. Electricity can be traded in both organized markets or using forward bilateral contracts. This article focuses on bilateral contracts and describes some important features of an agent-based system for bilateral trading in competitive markets. Special attention is devoted to the negotiation process, demand response in bilateral contracting, and risk management. The article also presents a case study on forward bilateral contracting: a retailer agent and a customer agent negotiate a 24h-rate tariff. © 2014 IEEE.

Multi-agent simulation of bilateral contracting in competitive electricity markets

Traditional vertically integrated power utilities around the world have evolved from monopoly structures to open markets that promote competition among suppliers and provide consumers with a choice of services. Market forces drive the price of electricity and reduce the net cost through increased competition. Electricity can be traded in both organized markets or using forward bilateral contracts. This article focuses on bilateral contracts and describes some important features of an agent-based system for bilateral trading in competitive markets. Special attention is devoted to the negotiation process, demand response in bilateral contracting, and risk management. The article also presents a case study on forward bilateral contracting: a retailer agent and a customer agent negotiate a 24h-rate tariff. © 2014 IEEE.

Plataforma de simulação em Repast Simphony para análise da divulgação de novas ideias em mercado

Modelação e simulação baseadas em agentes estão a ganhar cada vez mais importância e adeptos devido à sua flexibilidade e potencialidade em reproduzir comportamentos e estudar um sistema na perspetiva global ou das interações individuais. Neste trabalho, criou-se um sistema baseado em agentes e desenvolvido em Repast Simphony com o objectivo de analisar a difusão de um novo produto ou serviço através de uma rede de potenciais clientes, tentando compreender, assim, como ocorre e quanto tempo demora esta passagem de informação (inovação) com diversas topologias de rede, no contato direto entre pessoas. A simulação baseia-se no conceito da existencia de iniciadores, que são os primeiros consumidores a adotar um produto quando este chega ao mercado e os seguidores, que são os potenciais consumidores que, apesar de terem alguma predisposição para adotar um novo produto, normalmente só o fazem depois de terem sido sujeitos a algum tipo de influência. Com a aplicação criada, simularam-se diversas situações com a finalidade de obter e observar os resultados gerados a partir de definições iniciais diferentes. Com os resultados gerados pelas simulações foram criados gráficos representativos dos diversos cenários. A finalidade prática desta aplicação, poderá ser o seu uso em sala de aula para simulação de casos de estudo e utilização, em casos reais, como ferramenta de apoio à tomada de decisão, das empresas.

TV Recommendation and Personalization Systems: Integrating Broadcast and Video On-demand Services

he expansion of Digital Television and the convergence between conventional broadcasting and television over IP contributed to the gradual increase of the number of available channels and on demand video content. Moreover, the dissemination of the use of mobile devices like laptops, smartphones and tablets on everyday activities resulted in a shift of the traditional television viewing paradigm from the couch to everywhere, anytime from any device. Although this new scenario enables a great improvement in viewing experiences, it also brings new challenges given the overload of information that the viewer faces. Recommendation systems stand out as a possible solution to help a watcher on the selection of the content that best fits his/her preferences. This paper describes a web based system that helps the user navigating on broadcasted and online television content by implementing recommendations based on collaborative and content based filtering. The algorithms developed estimate the similarity between items and users and predict the rating that a user would assign to a particular item (television program, movie, etc.). To enable interoperability between different systems, programs characteristics (title, genre, actors, etc.) are stored according to the TV-Anytime standard. The set of recommendations produced are presented through a Web Application that allows the user to interact with the system based on the obtained recommendations.

Multi-agent Simulation of Bilateral Contracting in Competitive Electricity Markets

Traditional vertically integrated power utilities around the world have evolved from monopoly structures to open markets that promote competition among suppliers and provide consumers with a choice of services. Market forces drive the price of electricity and reduce the net cost through increased competition. Electricity can be traded in both organized markets or using forward bilateral contracts. This article focuses on bilateral contracts and describes some important features of an agent-based system for bilateral trading in competitive markets. Special attention is devoted to the negotiation process, demand response in bilateral contracting, and risk management. The article also presents a case study on forward bilateral contracting: a retailer agent and a customer agent negotiate a 24h-rate tariff.

Sistemas de emprego público no século XXI: que significado? Uma sistematização

O presente artigo intenta sistematizar as formas ou regimes do emprego público em países da União Europeia e da OCDE. A metodologia compreende a análise dos tradicionais sistemas de carreira (career-based system) e sistema de emprego (position-based system) no emprego público. Desenvolvem-se, ainda, breves reflexões nas mudanças operadas naqueles dois regimes que migraram para um terceiro modelo, vulgarmente designado por modelo híbrido de emprego público, mais flexível e mais correlativo às circunstâncias do século XXI.

Brokerage Platform for Media Content Recommendation

Near real time media content personalisation is nowadays a major challenge involving media content sources, distributors and viewers. This paper describes an approach to seamless recommendation, negotiation and transaction of personalised media content. It adopts an integrated view of the problem by proposing, on the business-to-business (B2B) side, a brokerage platform to negotiate the media items on behalf of the media content distributors and sources, providing viewers, on the business-to-consumer (B2C) side, with a personalised electronic programme guide (EPG) containing the set of recommended items after negotiation. In this setup, when a viewer connects, the distributor looks up and invites sources to negotiate the contents of the viewer personal EPG. The proposed multi-agent brokerage platform is structured in four layers, modelling the registration, service agreement, partner lookup, invitation as well as item recommendation, negotiation and transaction stages of the B2B processes. The recommendation service is a rule-based switch hybrid filter, including six collaborative and two content-based filters. The rule-based system selects, at runtime, the filter(s) to apply as well as the final set of recommendations to present. The filter selection is based on the data available, ranging from the history of items watched to the ratings and/or tags assigned to the items by the viewer. Additionally, this module implements (i) a novel item stereotype to represent newly arrived items, (ii) a standard user stereotype for new users, (iii) a novel passive user tag cloud stereotype for socially passive users, and (iv) a new content-based filter named the collinearity and proximity similarity (CPS). At the end of the paper, we present off-line results and a case study describing how the recommendation service works. The proposed system provides, to our knowledge, an excellent holistic solution to the problem of recommending multimedia contents.

ROAZ and ROAZ II Autonomous Surface Vehicle Design and Implementation

International Lifesaving Congress 2007, La Coruna, Spain, December, 2007

Autonomous Surface Vehicle Docking Manoeuvre with Visual Information

This work presents a hybrid coordinated manoeuvre for docking an autonomous surface vehicle with an autonomous underwater vehicle. The control manoeuvre uses visual information to estimate the AUV relative position and attitude in relation to the ASV and steers the ASV in order to dock with the AUV. The AUV is assumed to be at surface with only a small fraction of its volume visible. The system implemented in the autonomous surface vehicle ROAZ, developed by LSA-ISEP to perform missions in river environment, test autonomous AUV docking capabilities and multiple AUV/ASV coordinated missions is presented. Information from a low cost embedded robotics vision system (LSAVision), along with inertial navigation sensors is fused in an extended Kalman filter and used to determine AUV relative position and orientation to the surface vehicle The real time vision processing system is described and results are presented in operational scenario.

A control framework for a remotely operated vehicle

A control framework enabling the automated maneuvering of a Remotely Operate Vehicle (ROV) is presented. The control architecture is structured according to the principle of composition of vehicle motions from a minimal set of elemental maneuvers that are designed and verified independently. The principled approach is based on distributed hybrid systems techniques, and spans integrated design, simulation and implementation as the same model is used throughout. Hybrid systems control techniques are used to synthesize the elemental maneuvers and to design protocols, which coordinate the execution of elemental maneuvers within a complex maneuver. This work is part of the Inspection of Underwater Structures (IES) project whose main objective is the implementation of a ROV-based system for the inspection of underwater structures.

A Multi–Agent Brokerage Platform for Media Content Recommendation

Near real time media content personalisation is nowadays a major challenge involving media content sources, distributors and viewers. This paper describes an approach to seamless recommendation, negotiation and transaction of personalised media content. It adopts an integrated view of the problem by proposing, on the business-to-business (B2B) side, a brokerage platform to negotiate the media items on behalf of the media content distributors and sources, providing viewers, on the business-to-consumer (B2C) side, with a personalised electronic programme guide (EPG) containing the set of recommended items after negotiation. In this setup, when a viewer connects, the distributor looks up and invites sources to negotiate the contents of the viewer personal EPG. The proposed multi-agent brokerage platform is structured in four layers, modelling the registration, service agreement, partner lookup, invitation as well as item recommendation, negotiation and transaction stages of the B2B processes. The recommendation service is a rule-based switch hybrid filter, including six collaborative and two content-based filters. The rule-based system selects, at runtime, the filter(s) to apply as well as the final set of recommendations to present. The filter selection is based on the data available, ranging from the history of items watched to the ratings and/or tags assigned to the items by the viewer. Additionally, this module implements (i) a novel item stereotype to represent newly arrived items, (ii) a standard user stereotype for new users, (iii) a novel passive user tag cloud stereotype for socially passive users, and (iv) a new content-based filter named the collinearity and proximity similarity (CPS). At the end of the paper, we present off-line results and a case study describing how the recommendation service works. The proposed system provides, to our knowledge, an excellent holistic solution to the problem of recommending multimedia contents.

Hand gesture recognition for human computer interaction : a comparative study of different image features

Hand gesture recognition for human computer interaction, being a natural way of human computer interaction, is an area of active research in computer vision and machine learning. This is an area with many different possible applications, giving users a simpler and more natural way to communicate with robots/systems interfaces, without the need for extra devices. So, the primary goal of gesture recognition research is to create systems, which can identify specific human gestures and use them to convey information or for device control. For that, vision-based hand gesture interfaces require fast and extremely robust hand detection, and gesture recognition in real time. In this study we try to identify hand features that, isolated, respond better in various situations in human-computer interaction. The extracted features are used to train a set of classifiers with the help of RapidMiner in order to find the best learner. A dataset with our own gesture vocabulary consisted of 10 gestures, recorded from 20 users was created for later processing. Experimental results show that the radial signature and the centroid distance are the features that when used separately obtain better results, with an accuracy of 91% and 90,1% respectively obtained with a Neural Network classifier. These to methods have also the advantage of being simple in terms of computational complexity, which make them good candidates for real-time hand gesture recognition.

Arquitectura corporativa de web services

Este proyecto consiste en la realización de un sistema informático que se encargue de ampliar la red comercial de una compañía de seguros a través de Internet. Para ello se utiliza la tecnología de web services, que nos permite efectuar transacciones de datos de manera rápida, fiable y segura. El web service que se ha diseñado se encarga de resolver y dar respuesta tanto a peticiones de solicitud de precios como de emisión de pólizas en varios ramos. El objetivo es ofrecer al cliente final un método sencillo y próximo de cotización y emisión de seguros.

Automatic front-crawl temporal phase detection using adaptive filtering of inertial signals

This study introduces a novel approach for automatic temporal phase detection and inter-arm coordination estimation in front-crawl swimming using inertial measurement units (IMUs). We examined the validity of our method by comparison against a video-based system. Three waterproofed IMUs (composed of 3D accelerometer, 3D gyroscope) were placed on both forearms and the sacrum of the swimmer. We used two underwater video cameras in side and frontal views as our reference system. Two independent operators performed the video analysis. To test our methodology, seven well-trained swimmers performed three 300 m trials in a 50 m indoor pool. Each trial was in a different coordination mode quantified by the index of coordination. We detected different phases of the arm stroke by employing orientation estimation techniques and a new adaptive change detection algorithm on inertial signals. The difference of 0.2 +/- 3.9% between our estimation and video-based system in assessment of the index of coordination was comparable to experienced operators' difference (1.1 +/- 3.6%). The 95% limits of agreement of the difference between the two systems in estimation of the temporal phases were always less than 7.9% of the cycle duration. The inertial system offers an automatic easy-to-use system with timely feedback for the study of swimming.

How to improve the formal analytic reasoning and scientific motivation in the intellectual training of medical students

A review article of the The New England Journal of Medicine refers that almost a century ago, Abraham Flexner, a research scholar at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, undertook an assessment of medical education in 155 medical schools in operation in the United States and Canada. Flexner’s report emphasized the nonscientific approach of American medical schools to preparation for the profession, which contrasted with the university-based system of medical education in Germany. At the core of Flexner’s view was the notion that formal analytic reasoning, the kind of thinking integral to the natural sciences, should hold pride of place in the intellectual training of physicians. This idea was pioneered at Harvard University, the University of Michigan, and the University of Pennsylvania in the 1880s, but was most fully expressed in the educational program at Johns Hopkins University, which Flexner regarded as the ideal for medical education. (...)