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.

Abstract
Several concurrent applications running on a sensor network may cause a node to transmit packets at distinct periods, which increases the radio-switching rate and has significant impact in terms of the overall energy consumption. We propose to batch the transmissions together by defining a harmonizing period to align the transmissions from multiple applications at periodic boundaries. This harmonizing period is then leveraged to design a distributed protocol called Network-Harmonized Scheduling (NHS) that coordinates transmissions across nodes and provides real-time guarantees in a multi-hop network. Categories and Subject Descriptors-C. 3 [Computer Systems Organization]: Special-purpose and Application-Based Systems: Real-time and embedded systems

Abstract