Abstract
Incorporating renewables in the power grid presents challenges for stability, reliability, and operational efficiency. Integrating energy storage systems (ESSs) offers a solution by managing unpredictable loads, enhancing reliability, and serving the grid. Hybrid storage solutions have gained attention for specific applications, suggesting higher performance in some respects. This article compares the performance of hybrid energy storage systems (HESSs) to a single battery, evaluating their energy supply cost and environmental impact through optimization problems. The optimization model is based on a MILP incorporating the energy and degradation terms. It generates an optimized dispatch, minimizing cost or environmental impact of supplying energy to a generic load. Seven technologies are assessed, with an example applied to an industrial site combining a vanadium redox flow battery (VRFB) and lithium battery considering the demand of a local load (building). The results indicate that efficiency and degradation curves have the highest impact in the final costs and environmental functions on the various storage technologies assessed. For the simulations of the example case, a single system only outperforms the hybrid system in cases where lithium efficiency is higher than approximately 87% and vanadium is lower approximately 82%.

Abstract

Abstract
A growing number of organizations are adopting a strategy of breaking down large data analysis problems into specific sub-problems, tailoring models for each. However, handling a large number of individual models can pose challenges in understanding organization-wide phenomena. Recent studies focus on using decision trees to create a consensus model by aggregating local decision trees into sets of rules. Despite efforts, the resulting models may still be incomplete, i.e., not able to cover the entire decision space. This paper explores methodologies to tackle this issue by generating complete consensus models from incomplete rule sets, relying on rough estimates of the distribution of independent variables. Two approaches are introduced: synthetic dataset creation followed by decision tree training and a specialized algorithm for creating a decision tree from symbolic data. The feasibility of generating complete decision trees is demonstrated, along with an empirical evaluation on a number of datasets.

Abstract
The development of technologies to enable robots to operate autonomously in challenging forest environments is crucial for promoting effective natural resource management and preventing forest fires, standing out as a priority on environmental conservation and public safety agendas. This article presents a detailed discussion on the development of an innovative sensory architecture, specifically designed to integrate a wide range of advanced sensors. The main objective of this architecture is to provide highly accurate inputs to a system, thereby empowering a forest robot to make autonomous and adaptive decisions in real-time. To achieve this ambitious goal, the proposed sensory architecture defines a comprehensive set of crucial variables, which are carefully selected and strategically integrated. This design results in a distributed system capable of processing multiple subsystems in parallel and efficiently. This innovative approach enables the conversion of a conventional forest mulcher machine into a fully autonomous and highly intelligent forest robot. Furthermore, the article details the procedures and methodologies used to experimentally validate the robustness and effectiveness of the developed system. Through rigorous testing and comprehensive analyses, the system's ability to handle a variety of adverse environmental conditions and typical operational challenges in forest environments is demonstrated. These experimental validations are essential to ensure the reliability and accuracy of the system in real-world situations. © 2024, International Frequency Sensor Association (IFSA). All rights reserved.

Abstract
This paper proposes to extend the fast-decoupled state estimation formulation to bring its well-known efficiency and benefits to the processing of networks with embedded FACTS devices. The proposed method approaches shunt-, series-, and shunt -series -type devices. The controller parameters are included as new active or reactive state variables, while controlled quantity values are included in the metering scheme of the decoupled approach. From the electrical model adopted for each device, the extended formulation is presented, and a modified fast-decoupled method is devised, seeking to ensure accuracy and impart robustness to the iterative solution. Simulation results conducted throughout the IEEE 30 -bus test system with distinct types of FACTS devices are used to validate and evaluate the performance of the proposed decoupled approaches.

Abstract
In the past three decades, an impressive body of knowledge has been built around secure and private password authentication. In particular, secure password-authenticated key exchange (PAKE) protocols require only minimal overhead over a classical Diffie-Hellman key exchange. PAKEs are also known to fulfill strong composable security guarantees that capture many password-specific concerns such as password correlations or password mistyping, to name only a few. However, to enjoy both round-optimality and strong security, applications of PAKE protocols must provide unique session and participant identifiers. If such identifiers are not readily available, they must be agreed upon at the cost of additional communication flows, a fact which has been met with incomprehension among practitioners, and which hindered the adoption of provably secure password authentication in practice. In this work, we resolve this issue by proposing a new paradigm for truly password-only yet securely composable PAKE, called bare PAKE. We formally prove that two prominent PAKE protocols, namely CPace and EKE, can be cast as bare PAKEs and hence do not require pre-agreement of anything else than a password. Our bare PAKE modeling further allows to investigate a novel reusability property of PAKEs, i.e., whether n(2) pairwise keys can be exchanged from only n messages, just as the Diffie-Hellman non-interactive key exchange can do in a public-key setting. As a side contribution, this add-on property of bare PAKEs leads us to observe that some previous PAKE constructions relied on unnecessarily strong, reusable building blocks. By showing that non-reusable tools suffice for standard PAKE, we open a new path towards round-optimal post-quantum secure password-authenticated key exchange.