Abstract
Brazil is the largest sugarcane producer in the world and the leader in the production of sugar and ethanol. Although sugarcane has become an important factor in the Brazilian economy, cultivation has presented many issues, for example, the problems due to burning before the manual harvest. The Brazilian authorities have approved a law that prohibits this practice and mechanized harvesting has thus become the most fitting approach. Given this development, areas for sugarcane plantation must be properly rebuilt to accommodate the new way of harvesting. The main characteristic demanded of sugarcane plots to use harvesting machines is that they must be rectangular. In the present paper, we propose a methodology for dividing the plantation area into plots and planning their allocation so as to accommodate mechanized harvesting. In view of the requirement for plots to be rectangular, we represented this problem as a two-dimensional cutting problem, and to find a solution we adopted the AND/OR graph approach. The computational experiments were conducted using real cases, and the proposed strategy was shown to perform well.

Abstract
Electric power systems are facing significant challenges regarding their organization and structure. Energy infrastructures are crucial to ensure a transition to low-carbon societies, contributing to sustainable development. This paper uses Data Envelopment Analysis to compare the performance of the power systems in 16 European countries using data available to the public. Three perspectives were considered, focusing on technical aspects affecting quality of service, network costs and environmental impact. It is proposed a new formulation of the DEA model that estimates a composite indicator (CI) aggregating individual indicators which should be minimized. The benchmarking results can give insights to electric operators, regulators and decision-makers on the strengths and weakness of national power systems and disclose the potential for performance improvements. Based on the outcomes from the CI model, Austria, Croatia, Denmark, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy and Netherlands are identified as the benchmarks for the power systems in the Europe. The discussion of the results is intended to raise public awareness on the performance of the European power systems and contribute to the definition of public policies for the promotion of continuous improvement. © 2019, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Abstract
This paper presents one methodology for teaching engineering students, which relies on open platform requiring basic knowledge of robotics, like mechanics, control or energy management. Walking robots are well known for being able to walk over rough terrain and adapt to various environments. Hexapod robots are chosen because of their better stability and higher number of different gaits. However, having to hold the whole weight of the body and a large number of actuators makes all walking robots less energetically efficient than wheeled robots. This platform endows students with an intuitive learning for current technologies, development and testing of new algorithms in the area of mobile robotics and also in generating good team-building. © 2019, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Abstract

Abstract
Grapevine yield prediction during phenostage and particularly, before harvest is highly significant as advanced forecasting could be a great value for superior grapevine management. The main contribution of the current study is to develop predictive model for each phenology that predicts yield during growing stages of grapevine and to identify highly relevant predictive variables. Current study uses climatic conditions, grapevine yield, phenological dates, fertilizer information, soil analysis and maturation index data to construct the relational dataset. After words, we use several approaches to pre-process the data to put it into tabular format. For instance, generalization of climatic variables using phenological dates. Random Forest, LASSO and Elasticnet in generalized linear models, and Spikeslab are feature selection embedded methods which are used to overcome dataset dimensionality issue. We used 10-fold cross validation to evaluate predictive model by partitioning the dataset into training set to train the model and test set to evaluate it by calculating Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE) and Relative Root Mean Squared Error (RRMSE). Results of the study show that rf_PF, rf_PC and rf_MH are optimal models for flowering (PF), colouring (PC) and harvest (MH) phenology respectively which estimate 1484.5, 1504.2 and 1459.4 (Kg/ha) low RMSE and 24.6%, 24.9% and 24.2% RRMSE, respectively as compared to other models. These models also identify some derived climatic variables as major variables for grapevine yield prediction. The reliability and early-indication ability of these forecast models justify their use by institutions and economists in decision making, adoption of technical improvements, and fraud detection. © 2019 Asian Agricultural and Biological Engineering Association

Abstract
JavaScript is currently one of the most popular languages worldwide. Its meteoric rise is mainly due to the fact that the language is no longer bound to the limits of the browser and can now be used on several platforms. This growth has led to its increasing use by companies and, consequently, to become part of the curriculum in schools. Meanwhile, in the teaching-learning process of computer programming, teachers continue to use automatic code evaluation systems to relieve their time-consuming and error prone evaluation work. However, these systems reveal a number of issues: they are very generic (one size fits all), they have scarce features to foster exercises authoring, they do not adhere to interoperability standards (e.g. LMS communication), they rely solely on remote evaluators being exposed to single point of failure problems and reducing application performance and user experience, which is a feature well appreciated by the mobile users. In this context, LearnJS is presented as a Web playground for practicing the JavaScript language. The system uses a local evaluator (the user’s own browser) making response times small and thus benefiting the user experience. LearnJS also uses a sophisticated authoring system that allows the teacher to quickly create new exercises and aggregate them into gamified activities. Finally, LearnJS includes universal LMS connectors based on international specifications. In order to validate its use, an evaluation was made by a group of students of Porto Polytechnic aiming to validate the usability of its graphical user interface. © Ricardo Queirós.