Abstract
Autonomous vehicles are becoming a reality that in the next future will most probably start populating everyday roads. Such vehicles can, on the one hand, increase safety through automated driving, and, on the other, be a means of transportation also for people with disabilities who cannot move alone on commercial cars. Within this class of vehicles, mechanical layouts that allow an actuator redundancy coupled with electric propulsion appear particularly interesting, as they make it possible to design motion controller that can optimally blend multiple objectives, both dynamic, safety and driver-oriented. This paper considers such setting and concentrates on the design of a path-following algorithm with minimum-time features, with the aim of combining performance and energy-oriented optimization of the vehicle motion. The effectiveness of the approach is assessed by means of simulation tests carried out on the CarSim vehicle simulation environment. © IFAC.

Abstract
Drivers routing decisions can be influenced to minimize environmental impacts by using, for instance, dynamic and intelligent road pricing schemes. However, some previous research studies have shown that often different pollutants can dictate different traffic assignment strategies which makes necessary to assign weights to these pollutants so they become comparable. In this chapter, a tool for traffic assignment taking into account eco-routing purposes is presented. The main goal of this work is to identify the best traffic volume distribution that allows a minimization of environmental costs for a given corridor with predetermined different alternative routes. To achieve this, an integrated numerical computing platform was developed by integrating microscopic traffic and emission models. The optimization tool employs non-linear techniques to perform different traffic assignment methods: User Equilibrium (UE), System Optimum (SO) and System Equitable (SE). For each method, different strategies can be assessed considering: (i) individual pollutants and traffic performance criteria; and (ii) all pollutants simultaneously. For the latter case, three different optimization approaches can be assessed based on: (i) economic costs of pollutants once released into the air; (ii) human health impacts according to the Eco-Indicator 99; and (iii) real time atmospheric pollutant concentration levels. The model was applied to a simple network, simulating three levels of traffic demand and three different strategies for traffic assignment. The system is developed in Microsoft Excel and offers a user friendly access to optimization algorithms by including a dynamic user interface. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014.

Abstract
In the recent years, it has been confirmed both by theory and by practice that organisational models need to include networking strategies to cope with the current competitive environment. Different collaboration levels can characterise supply chains, virtual organisations (VO) and business communities; however, managing different networking scenarios is extremely important to allow SMEs to respond to market opportunities, ensuring a quick response, unique products with competitive prices and high product quality. This paper proposes an innovative methodological approach to support collaboration amongst SMEs for customised product design and manufacturing based on the VO concept. The work is based on mapping the methodology with the most important processes characterising the life of a VO and defining the operative practices to be performed within this type of network. This paper presents two case studies in the fashion industry, where the proposed approach for network management was tested and analysed.

Abstract
The huge amount of online information deprives the user to keep up with his/hers interests and preferences, Recommender Systems appeared to solve this problem, by employing social behavioural paradigms in order to recommend potentially interesting items to users, Among the several kinds of Recommender Systems, one of the most mature and most used in real world applications are known as Collaborative Filtering. These methods recommend items based on the preferences of similar-users, using only a user-item rating matrix. In this pa™ per we explain a methodology to use Multi™Agent based simulation to study the evolution of the data rating matrix and its effect on the performance of several Collaborative Filtering algorithms. Our results show that the best performing methods are user-based and item-based Collaborative Filtering and that the average algorithm performance is surprisingly constant for different rating schemes.

Abstract
This paper discusses mechanisms for establishing an efficient decentralized methodology for the reconstruction of topology in power systems. The maximum mutual information criterion is proposed as a selection criterion for the inputs of a distributed topology estimator, based on mosaic of local auto-associative neural networks. The proposed concepts offer some strong theoretical support for an information theoretic perspective on power system state estimation. The results are confirmed by extensive tests conducted on the IEEE RTS 24-bus system.

Abstract
Contextual factors allow us to fully grasp an event, situation, communication process or action. Frequently, the context in which an event takes place provides more valuable information than the event itself. This chapter addresses context and its importance from a general perspective and in the particular domain of conflict resolution. It describes many different contextual dimensions such as the verbal, social or cultural, pointing out the importance of each one to understand individuals’ actions. It then moves on to the address the recent field of Context-aware Computing: the vision of computers that are sensible to contextual cues, harness it and use such information to provide better services. Several context-aware solutions are described in this chapter that point out the range of application domains. However, no such application exists in the domain of conflict resolution. While the next chapters are dedicated do describing the components of such an application, this chapter ends with the enumeration of several contextual dimensions that are of relevance to fully describe a conflict and its resolution process.