Fully smart cities: Analysis of the city to Smart City transformation process

Ever since the birth of the Smart City paradigm, a wide variety of initiatives have sprung up involving this phenomenon: best practices, projects, pilot projects, transformation plans, models, standards, indicators, measuring systems, etc. The question to ask, applicable to any government official, city planner or researcher, is whether this effect is being felt in how cities are transforming, or whether, in contrast, it is not very realistic to speak of cities imbued with this level of intelligence. Many cities are eager to define themselves as smart, but the variety, complexity and scope of the projects needed for this transformation indicate that the change process is longer than it seems. If our goal is to carry out a comparative analysis of this progress among cities by using the number of projects executed and their scope as a reference for the transformation, we could find such a task inconsequential due to the huge differences and characteristics that define a city. We believe that the subject needs simplification (simpler, more practical models) and a new approach. This paper presents a detailed analysis of the smart city transformation process in Spain and provides a support model that helps us understand the changes and the speed at which they are being implemented. To this end we define a set of elements of change called "transformation factors" that group a city's smartness into one of three levels (Low/Medium/Fully) and more homogeneously identify the level of advancement of this process. © 2016 IEEE.

Computational Models Development and Demand Response Application for Smart Grids

This paper focuses on computational models development and its applications on demand response, within smart grid scope. A prosumer model is presented and the corresponding economic dispatch problem solution is analyzed. The prosumer solar radiation production and energy consumption are forecasted by artificial neural networks. The existing demand response models are studied and a computational tool based on fuzzy clustering algorithm is developed and the results discussed. Consumer energy management applications within the InovGrid pilot project are presented. Computation systems are developed for the acquisition, monitoring, control and supervision of consumption data provided by smart meters, allowing the incorporation of consumer actions on their electrical energy management. An energy management system with integration of smart meters for energy consumers in a smart grid is developed.

Smart mail – a smart platform for mail management

Email is a key communication format in a digital world, both for professional and/or personal usage. Exchanged messages (both human and automatically generated) have reached such a volume that processing them can be a great challenge for human users that try to do it on a daily basis and in an efficient manner. In fact, a significant amount of their time is spent searching and getting context information (normally historic information) in order to prepare a reply message or to take a decision/action, when compared to the actual time required for writing a reply. Therefore, it is of utmost importance for this process to use both automatic and semi-automatic mechanisms that allow to put email messages into context. Since context information is given, not only by historical email messages but also inferred from the relationship between contacts and/or organizations present in the messages, the existence of navigation mechanisms (and even exploration ones) between contacts and entities associated to email messages, is of fundamental importance. This is the main purpose of the SMART Mail prototype, which architecture, data visualization and exploration components and AI algorithms, are presented throughout this paper.

On the zeros of the Abelian integrals for a class of Liénard systems

A planar polynomial differential system has a finite number of limit cycles. However, finding the upper bound of the number of limit cycles is an open problem for the general nonlinear dynamical systems. In this paper, we investigated a class of Liénard systems of the form x'=y, y'=f(x)+y g(x) with deg f=5 and deg g=4. We proved that the related elliptic integrals of the Liénard systems have at most three zeros including multiple zeros, which implies that the number of limit cycles bifurcated from the periodic orbits of the unperturbed system is less than or equal to 3.