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Publications

2025

A Container-Native IAM Framework for Secure Green Mobility: A Case Study with Keycloak and Kubernetes

Authors
Sousa, A; Branco, F; Reis, A; Reis, MJCS;

Publication
INFORMATION

Abstract
The rapid adoption of green mobility solutions-such as electric-vehicle sharing and intelligent transportation systems-has accelerated the integration of Internet of Things (IoT) technologies, introducing complex security and performance challenges. While conceptual Identity and Access Management (IAM) frameworks exist, few are empirically validated for the scale, heterogeneity, and real-time demands of modern mobility ecosystems. This work presents a data-backed, container-native reference architecture for secure and resilient Authentication, Authorization, and Accounting (AAA) in green mobility environments. The framework integrates Keycloak within a Kubernetes-orchestrated infrastructure and applies Zero Trust and defense-in-depth principles. Effectiveness is demonstrated through rigorous benchmarking across latency, throughput, memory footprint, and automated fault recovery. Compared to a monolithic baseline, the proposed architecture achieves over 300% higher throughput, 90% faster startup times, and 75% lower idle memory usage while enabling full service restoration in under one minute. This work establishes a validated deployment blueprint for IAM in IoT-driven transportation systems, offering a practical foundation for a secure and scalable mobility infrastructure.

2025

Simulating Degradation Costs in Li-ion Batteries Dispatch: Impacts on Planning and operational strategies

Authors
Agrela, João Carlos; Tiago, Abreu; Silva, Ricardo; Soares, Tiago; Gouveia, Clara;

Publication

Abstract
Grid scale Battery Energy Storage Systems (BESS) have a key role for future power systems operation and stability. However, cyclic degradation, intensified by multi-service operation, remains a major challenge, directly affecting battery lifespan and profitability. This study examines BESS participation in energy markets and in automatic frequency restoration reserve (aFRR) markets, assessing the impact of cyclic degradation costs on BESS planning and operation. The methodology involved modelling the daily dispatch of an 8.1 MW lithium-ion battery for participation in day-ahead, intraday and reserve markets, incorporating a degradation cost minimization model. The simulations were conducted using the historical data from Iberian electricity and Portuguese ancillary services market, such as energy prices, historical reserve requirements and AGC forecasts. The results show that reserve market participation is highly profitable and can be successfully complemented with day-ahead and intraday market participation. Also, incorporating cyclic degradation cost into planning extends BESS lifespan in all cases. However, this approach is beneficial only in arbitrage scenarios, while in reserve market participation, it reduces profits. The findings highlight the importance of balancing BESS degradation minimization with profitability, particularly in reserve market participation. Future research could apply this model to different battery technologies and real-world systems to validate the simulated results.

2025

Speed Control of Switched Reluctance Motor with Torque Ripple Reduction Based on Super-Twisting Sliding Mode Control

Authors
Touati, Z; Araújo, RE;

Publication
IFAC PAPERSONLINE

Abstract
In this paper, a robust nonlinear Super-Twisting Sliding Mode Controller (STSMC) is proposed to minimize torque ripple in Switched Reluctance Motor (SRM) drive systems, thereby reducing acoustic noise and vibration. To optimize torque ripple, the firing angles (theta(on) and theta(off)) are dynamically adjusted based on the instantaneous torque and speed error. To demonstrate its superiority, the performance of the STSMC is compared with conventional linear and Sliding Mode Control (SMC) regulators. The results confirm the robustness and effectiveness of the proposed controller. The torque ripple with PSO-optimized firing angles and STSMC is reduced by around 50% compared to conventional fixed switching angles. Copyright (c) 2025 The Authors. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/)

2025

Inclusive Interactions for Place-Belongingness: Lessons fron Citizen Science

Authors
Mohseni, H; Silvennoinen, JM; Correia, A;

Publication
IUI Workshops

Abstract
The active involvement of marginalized and vulnerable groups such as migrants and newly arrived refugees in the development of local communities has been part of many agendas across the EU and around the world. Despite the lessons gleaned from more than three decades of IUI research, there is still a shortage of systematic understanding and concrete guidance on how to design more socially inclusive and culturally sensitive interfaces targeted to these populations. In this paper, we argue that community-based citizen science approaches hold the potential to foster people-place bonds and inform the design of inclusive interactions since these initiatives are typically open to a wide audience regardless of race, ethnicity, gender, and education. From portable environmental monitoring devices to open databases providing place-related data about species observations and environmental threats, citizen scientists have a socially transformative and place-development potential that is often overlooked from an interaction design perspective. This research investigates this gap by examining digital interactions in citizen science through a systematic literature review addressing interaction possibilities for digitally enhanced place-belongingness. The results indicate three interaction themes within citizen science literature contributing to digitally enhanced sense of place-belonginess: place awareness and involvement, experience sharing, and collaboration encouragement. In addition, we found that the inclusivity goals in citizen science initiatives typically vary from urban and rural development to cultural purposes and environmental engagement and conservation. The interaction themes, along with the negative impacts of digital technologies, are discussed regarding their potential to inform technology design for place-belongingness in HCI.

2025

A Metamodel for Reengineering CI/CD Pipelines

Authors
da Giao, H; Amaral, V; Engels, G; Flores, A; Pereira, R; Sauer, S; Cunha, J;

Publication
2025 ACM/IEEE 28TH INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON MODEL DRIVEN ENGINEERING LANGUAGES AND SYSTEMS, MODELS

Abstract
In the realm of industrial software development, DevOps has emerged as the preferred approach for handling the highly iterative software production process. DevOps refers to the tight integration of development and operations activities, with Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery, and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) being pivotal methodologies for ensuring the iterative delivery of high-quality software. To achieve CI/CD, pipelines of activities are deployed using commercial tools. Due to the dynamic nature of these tools, CI/CD pipelines are often migrated to new versions or even new tools. Since this is mostly a manual process, it is a cumbersome and error-prone activity. To assist software engineers during this process, we propose a novel approach that leverages model-driven engineering (MDE) to support the migration of CI/CD pipelines. Our approach is inspired by the traditional reengineering horseshoe model, which abstracts existing pipeline artifacts into a comprehensive model as an intermediate representation. From these models, we can then generate semantic-equivalent pipelines for any novel CI/CD tool. Thus, our main contribution comprises a metamodel designed to represent the structure of existing CI/CD pipelines and build the foundation for MDE-based migration of CI/CD pipelines. We validated our metamodel by successfully modeling 400 existing pipelines. This evaluation demonstrated a 100% applicability rate when applied to configuration files from technologies that collectively account for over 92% of CI/CD scripts in use. Furthermore, we conducted a detailed case study demonstrating the practical applicability of our approach in real-world migration scenarios. Finally, we demonstrate that our metamodel promotes equivalence between an original pipeline and a new one generated from it in a different technology by showing through test cases that the execution traces of both pipelines are identical.

2025

Deep Learning Meets InSAR for Infrastructure Monitoring: A Systematic Review of Models, Applications, and Challenges

Authors
Fontes, M; Bakon, M; Cunha, A; Sousa, JJ;

Publication
SENSORS

Abstract
Monitoring civil infrastructure is increasingly critical due to aging assets, urban expansion, and the need for early detection of structural instabilities. Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) offers high-resolution, all-weather surface deformation monitoring capabilities, which are being enhanced by recent advances in Deep Learning (DL). Despite growing interest, the existing literature lacks a comprehensive synthesis of how DL models are applied specifically to infrastructure monitoring using InSAR data. This review addresses this gap by systematically analyzing 67 peer-reviewed articles published between 2020 and February 2025. We examine the DL architectures employed, ranging from LSTMs and CNNs to Transformer-based and hybrid models, and assess their integration within various stages of the InSAR monitoring pipeline, including pre-processing, temporal analysis, segmentation, prediction, and risk classification. Our findings reveal a predominance of LSTM and CNN-based approaches, limited exploration of pre-processing tasks, and a focus on urban and linear infrastructures. We identify methodological challenges such as data sparsity, low coherence, and lack of standard benchmarks, and we highlight emerging trends including hybrid architectures, attention mechanisms, end-to-end pipelines, and data fusion with exogenous sources. The review concludes by outlining key research opportunities, such as enhancing model explainability, expanding applications to underexplored infrastructure types, and integrating DL-InSAR workflows into operational structural health monitoring systems.

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