Abstract
The worldwide economic and financial crisis is trigger g a number of difficulties to several sectors, including public transport industry. Public Transport Operators (PTOs) have fewer resources to invest, nevertheless they need to achieve good results and improve their service offerings. Therefore, this paper aims to present an innovative ticketing solution based on customers' mobile devices, which intends to minimize the investment cost from the PTOs and customers' perspective, maximizing consumer's acceptance. The proposed solution doesn't require any interaction with PTOs infrastructures to purchase or validate a ticket, being solely based on customers' mobile devices with an internet connection. The approach presented in this paper is the result of a project involving the major PTO in Porto city and customers who contributed to the design, requirements elicitation and evaluation of the system. A prototype of the system has already been tested by a group of potential users. (C) 2013 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.

Abstract
This paper puts forward the importance of decision support systems (DSS) for the planning and management of water resources. A case study of the Pinhao river basin, in Portugal, is presented. Given the importance of vineyards in the Douro region, it is important to determine if water availability will be enough to meet present and future water demands. In order to answer this question, DSS tools were used to assess different scenarios. The MIKE BASIN software was used in the hydrographical basin of Pinhao river, assisted by a geographic information system, GIS, which allowed the modelling of the basin, both temporally and spatially, facilitating the visualisation and interpretation of results. According to the attained results, it was verified that, at present, the hydrographical basin meets the considered water needs. The DSS proved to be an important tool to assist the decision-making process in the studied river basin.

Abstract
With the advent of restructuring, generation companies have to plan the operation of their stations in order to maximize their profits. This is very relevant for companies having a large share of hydro stations, and even more if these stations have pumping capacity. This paper describes a model to plan the operation of a set of hydro stations eventually installed in cascade and admitting that some of them are pumping stations. Once a first set of operation orders is obtained using a Genetic Algorithm, their generation/load values are included in the expected market selling/buying curves and the hourly prices are updated. These prices are then used to refine the operation orders originating an iterative process so that hydro stations are price makers. The paper includes results for a hydro system in order to illustrate the application of the developed approach.

Abstract
Nowadays, navigation systems are widely used to find the correct path, or the quickest, between two places. These systems use the Global Positioning System (GPS) and only work well in outdoor environment since GPS signals cannot easily penetrate and/or are greatly degraded inside of buildings. Several technologies have been proposed to make navigation inside of buildings possible. One such technology is Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID). In the case of outside environments, some hybrid systems have been proposed that use GPS as main information source and RFID for corrections and location error minimization. In this article we propose a navigation system that uses RFID as the main technology to guide people with visual impairment in unfamiliar environments, both indoor and outdoor, complementing the traditional white cane and providing information about the user's geographical context. (C) 2013 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.

Abstract

Abstract
This paper deals with a multi-objective control strategy for integration of distributed generation (DG) sources to the power grid. The proposed control technique can provide simultaneous compensation for active and reactive power, and harmonic current components of loads through integration of DG sources to the grid, which is the main contribution of this work over the other proposed methods. A dynamic model of the proposed DG model is first formulated in the stationary reference frame and then transformed into the synchronous orthogonal reference frame. The transformed variables are used in control of voltage source converter (VSC) as the heart of an interfacing system between DG sources and utility grid. By setting appropriate reference currents in the control loop of DG, the maximum available power of DG source will be injected to the grid with fast dynamic response, thereby achieving sinusoidal grid currents in phase with load voltages, while the required power of the load is more than the maximum injected power of DG to the grid. The effectiveness of the proposed control strategy is validated with injection of maximum available power from the DG source to the grid, increased power factor of the utility grid and reduced total harmonic distortion (THD) of grid current through simulation results under dynamic and steady-state operating conditions.