Abstract
Knowledge of the Kalman filter is very important in machine learning since is the basis for understanding more advanced concepts. Towards this end, control and estimation courses should assure the understanding of the concept and its correct application. A tutorial on the design, implementation and test of the KF to denoise the discharge current of a Li-ion cell is presented in this article. The students are also meant to acquire the discharge data used in the case study - Discharge of a Li-ion cell. The Battery Discharger Board is a low cost device to discharge Li-ion cells with a user programmable current discharge profile. The discharge is controlled and monitored by an external microcontroller connected to a host computer that stores and processes the discharge data. This board has been constructed to help students to gain insight into batteries. The current is measured by ACS712 Hall sensors, which are low cost but also very noisy. To de-noise the current measurements two different KF are used with the current being modelled as the state of a first order integrator. In the first approach, the KF assumes that the system is disturbed by process and measurement noises while in the second it only assumes measurement noise, The operation of the discharge board is illustrated in two experiments: (i) one with a constant discharge current and (ii) the other with a pulsed current. In both experiments, the filters performance was very good. Copyright (c) 2023 The Authors.

Abstract
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are increasingly used as cost-effective and flexible Wi-Fi Access Points (APs) and cellular Base Stations (BSs) to enhance Quality of Service (QoS). In disaster management scenarios, UAV-based networks provide on-demand wireless connectivity when traditional infrastructures fail. In obstacle-rich environments like urban areas, reliable high-capacity communications links depend on Line-of-Sight (LoS) availability, especially at higher frequencies. Positioning UAVs to consider obstacles and enable LoS communications represents a promising solution that requires further exploration and development. The main contribution of this paper is the Traffic- and Obstacle-aware UAV Positioning Algorithm (TOPA). TOPA takes into account the users' traffic demand and the need for LoS between the UAV and the ground users in the presence of obstacles. The network performance achieved when using TOPA was evaluated through ns-3 simulations. The results show up to 100% improvement in the aggregate throughput without compromising fairness.

Abstract
Forecasting energy consumption models allow for improvements in building performance and reduce energy consumption. Energy efficiency has become a pressing concern in recent years due to the increasing energy demand and concerns over climate change. This paper addresses the energy consumption forecast as a crucial ingredient in the technology to optimize building system operations and identifies energy efficiency upgrades. The work proposes a modified multi-head transformer model focused on multi-variable time series through a learnable weighting feature attention matrix to combine all input variables and forecast building energy consumption properly. The proposed multivariate transformer-based model is compared with two other recurrent neural network models, showing a robust performance while exhibiting a lower mean absolute percentage error. Overall, this paper highlights the superior performance of the modified transformer-based model for the energy consumption forecast in a multivariate step, allowing it to be incorporated in future forecasting tasks, allowing for the tracing of future energy consumption scenarios according to the current building usage, playing a significant role in creating a more sustainable and energy-efficient building usage.

Abstract
This paper presents an innovative digital platform for managing energy communities with self-consumption and energy trading in a local electricity market. Its architecture is based on micro-services, such as the energy transaction service, the settlement service to compute the financial compensations among community members for the energy transacted, or a resource sizing service. This approach enables the platform to be more efficient and scalable, making easier to incorporate new functionalities while maintaining a secure community and energy transactions management. The transactions and settlement procedures, adapted to the Portuguese regulation, are described, and the results of the platform operating a post-delivery pool market are presented and analyzed. This paper contributes to the understanding and improvement of renewable energy communities' business models and management, offering insights for policymakers, researchers, and practitioners in the field.

Abstract
The resource-constrained project scheduling problem (RCPSP) is a well-known scheduling problem that has attracted attention since several decades. Despite the rapid progress of exact and (meta-)heuristic procedures, the problem can still not be solved to optimality for many problem instances of relatively small size. Due to the known complexity, many researchers have proposed fast and efficient meta-heuristic solution procedures that can solve the problem to near optimality. Despite the excellent results obtained in the last decades, little is known why some heuristics perform better than others. However, if researchers better understood why some meta-heuristic procedures generate good solutions for some project instances while still falling short for others, this could lead to insights to improve these meta-heuristics, ultimately leading to stronger algorithms and better overall solution quality. In this study, a new hardness indicator is proposed to measure the difficulty of providing near-optimal solutions for meta-heuristic procedures. The new indicator is based on a new concept that uses the o-distance metric to describe the solution space of the problem instance, and relies on current knowledge for lower and upper bound calculations for problem instances from five known datasets in the literature. This new indicator, which will be called the o -D indicator, will be used not only to measure the hardness of existing project datasets, but also to generate a new benchmark dataset that can be used for future research purposes. The new dataset contains project instances with different values for the o -D indicator, and it will be shown that the value of the o-distance metric actually describes the difficulty of the project instances through two fast and efficient meta-heuristic procedures from the literature.

Abstract
In this work, the prediction of a time series is formulated as a gaussian process regression, for different levels of noise. The gaussian regressor is translated into lower rank Dynamic Mode Decomposition methods that use kernels (K-DMD) - Kernel regression and Least Squares Support Vector Machines. The presented unified approach delivers an algorithm where the optimisation of the marginal likelihood function can be used to find the parameters of the kernel regression. The viability of the procedure is demonstrated on a chaotic series, with quite good adjustment results being obtained. Copyright (c) 2023 The Authors.