Mixed integer non linear programming and artificial neural network based approach to ancillary services dispatch in competitive electricity markets

Ancillary services represent a good business opportunity that must be considered by market players. This paper presents a new methodology for ancillary services market dispatch. The method considers the bids submitted to the market and includes a market clearing mechanism based on deterministic optimization. An Artificial Neural Network is used for day-ahead prediction of Regulation Down, regulation-up, Spin Reserve and Non-Spin Reserve requirements. Two test cases based on California Independent System Operator data concerning dispatch of Regulation Down, Regulation Up, Spin Reserve and Non-Spin Reserve services are included in this paper to illustrate the application of the proposed method: (1) dispatch considering simple bids; (2) dispatch considering complex bids.

Legal and political regulation of higher education in Portugal: an evolutionary perspective on the current policy issues and the problem of order

The higher education system in Europe is currently under stress and the debates over its reform and future are gaining momentum. Now that, for most countries, we are in a time for change, in the overall society and the whole education system, the legal and political dimensions have gained prominence, which has not been followed by a more integrative approach of the problem of order, its reform and the issue of regulation, beyond the typical static and classical cost-benefit analyses. The two classical approaches for studying (and for designing the policy measures of) the problem of the reform of the higher education system - the cost-benefit analysis and the legal scholarship description - have to be integrated. This is the argument of our paper that the very integration of economic and legal approaches, what Warren Samuels called the legal-economic nexus, is meaningful and necessary, especially if we want to address the problem of order (as formulated by Joseph Spengler) and the overall regulation of the system. On the one hand, and without neglecting the interest and insights gained from the cost-benefit analysis, or other approaches of value for money assessment, we will focus our study on the legal, social and political aspects of the regulation of the higher education system and its reform in Portugal. On the other hand, the economic and financial problems have to be taken into account, but in a more inclusive way with regard to the indirect and other socio-economic costs not contemplated in traditional or standard assessments of policies for the tertiary education sector. In the first section of the paper, we will discuss the theoretical and conceptual underpinning of our analysis, focusing on the evolutionary approach, the role of critical institutions, the legal-economic nexus and the problem of order. All these elements are related to the institutional tradition, from Veblen and Commons to Spengler and Samuels. The second section states the problem of regulation in the higher education system and the issue of policy formulation for tackling the problem. The current situation is clearly one of crisis with the expansion of the cohorts of young students coming to an end and the recurrent scandals in private institutions. In the last decade, after a protracted period of extension or expansion of the system, i. e., the continuous growth of students, universities and other institutions are competing harder to gain students and have seen their financial situation at risk. It seems that we are entering a period of radical uncertainty, higher competition and a new configuration that is slowly building up is the growth in intensity, which means upgrading the quality of the higher learning and getting more involvement in vocational training and life-long learning. With this change, and along with other deep ones in the Portuguese society and economy, the current regulation has shown signs of maladjustment. The third section consists of our conclusions on the current issue of regulation and policy challenge. First, we underline the importance of an evolutionary approach to a process of change that is essentially dynamic. A special attention will be given to the issues related to an evolutionary construe of policy analysis and formulation. Second, the integration of law and economics, through the notion of legal economic nexus, allows us to better define the issues of regulation and the concrete problems that the universities are facing. One aspect is the instability of the political measures regarding the public administration and on which the higher education system depends financially, legally and institutionally, to say the least. A corollary is the lack of clear strategy in the policy reforms. Third, our research criticizes several studies, such as the one made by the OECD in late 2006 for the Ministry of Science, Technology and Higher Education, for being too static and neglecting fundamental aspects of regulation such as the logic of actors, groups and organizations who are major players in the system. Finally, simply changing the legal rules will not necessary per se change the behaviors that the authorities want to change. By this, we mean that it is not only remiss of the policy maker to ignore some of the critical issues of regulation, namely the continuous non-respect by academic management and administrative bodies of universities of the legal rules that were once promulgated. Changing the rules does not change the problem, especially without the necessary debates form the different relevant quarters that make up the higher education system. The issues of social interaction remain as intact. Our treatment of the matter will be organized in the following way. In the first section, the theoretical principles are developed in order to be able to study more adequately the higher education transformation with a modest evolutionary theory and a legal and economic nexus of the interactions of the system and the policy challenges. After describing, in the second section, the recent evolution and current working of the higher education in Portugal, we will analyze the legal framework and the current regulatory practices and problems in light of the theoretical framework adopted. We will end with some conclusions on the current problems of regulation and the policy measures that are discusses in recent years.

Constructing and Using Multimodal Narratives to Research in Science Education: Contributions Based on Practical Classroom

This study deals with the problem of how to collect genuine and useful data about science classroom practices, and preserving the complex and holistic nature of teaching and learning. Additionally, we were looking for an instrument that would allow comparability and verifiability for teaching and research purposes. Given the multimodality of teaching and learning processes, we developed the multimodal narrative (MN), which describes what happens during a task and incorporates data such as examples of students’ work.

O panorama do audiovisual infantil em Portugal: a problemática da surdez equacionada na concepção de filmes de animação

Dissertação apresentada à Escola Superior de Comunicação Social como parte dos requisitos para obtenção de grau de mestre em Audiovisual e Multimédia.

Programming atomic multicasts in CAN

In Distributed Computer-Controlled Systems (DCCS), a special emphasis must be given to the communication infrastructure, which must provide timely and reliable communication services. CAN networks are usually suitable to support small-scale DCCS. However, they are known to present some reliability problems, which can lead to an unreliable behaviour of the supported applications. In this paper, an atomic multicast protocol for CAN networks is proposed. This protocol explores the CAN synchronous properties, providing a timely and reliable service to the supported applications. The implementation of such protocol in Ada, on top of the Ada version of Real-Time Linux is presented, which is used to demonstrate the advantages and disadvantages of the platform to support reliable communications in DCCS.

Nano-CF: a Coordination Framework for macro-programming in wireless sensor networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) are being used for a number of applications involving infrastructure monitoring, building energy monitoring and industrial sensing. The difficulty of programming individual sensor nodes and the associated overhead have encouraged researchers to design macro-programming systems which can help program the network as a whole or as a combination of subnets. Most of the current macro-programming schemes do not support multiple users seamlessly deploying diverse applications on the same shared sensor network. As WSNs are becoming more common, it is important to provide such support, since it enables higher-level optimizations such as code reuse, energy savings, and traffic reduction. In this paper, we propose a macro-programming framework called Nano-CF, which, in addition to supporting in-network programming, allows multiple applications written by different programmers to be executed simultaneously on a sensor networking infrastructure. This framework enables the use of a common sensing infrastructure for a number of applications without the users having to worrying about the applications already deployed on the network. The framework also supports timing constraints and resource reservations using the Nano-RK operating system. Nano- CF is efficient at improving WSN performance by (a) combining multiple user programs, (b) aggregating packets for data delivery, and (c) satisfying timing and energy specifications using Rate- Harmonized Scheduling. Using representative applications, we demonstrate that Nano-CF achieves 90% reduction in Source Lines-of-Code (SLoC) and 50% energy savings from aggregated data delivery.

A parallel programming model for ada

Over the last three decades, computer architects have been able to achieve an increase in performance for single processors by, e.g., increasing clock speed, introducing cache memories and using instruction level parallelism. However, because of power consumption and heat dissipation constraints, this trend is going to cease. In recent times, hardware engineers have instead moved to new chip architectures with multiple processor cores on a single chip. With multi-core processors, applications can complete more total work than with one core alone. To take advantage of multi-core processors, parallel programming models are proposed as promising solutions for more effectively using multi-core processors. This paper discusses some of the existent models and frameworks for parallel programming, leading to outline a draft parallel programming model for Ada.

A framework for programming sensor networks with scheduling and resource-sharing optimizations

Several projects in the recent past have aimed at promoting Wireless Sensor Networks as an infrastructure technology, where several independent users can submit applications that execute concurrently across the network. Concurrent multiple applications cause significant energy-usage overhead on sensor nodes, that cannot be eliminated by traditional schemes optimized for single-application scenarios. In this paper, we outline two main optimization techniques for reducing power consumption across applications. First, we describe a compiler based approach that identifies redundant sensing requests across applications and eliminates those. Second, we cluster the radio transmissions together by concatenating packets from independent applications based on Rate-Harmonized Scheduling.

sMapReduce: a programming pattern for wireless sensor networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are increasingly used in various application domains like home-automation, agriculture, industries and infrastructure monitoring. As applications tend to leverage larger geographical deployments of sensor networks, the availability of an intuitive and user friendly programming abstraction becomes a crucial factor in enabling faster and more efficient development, and reprogramming of applications. We propose a programming pattern named sMapReduce, inspired by the Google MapReduce framework, for mapping application behaviors on to a sensor network and enabling complex data aggregation. The proposed pattern requires a user to create a network-level application in two functions: sMap and Reduce, in order to abstract away from the low-level details without sacrificing the control to develop complex logic. Such a two-fold division of programming logic is a natural-fit to typical sensor networking operation which makes sensing and topological modalities accessible to the user.

Nuclear medicine technologist education and training in Europe: literature and web-based findings

Purpose - The education and training of a nuclear medicine technologist (NMT) is not homogeneous among European countries, which leads to different scope of practices and, therefore, different technical skills are assigned. The goal of this research was to characterize the education and training of NMT in Europe. Materials and methods - This study was based on a literature research to characterize the education and training of NMT and support the historical evolution of this profession. It was divided into two different phases: the first phase included analysis of scientific articles and the second phase included research of curricula that allow health professionals to work as NMT in Europe. Results - The majority of the countries [N=31 (89%)] offer the NMT curriculum integrated into the high education system and only in four (11%) countries the education is provided by professional schools. The duration in each education system is not equal, varying in professional schools (2-3 years) and high education level system (2-4 years), which means that different European Credit Transfer and Accumulation System, such as 240, 230, 222, 210 or 180 European Credit Transfer and Accumulation System, are attributed to the graduates. The professional title and scope of the practice of NMT are different in different countries in Europe. In most countries of Europe, nuclear medicine training is not specific and curriculum does not demonstrate the Nuclear Medicine competencies performed in clinical practice. Conclusion - The heterogeneity in education and training for NMT is an issue prevalent among European countries. For NMT professional development, there is a huge need to formalize and unify educational and training programmes in Europe.

Design and implementation of a behaviorally typed programming system for web services

Dissertação apresentada na Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia da Universidade Nova de Lisboa para a obtenção do Grau de Mestre em Engenharia Informática.

Direct search optimization application programming interface with remote access

Search Optimization methods are needed to solve optimization problems where the objective function and/or constraints functions might be non differentiable, non convex or might not be possible to determine its analytical expressions either due to its complexity or its cost (monetary, computational, time,...). Many optimization problems in engineering and other fields have these characteristics, because functions values can result from experimental or simulation processes, can be modelled by functions with complex expressions or by noise functions and it is impossible or very difficult to calculate their derivatives. Direct Search Optimization methods only use function values and do not need any derivatives or approximations of them. In this work we present a Java API that including several methods and algorithms, that do not use derivatives, to solve constrained and unconstrained optimization problems. Traditional API access, by installing it on the developer and/or user computer, and remote API access to it, using Web Services, are also presented. Remote access to the API has the advantage of always allow the access to the latest version of the API. For users that simply want to have a tool to solve Nonlinear Optimization Problems and do not want to integrate these methods in applications, also two applications were developed. One is a standalone Java application and the other a Web-based application, both using the developed API.

A Java expression evaluator for nonlinear programming

Finding the optimal value for a problem is usual in many areas of knowledge where in many cases it is needed to solve Nonlinear Optimization Problems. For some of those problems it is not possible to determine the expression for its objective function and/or its constraints, they are the result of experimental procedures, might be non-smooth, among other reasons. To solve such problems it was implemented an API contained methods to solve both constrained and unconstrained problems. This API was developed to be used either locally on the computer where the application is being executed or remotely on a server. To obtain the maximum flexibility both from the programmers’ and users’ points of view, problems can be defined as a Java class (because this API was developed in Java) or as a simple text input that is sent to the API. For this last one to be possible it was also implemented on the API an expression evaluator. One of the drawbacks of this expression evaluator is that it is slower than the Java native code. In this paper it is presented a solution that combines both options: the problem can be expressed at run-time as a string of chars that are converted to Java code, compiled and loaded dynamically. To wide the target audience of the API, this new expression evaluator is also compatible with the AMPL format.

Web-based application programming interface to solve nonlinear optimization problems

Nonlinear Optimization Problems are usual in many engineering fields. Due to its characteristics the objective function of some problems might not be differentiable or its derivatives have complex expressions. There are even cases where an analytical expression of the objective function might not be possible to determine either due to its complexity or its cost (monetary, computational, time, ...). In these cases Nonlinear Optimization methods must be used. An API, including several methods and algorithms to solve constrained and unconstrained optimization problems was implemented. This API can be accessed not only as traditionally, by installing it on the developer and/or user computer, but it can also be accessed remotely using Web Services. As long as there is a network connection to the server where the API is installed, applications always access to the latest API version. Also an Web-based application, using the proposed API, was developed. This application is to be used by users that do not want to integrate methods in applications, and simply want to have a tool to solve Nonlinear Optimization Problems.

Type System for the ComponentJ Programming Language

Dissertação apresentada na Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia da Universidade Nova de Lisboa para a obtenção do grau de Mestre em Engenharia Informática.