Abstract
Energy management in buildings can provide massive benefits in financial and energy saving terms. It is possible to optimize energy usage with smart grid techniques, where the benefits are enhanced when the energy consumer can trade the energy on energy markets, since it forces energy providers to compete with each other on the energy price. However, two hurdles oppose this approach: the devices providing control over appliances do not interoperate with each other; and energy markets limit trading activities to large quantities of energy, thus impeding access for small consumers. This work considers using the FlexOffer (FO) concept to allow the consumer to express its energy needs, and FO-related mechanisms to aggregate energy requests into quantities relevant for energy markets. Moreover, the presented system, named FlexHousing, is based on the Arrowhead Framework - A framework that simplifies design and implementation of distributed applications by means of normalizing communication via services - and exploits its Service Oriented mechanisms to provide device interoperability. The implemented FlexHousing system uses multi-level FO aggregation to empower either the final user, for example the owner of an apartment, to manage its own energy by defining their flexibilities, or to offload this responsibility to an energy manager who takes care of all the apartments in a building or set of buildings. © 2018 IEEE.

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The aims of the TheRoute (Tourism and Heritage Routes including Ambient Intelligence with Visitants’ Profile Adaptation and Context Awareness) project is to conduct studies, research and experimentation around the challenge of automatic generation of routes for visitors. The suggested routes fit the profile of visitors and groups of visitors, including aspects like emotion, mood and personality, and be aware of the context (e.g. weather, security). TheRoute is developed according the Ambient Intelligence perspective. At this point of the project execution we have already developed the full system architecture as a System of Systems approach according to an Ambient Intelligence perspective, to allow the best possible performance in the system utilization for the final user. Intelligent route generation uses user preferences for the categories of points of interest, as well as their personality traits. © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019.

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Current real-time embedded systems development frameworks lack support for the verification of properties using explicit time where counting time (i.e., durations) may play an important role in the development process. Focusing on the real-time constraints inherent to these systems, we present a framework that addresses the specification of duration properties for runtime verification by employing a fragment of metric temporal logic with durations. We also provide an overview of the framework, the synthesis tools, and the library to support monitoring properties for real-time systems developed in C++11. The results obtained provide clear evidence of the feasibility and advantages of employing a duration-sensitive formalism to increase the dependability of avionic controller systems such as the PX4 and the Ardupilot flight stacks.

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