Abstract
Proliferation of the Internet is enabling the use of sensors and actuators to capture data and control devices remotely in a multitude of domains. Still, there is a general lack of best practices while designing such large scale real-time systems. This paper describes a generic architecture used on the implementation of a framework for deploying such systems in the cloud, enabling run-time evolution of the system with new sensors, actuators or services possibly developed by third-parties being integrated dynamically. Such architecture orchestrates the flow of information in the ecosystem and scales transparently to external components when needed, requiring no change in them. Adoption in the Portuguese nation-wide AAL project AAL4ALL is then described. Copyright © 2013 by the Association for Computing Machinery, Inc. (ACM).

Abstract
In this paper we present a user-centered interface for a scheduling system. The purpose of this interface is to provide graphical and interactive ways of defining a scheduling problem. To create such user interface an evaluation-centered user interaction development method was adopted: the star life cycle. The created prototype comprises the Task Module and the Scheduling Problem Module. The first one allows users to define a sequence of operations, i.e., a task. The second one enables a scheduling problem definition, which consists in a set of tasks. Both modules are equipped with a set of real time validations to assure the correct definition of the necessary data input for the scheduling module of the system. The usability evaluation allowed us to measure the ease of interaction and observe the different forms of interaction provided by each participant, namely the reactions to the real time validation mechanism.

Abstract
Cooperation with humans is a requirement for the next generation of robots so it is necessary to model how robots can sense, know, share and acquire knowledge from human interaction. Instead of traditional SLAM (Simultaneous Localization and Mapping) methods, which do not interpret sensor information other than at the geometric level, these capabilities require an environment map representation similar to the human representation. Topological maps are one option to translate these geometric maps into a more abstract representation of the the world and to make the robot knowledge closer to the human perception. In this paper is presented a novel approach to translate 3D grid map into a topological map. This approach was optimized to obtain similar results to those obtained when the task is performed by a human. Also, a novel feature of this approach is the augmentation of topological map with features such as walls and doors.

Abstract
National governments sometimes introduce policies that modify energy markets to achieve other social and political goals. These policies, created with the best of intentions, often have unintended consequences. Here we present a case study of one such policy, the Royal Decree in Spain that mandates the use of the Spanish-Indigenous Coal (IC). © 2013 IEEE.

Abstract
In communication systems, transient faults will eventually occur. Thus, some mechanism is necessary to handle them and achieve appropriate levels of reliability, particularly in safety-critical systems. One possibility is to rely on temporal redundancy, i.e., using message retransmissions. General requirements for such a mechanism would include a parsimonious use of extra bandwidth while guaranteeing the schedulability of the message set. In this paper we propose using on-line traffic scheduling together with scheduling servers to recover message errors in time-triggered systems on Controller Area Network (CAN), taking advantage of the Flexible Time-Triggered CAN protocol. This novel mechanism is shown to offer a desired error recovery latency using much less extra bandwidth than typical approaches used in time-triggered systems. In this paper we present this novel error recovery mechanism, including a thorough characterization as well as configuration guidelines, namely concerning how to choose the server parameters (type, period and capacity). The correctness of the proposed approach and its superior performance are validated with simulation using several communication benchmarks available in the literature.

Abstract