Abstract
The Unit Commitment Problem (UCP) is a well-known combinatorial optimization problem in power systems. The main goal in the UCP is to schedule a subset of a given group of electrical power generating units and also to determine their production output in order to meet energy demands at minimum cost. In addition, a set of technological and operational constraints must be satisfied. A large variety of optimization methods addressing the UCP is available in the literature. This panoply of methods includes exact methods (such as dynamic programming, branch-and-bound) and heuristic methods (tabu search, simulated annealing, particle swarm, genetic algorithms). This paper proposes two non-traditional formulations. First, the UCP is formulated as a mixed-integer optimal control problem with both binary-valued control variables and real-valued control variables. Then, the problem is formulated as a switching time dynamic optimization problem involving only real-valued controls.

Abstract
Software business continues to expand globally, highly motivated by the reachability of the Internet and possibilities of Cloud Computing. While widely adopted, development for the cloud has some intrinsic properties to it, making it complex to any newcomer. This research is capturing those intricacies using a pattern catalog, with this paper contributing with three of those patterns: Messaging System, a message bus for abstracting service placement in a cluster and orchestrating messages between multiple services; Preemptive Logging, a design principle where services and servers continuously output relevant information to log files, making them available for later debugging failures; and Log Aggregation, a technique to aggregate logs from multiple services and servers in a centralized location, which indexes and provides them in a queryable, user friendly format. These patterns are useful for anyone designing software for the cloud, either to guide or validate their design decisions.

Abstract
Autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) are increasingly being used to perform search operations but its capabilities are limited by the efficiency of the planning process. The objective of the paper is to propose new survey planning methods for AUVs. In particular, the problem of multi-objective search mission planning with an AUV navigating in known or unknown 3D environments is studied. The vehicle should completely cover the operating area while maximizing the probability of detecting the targets and minimizing the required energy and time to complete the mission. The approach presented here differs from other CPP methods in that paths for coverage are generated based on a coverage map that is actively maintained as the vehicle executed its mission. Our replanning approach borrows ideas from case-based reasoning (CBR) in which old problem and solution information helps solve a new problem. The resulting combination takes advantage of both paradigms where our evolutionary approach in conjunction with an artificial neural network (ANN), presented earlier, delivers robustness and adaptive learning while the case-based component speeds up the replanning process. The experiments show that the online algorithm was able to successfully replan missions in varied scenarios and guarantee full area coverage while minimizing resource consumption.

Abstract
The most widely used resiliency approach today, based on Checkpoint and Restart (C/R) recovery, is not expected to remain viable in the presence of the accelerated fault and error rates in future Exascale-class systems. In this paper, we introduce a series of pragma directives and the corresponding source-to-source transformations that are designed to convey to a compiler, and ultimately a fault-aware run-time system, key information about the tolerance to memory errors in selected sections of an application. These directives, implemented in the ROSE compiler infrastructure, convey information about storage mapping and error tolerance but also amelioration and recovery using externally provided functions and multi-threading. We present preliminary results of the use of a subset of these directives for a simple implementation of the conjugate-gradient numerical solver in the presence of uncorrected memory errors, showing that it is possible to implement simple recovery strategies with very low programmer effort and execution time overhead. © Springer International Publishing AG 2017.

Abstract
Assessing eco-efficiency of companies is important to ensure the creation of wealth without compromising the needs of future generations. This work aims to extend the eco-efficiency concept by including in the assessment new features related to environmental benefits and environmental burdens. This concept is implemented using an innovative Directional Distance Function model, which searches for improvements in the magnitude of the indicators and in the composition of the resources consumed. This framework can help firms to become more sustainable by replacing non-renewable inputs with "greener" alternatives. We present an empirical application to large mining companies. Different scenarios regarding managerial priorities for adjustments to firms' economic and environmental indicators are explored. The results obtained and their managerial implications are discussed in the context of mining firms activity.

Abstract
The growth of wireless networks has resulted in part from requirements for connecting people and advances in radio technologies. Wireless sensor networks are an example of these networks in which a large number of tiny devices interacting with their environments may be internet-worked together and accessible through the Internet. As these devices may be scattered in an unplanned way, a routing protocol is needed. The RPL protocol is the IETF proposed standard protocol for IPv6-based multi-hop WSN. RPL requires that communication paths go through a central router which may provide suboptimal paths, not considering the characteristics of the applications the nodes run. In this paper is proposed an Application-Driven extension to RPL which enables to increase the WSN lifetime by limiting the routing and forwarding functions of the network mainly to nodes running the same application. As nodes may join a network at a non predictable time, they must be synchronized with respect to their application duty cycles. Therefore, nodes have to wake up and sleep in a synchronized way. In this paper it is also proposed such synchronization mechanism. The results confirm that the proposed solutions provide lower energy consumption and lower number of packets exchanged than the conventional RPL solution, while maintaining fairness and the packet reception ratio high.