Abstract
The smart grids represent a new and attracting challenge for various research areas. The inclusion of information technologies across the entire electrical grid creates new capacities, with impact on the environment, science and technology, economy and lifestyle. Creation of a smart grid provides utilities and their customers a significant improvement in power reliability and services. This paper presents an overview of smart grid technologies focusing on its characteristics, benefits and challenges. Moreover, this paper reviews the reliability impacts of the major smart grid resources such as renewables, demand response and storage. The main differences between a traditional grid and a smart grid, the trends in the evolution of power distribution systems and the highlights of smart grid segments and applications are also presented. Smart Grids represent one of the great challenges at the global level. Under the effect of political and societal pressure due to climate change and pollution concerns, and enabled by availability of new technologies, the electrical power systems are undergoing reconsideration. Including the technology of information in the whole electric grid creates new capabilities with strong impact in the environment, science and technology, but also in the economy and life in general. The term "smart grid" describes the evolution of the electrical grids and reflects a change of paradigm in the electric market organization and management. Some changes are already on the way to be implemented, such as a growth of the renewable fraction of the generating power, some other are envisioned, such as the fully flexible energy routing or the consumer driven distribution. From a global perspective, implementing smart grids at a large scale will definitely improve the services that supply electrical energy in the future. In recent years, electrical grids have been faced with an increasing concentration of distortion loads that generate distortion, causing both current and voltage harmonic distortions. The impact of these loads increases as their power approaches the power capacity of the grid.

Abstract
Small sections of suspended twin-core fiber are used in reflection configurations to create two parallel Fabry-Perot cavities. Situations where both cores are excited and where only one core is excited are analyzed and compared. When both cores are excited, two parallel and equivalent cavities are formed and an interference pattern with higher visibility is obtained. The structure is also characterized with respect to temperature and a sensitivity of 12.4 pm/K is achieved.

Abstract
The synthesis and mapping of applications to configurable embedded systems is a notoriously complex process. Design-flows typically include tools that have a wide range of parameters which interact in very unpredictable ways, thus creating a large and complex design space. When exploring this space, designers must manage the interfaces between different tools and apply, often manually, a sequence of tool-specific transformations making design exploration extremely cumbersome and error-prone. This paper describes the use of techniques inspired by aspect-oriented technology and scripting languages for defining and exploring hardware compilation strategies. In particular, our approach allows developers to control all stages of a hardware/software compilation and synthesis toolchain: from code transformations and compiler optimizations to placement and routing for tuning the performance of application kernels. Our approach takes advantage of an integrated framework which provides a transparent and unified view over toolchains, their data output and the control of their execution. We illustrate the use of our approach when designing application-specific hardware architectures generated by a toolchain composed of high-level source-code transformation and synthesis tools. The results show the impact of various strategies when targeting custom hardware and expose the complexities in devising these strategies, hence highlighting the productivity benefits of this approach.

Abstract
In this research we represent the major elements of the Theory of Constraints (TOC) in a services environment, specifically for the banking sector, and we analyze the factors involved in the decision to adopt the TOC by companies in this sector. It was identified that the four elements of the TOC theory, throughput, inventory, operating expenses and constraints, correspond to, respectively, the money coming from financial services rendered, the money required to generate this profit, the money to fund the expenses, and the limitations to the normal activity. Regarding the constraints, the most common are mainly administrative (regulations and policies) and the lack of technological resources associated to the scarcity of capital flow and the environment imposed by the state of the economy at a specific time. The main factors that influence the decision to adopt the TOC by the banking sector reside, first, in the tool's current level of development; second, in the nature and the characteristics of the banking service that are very far from the original industrial reality and, finally, in organizational factors such as the attitude towards change, the leadership of the administration and the commitment of the entire institution.

Abstract
We found the self-similar solitary solutions of a recently proposed model for the propagation of pulses in gas-filled hollow-core photonic crystal fibers that includes a plasma induced nonlinearity. As anticipated for a simpler model and using a perturbation analysis, there are indeed stationary solitary waves that accelerate and self-shift to higher frequencies. However, if the plasma nonlinearity strength is large or the pulse amplitudes are small, the solutions have distinguished long tails and decay as they propagate.

Abstract
Recently, regulating mechanisms of branching morphogenesis of fetal lung rat explants have been an essential tool for molecular research. The development of accurate and reliable segmentation techniques may be essential to improve research outcomes. This work presents an image processing method to measure the perimeter and area of lung branches on fetal rat explants. The algorithm starts by reducing the noise corrupting the image with a pre-processing stage. The outcome is input to a watershed operation that automatically segments the image into primitive regions. Then, an image pixel is selected within the lung explant epithelial, allowing a region growing between neighbouring watershed regions. This growing process is controlled by a statistical distribution of each region. When compared with manual segmentation, the results show the same tendency for lung development. High similarities were harder to obtain in the last two days of culture, due to the increased number of peripheral airway buds and complexity of lung architecture. However, using semiautomatic measurements, the standard deviation was lower and the results between independent researchers were more coherent.