Abstract
Robotic platforms are being developed for precision agriculture, to execute repetitive and long term tasks. Autonomous monitoring, pruning, spraying and harvesting are some of these agricultural tasks, which requires an advanced path planning system aware of maximum robot capabilities (mobile platform and arms), terrain slopes and plant/fruits position. The state of the art path planning systems have two limitations: are not optimized for large regions and the path planning is not aware of agricultural tasks requirements. This work presents two solutions to overcome these limitations. It considers the VGR2TO (Vineyard Grid Map to Topological) approach to extract from a 2D grid map a topological map, to reduce the total amount of memory needed by the path planning algorithm and to reduce path search space. Besides, introduces an extension to the chosen algorithm, the Astar algorithm, to ensure a safe path and a maximum distance from the vine trees to enable robotic operations on the tree and its fruits.

Abstract
The photogrammetry, 3D reconstruction from images, is an old technique but it's potentials could only be seen after the development of computers and digital photographs. Nowadays it has many applications, as creating scenarios for games, acquiring human expressions, roof inspection, stockpile measurement, high voltage transformer inspection, etc. As new technologies appear, new applications to photogrammetry are created. In this paper the use of available open and closed-source algorithms for 3D reconstruction and texturization is investigated. To achieve this goal, images of a fountain from several points-of-view were used. Next a comparison between several open and closed-source algorithms was performed, evaluating the number of faces, time consumption, RAM memory, GPU memory and the generated textured 3D models. The results obtained demonstrate that with the right setup, current open-source algorithms can achieve results near or better than proprietary software. Regarding the comparison, 3Dflow and MeshRecon presented the most accurate textured 3D models. When comparing quantitative measures, though, MeshRecon presented a slightly better performance in time consumption, but 3Dflow had a better RAM memory usage and a lower quantity of faces with a similar level of details. © 2019 IEEE.

Abstract
Recently, demand response programmes (DRPs) have captured great attention in electric power systems. DRPs such as time-of-use (ToU) programme can be efficiently employed in the power system planning to reform the long-term behaviour of the load demands. The composite generation expansion planning (GEP) and transmission expansion planning (TEP) known as composite GEP–TEP is of high significance in power systems to meet the future load demand of the system and also integrate renewable energy sources (RESs). In this regard, this study presents a dynamic optimisation framework for the composite GEP–TEP problem taking into consideration the ToU programme and also, the incentive-based and supportive programmes. Accordingly, the performances of the capacity payment and feed-in tariff mechanisms and the ToU programme in integrating RESs and reducing the total cost have been evaluated in this study. The problem has been formulated and solved as a standard two-stage mixed-integer linear programming model aimed at minimising the total costs. In this model, the ToU programme is applied and the results are fed into the expansion planning problem as the input. The proposed framework is simulated on the IEEE Reliability Test System to verify the effectiveness of the model and discuss the results obtained from implementing the mentioned mechanisms to support the RESs integration.

Abstract
The domain of Production Planning and Control, or in a broader sence Production Management has been deserving a special and increasing attention by the companies, which intend to continuously achieve better results through continuous improvement, which also fits in the context of Industry 4.0. Companies tend to implement management systems with the purpose of achieving greater competitiveness and, consequently, greater sustainability in their sector. The selection of the appropriate production management system is a serious problem for the companies. The main objective of this study is to support companies in the correct choice of a Decision Support System. The method used to achieve the proposed objective consists on formulating a model for comparing functionalities and specifications, where selection of criteria were also defined and analyzed. Based on a large Company scenario, the model is applied to three production execution systems: SAP PP (Systems Applications and Products - Production Planning), Prodsmart and GenSYS. © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019.

Abstract
Social networks have an evolving characteristic due to the continuous interaction between users, with nodes associating and disassociating with each other as time flies. The analysis of such networks is especially challenging, because it needs to be performed with an online approach, under the one-pass constraint of data streams. Such evolving behavior leads to changes in the network topology that can be investigated under different perspectives. In this work we focus on the analysis of nodes position evolution—a node-centric perspective. Our goal is to spot change-points in an evolving network at which a node deviates from its normal behavior. Therefore, we propose a change detection model for processing evolving network streams which employs three different aggregating mechanisms for tracking the evolution of centrality metrics of a node. Our model is space and time efficient with memory less mechanisms and in other mechanisms at most we require the network of current time step T only. Additionally, we also compare the influence on different centralities’ fluctuations by the dynamics of real-world preferences. Consecutively, we apply our model in the user preference change detection task, reaching competitive levels of accuracy on Twitter network. © 2019, Springer International Publishing AG, part of Springer Nature.

Abstract