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This chapter describes the development, installation, and operation of a multi-agent system, designated as GRACE, integrating quality and process control to operate in a real home appliance production line, producing laundry washing machines owned by Whirlpool and located in Naples, Italy.

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Worldwide electricity markets have been evolving into regional and even continental scales. The aim at an efficient use of renewable based generation in places where it exceeds the local needs is one of the main reasons. A reference case of this evolution is the European electricity market, where countries are connected, and several regional markets were created, each one grouping several countries, and supporting transactions of huge amounts of electrical energy. However, physical constraints, such as the grid limited capacity, are major setbacks, which make the full European market unification a more distant goal. This paper presents a study that aims at analyzing the capability of the existing European transmission network in accommodating a full unification of the European electricity markets. This study considers the real European transmission network capacities, supporting a unified Pan-European electricity market scenario, which is simulated using the Multi-Agent System for Competitive Electricity Markets.

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Humanoid soccer robots must be able to carry out their tasks in a highly dynamic environment which requires responsive omnidirectional walking. This paper explains a new omnidirectional walking engine for a humanoid soccer robot that mainly consists of a foot planner, a zero moment point (ZMP) trajectory generator, a centre of mass (CoM) calculator and an active balance feedback loop. An analytical approach is presented for generating the CoM trajectory, in which the cart-table motion of the equations is solved using the Fourier approximation of the ZMP. With this approach, we propose using a new time segmentation approach in order to parametrize the double-support phase. An active balance method is also proposed which keeps the robot's trunk upright when faced with environmental disturbances. The walking engine is tested on both simulated and real NAO robots. Our results are encouraging given the fact that the robot performs favourably, walking quickly and in a stable manner in any direction in comparison with the best RoboCup 3D soccer simulation teams for which the same simulator is used. In addition, the proposed analytical Fourier-based approach is compared with the well-established numerical ZMP dynamics control method. Our results show that the presented analytical approach involves less time and complexity and better accuracy compared with the ZMP preview control method.

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