Abstract
With the constant increment of wind power generation driven by economic and environmental factors, the optimal utilization of generation resources has become a critical problem discussed by many authors. Within this topic, determination of optimal spinning reserve (SR) requirements is a key and complex issue due to the variable and unpredictable nature of renewable generation besides of generation unit reliability. Cost/benefit relationship has been suggested as a way to determine the optimal amount of power generation to be committed by taking into account renewable power forecasting error and system reliability. In this paper, a technique that combines an analytical convolution process with Monte Carlo Simulation (MCS) approach is proposed to efficiently build cost/benefit relationship. The proposed method uses discrete probability theory and identifies those cases at which convolution analysis can be used by recognizing those situations at which SR does not have any effect; while in the other cases MCS is applied. This approach allows improving significantly the computational efficiency. The proposed technique is illustrated by means of two case studies of 10 and 140 units, demonstrating the capabilities and flexibility of the proposed methodology.

Abstract
The alignment of the information technology implementation with the ever-changing business strategies in an enterprise drives modernization of the legacy system. However, the existing modernization contexts have not adequately addressed the focus of customer experience and service-orientation within the SaaS system development. This paper investigates the modernization process of legacy system into SaaS system using services concept through multidisciplinary approach. Several best practices are discussed to propose the Service-Oriented Modernization Framework (SOMF) which involves the maturity model for evolution roadmap identification, the service-oriented SaaS reference architecture, and the User-Centered Service-Oriented Software Reengineering (UCSOSR) methodology. An industrial case study is demonstrated by applying the framework to develop the public transport document generator as a service. The modernization process described in the framework provides a comprehensive and systematic guideline in developing a scalable system. In conclusion, this research, by integrating service analysis and design with SOA towards the SaaS modernization, enables the creation of an agile business model to achieve competitive advantages.

Abstract

Abstract
While bottom-up approaches to object recognition are simple to design and implement, they do not yield the same performance as top-down approaches. On the other hand, it is not trivial to obtain a moderate number of plausible hypotheses to be efficiently verified by top-down approaches. To address these shortcomings, we propose a hybrid top-down bottom-up approach to object recognition where a bottom-up procedure that generates a set of hypothesis based on data is combined with a top-down process for evaluating those hypotheses. We use the recognition of rectangular cuboid shaped objects from 3D point cloud data as a benchmark problem for our research. Results obtained using this approach demonstrate promising recognition performances.

Abstract
Model-checking is increasingly popular in the early phases of the software development process. To establish the correctness of a software design one must usually verify both structural and behavioral(or temporal) properties. Unfortunately, most specification languages, and accompanying model-checkers, excel only in analyzing either one or the other kind. This limits their ability to verify dynamic systems with rich configurations: systems whose state space is characterized by rich structural properties, but whose evolution is also expected to satisfy certain temporal properties. To address this problem, we first propose Electrum, an extension of the Alloy specification language with temporal logic operators, where both rich configurations and expressive temporal properties can easily be de fined. Two alternative model-checking techniques are then proposed, one bounded and the other unbounded, to verify systems expressed in this language, namely to verify that every desirable temporal property holds for every possible configuration.

Abstract
Buffer caching mechanisms are paramount to improve the performance of today's massive scale NoSQL databases. In this work, we show that in fact there is a direct and univocal relationship between the resource usage and the cache hit ratio in NoSQL databases. In addition, this relationship can be leveraged to build a mechanism that is able to estimate resource usage of the nodes composing the NoSQL cluster.