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Abstract
There is a large consensus on the importance of human behaviour on the energy performance of buildings. Energy policy orientations consistently take into account the importance of the building stock in the overall energy use by societies. Existing buildings are specially challenging, as reliable diagnoses are required to take appropriate action towards comfort and energy efficiency. Managers also play a determinant role in building performance, either on investment decisions in technology or on the building operation. Middle-out agents may determine effective energy use options and positively influence behaviours at both levels, top management and occupants. Interdisciplinary cooperation amongst members of research teams is required for energy-efficient building design, coping simultaneously with technological and behavioural issues and their interrelations, privileging occupant-centred approaches.

Abstract
This work consists in assessing a real islanded power system from a dynamic security point of view, to support the planned installation, in the near future, of a hydro power plant with pumped storage, aiming to increase the integration of renewable energy. The analysed hydro power plant will include a Pelton turbine as it is a high-head hydro facility. Due to economic reasons, the adopted water pumping technology consists in fixed speed pumps coupled to induction motors with direct grid connection. It was possible to verify through detailed simulations of this power system's time domain behaviour that, even though the expected installation of this new power plant will bring additional frequency stability constraints, a robust technical solution may be found dealing with the new constraints without increasing the complexity of operation in this islanded power system. The conclusions obtained from this specific case are also valid for similar isolated power systems, namely when hydro pumping stations are being considered to increase time-variable renewable generation penetration.

Abstract
To ensure interoperability and the correct end-to-end behavior of heterogenous distributed systems, it is important to conduct integration tests that verify the interactions with the environment and between the system components in key scenarios. The automation of such integration tests requires that test components are also distributed, with local testers deployed close to the system components, coordinated by a central tester. In such a test architecture, it is important to maximize the autonomy of the local testers to minimize the communication overhead and maximize the fault detection capability. A test scenario is called locally observable and locally controllable, if conformance errors can be detected locally and test inputs can be decided locally, respectively, by the local testers, without the need for exchanging coordination messages between the test components during test execution (i.e., without any communication overhead). For test scenarios specified by means of UML sequence diagrams that don’t exhibit those properties, we present in this paper an approach with tool support to automatically find coordination messages that, added to the given scenario, make it locally controllable and locally observable. © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019.

Abstract
The field of automated learning has been steadily growing in robotic tasks. This phenomenon is supported by the evolution of computational resources and new reinforcement learning algorithms. Researchers have drawn their attentions to methods that are easy to implement and tune, while achieving state-of-the-art performance. This trend also affects the world of robotic soccer, where new papers delve systematically into the optimization of basic skills. However, when learning higher-level strategies, there is space for improvement on two fronts. First, the simulation environment should allow the agent to abstract from low-level details. Second, the existing methods to train this kind of behaviors are still scarce. This paper contributes with innovative problem-solving methods, specifically in the rewards field. To test alternative approaches, an extended version of the RoboCup's official Soccer Server simulator was used. The results have confirmed the importance of the proposed reward components and their relationship with the episodes' initial conditions.

Abstract