Abstract
The study of Electricity Markets operation has been gaining an increasing importance in the last years, as result of the new challenges that the restructuring produced. Currently, lots of information concerning Electricity Markets is available, as market operators provide, after a period of confidentiality, data regarding market proposals and transactions. These data can be used as source of knowledge, to define realistic scenarios, essential for understanding and forecast Electricity Markets behaviour. The development of tools able to extract, transform, store and dynamically update data, is of great importance to go a step further into the comprehension of Electricity Markets and the behaviour of the involved entities. In this paper we present an adaptable tool capable of downloading, parsing and storing data from market operators’ websites, assuring actualization and reliability of stored data.

Abstract
In this paper we analyze some of the existing solutions for Message-Oriented Middleware (MOM), which can be used on industrial environments, and that are, at the same time, capable of handling large quantities of data and of providing adequate Quality-of-Service (QoS) levels for its supported applications. We also make a proposal for the generic structure of a middleware layer supported on a MOM. © 2013 IEEE.

Abstract
An increasing number of real-time embedded applications present high computation requirements which need to be realized within strict time constraints. Simultaneously, architectures are becoming more and more heterogeneous, programming models are having difficulty in scaling or stepping outside of a particular domain, and programming such solutions requires detailed knowledge of the system and the skills of an experienced programmer. In this context, this paper advocates the transparent integration of a parallel and distributed execution framework, capable of meeting real-time constraints, based on OpenMP programming model, and using MPI as the distribution mechanism. The paper also introduces our modified implementation of GCC compiler, enabled to support such parallel and distributed computations, which is evaluated through a real implementation. This evaluation gives important hints, towards the development of the parallel/distributed fork-join framework for supporting real-time embedded applications.

Abstract
The ENCOURAGE project tionalizing energy usage in building by implementing a smart energy grid based on intelligent scheduling of energy consuming appliances, renewable energy production, and inter-building energy trading. This paper presents the reference architecture proposed in the context of the ENCOURAGE project, and relates it with the goals of its research efforts.

Abstract
Classical lock-based concurrency control does not scale with current and foreseen multi-core architectures, opening space for alternative concurrency control mechanisms. The concept of transactions executing concurrently in isolation with an underlying mechanism maintaining a consistent system state was already explored in fault-tolerant and distributed systems, and is currently being explored by transactional memory, this time being used to manage concurrent memory access. In this paper we discuss the use of Software Transactional Memory (STM), and how Ada can provide support for it. Furthermore, we draft a general programming interface to transactional memory, supporting future implementations of STM oriented to real-time systems.

Abstract
This paper proposes a model for scheduling parallel real-time tasks. The proposed model uses a work-stealing approach to schedule real-time parallel task sets at runtime, where each job may present a nested fork-join structure, generate an arbitrary number of parallel jobs, and each parallel job inherits the timing properties of the job that spawns it.