Abstract
Competitive transactions resulting from recent restructuring of the electricity market, have made achieving a precise and reliable load forecasting, especially probabilistic load forecasting, an important topic. Hence, this paper presents a novel hybrid method of probabilistic electricity load forecasting, including generalized extreme learning machine fin- training an improved wavelet neural network, wavelet preprocessing and bootstrapping. In the proposed method, the forecasting model and data noise uncertainties are taken into account while the output of the model is the load probabilistic interval. In order to validate the method, it is implemented on the Ontario and Australian electricity markets data. Also, in order to remove the influence of model parameters and data on performance validation, Friedman and post-hoc tests, which are non-parametric tests, are applied to the proposed method. The results demonstrate the high performance, accuracy, and reliability of the proposed method.

Abstract
This paper presents the analysis of a novel framework of study and the impact of different market design criterion for the generation expansion planning (GEP) in competitive electricity market incentives, under variable uncertainties in a single year horizon. As investment incentives conventionally consist of firm contracts and capacity payments, in this study, the electricity generation investment problem is considered from a strategic generation company (GENCO)'s perspective, modelled as a bi-level optimization method. The first-level includes decision steps related to investment incentives to maximize the total profit in the planning horizon. The second-level includes optimization steps focusing on maximizing social welfare when the electricity market is regulated for the current horizon. In addition, variable uncertainties, on offering and investment, are modelled using set of different scenarios. The bi-level optimization problem is then converted to a single-level problem and then represented as a mixed integer linear program (MILP) after linearization. The efficiency of the proposed framework is assessed on the MAZANDARAN regional electric company (MREC) transmission network, integral to IRAN interconnected power system for both elastic and inelastic demands. Simulations show the significance of optimizing the firm contract and the capacity payment that encourages the generation investment for peak technology and improves long-term stability of electricity markets.

Abstract
The use of robotic palletizing systems has been increasing in the so-called Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) industry. However, because of the type of solutions developed, focused on high performance and efficiency, the degree of adaptability of packaging solutions from one type of product to another is extremely low. This is a relevant problem, since companies are changing their production processes from low variety/high volume to high variety/low volume. This environment requires companies to perform the setup of their robots more frequently, which has been leading to the need to use offline programming tools that decrease the required robot stop time. This work addresses these problems and, in this paper, is described the solution proposed for the automated offline development of collision free robot programs for palletizing applications. © Springer International Publishing AG 2018.

Abstract

Abstract
Most current customer baseline load (CBL) estimation methods for incentive-based demand response (DR) rely heavily on historical data and are unable to adapt to the cases when the load patterns (LPs) in the DR event day are not similar enough to those in non-DR days. After the error generation mechanism of current methods is revealed, a synchronous pattern matching principle-based residential CBL estimation approach without historical data requirement is proposed. All customers are split into DR and CONTROL group, including DR participants and non-DR customers, respectively. First, all CONTROL group customers are clustered into several non-overlapping clusters according to LPs similarity in the DR event day. Second, each DR participant is matched to the most similar cluster in the CONTROL group according to the similarity between its load curve segments in DR event day, excluding DR part and cluster centroids. Third, the CBL of each DR participant is estimated with an optimized weight combination method using the load data within the DR event period of all the customers in the very matching cluster in the CONTROL group. A comparison with five well-known CBL estimation methods using a dataset of 736 residential customers indicates that the proposed approach has better overall performance than other current CBL estimation methods.

Abstract
Scheduling jobs on a set of identical parallel machines using efficient heuristics when the objective is to minimize total weighted squared tardiness is considered. Two efficient heuristics and an improvement procedure are presented for the problem. These heuristics and other heuristics are tested using problem sets that represent a variety of conditions. The results show that one of the heuristics consistently performs better than the other heuristics tested. It is also shown how these heuristics can be incorporated into other procedures such as the existing Lagrangian relaxation procedure or meta-heuristics to obtain improved solutions for medium sized problems.