Abstract
Renewable energy sources (RES) used in small-scale distributed generation systems are a promising alternative for additional energy supply toward smarter and more sustainable cities. However, their proper integration as new infrastructures of the smart city (SMCT) requires understanding the SMCT architecture and promoting changes to the existing regulation, business models, and power grid topology and operation, constituting a new challenging energy supply paradigm. This chapter addresses the use of renewable energy systems on small scale, oriented to distributed generation (DG) for households or districts, integrated in an SMCT. In this context, the main renewable energies and companion technologies are reviewed, and their profitability investigated to highlight their current economic feasibility. A simplified architecture for SMCT development is presented, consisting of three interconnected layers, the intelligence layer, the communication layer, and the infrastructure layer. The integration and impact of distributed renewable energy generation and storage technologies in this architecture is analyzed. Special attention is paid to the grid topology for their technical and efficient integration, and to the business models for facilitating their economic integration and feasibility. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014.

Abstract
Renewable energy is essential for global sustainability. Wind power gave a great contribution to this energy paradigm. The paper describes a maintenance management system for inshore and offshore wind farms, as well as a method to schedule maintenance using genetic algorithms. Under this subject there exists a sub-problem that concerns with the determination of the cheapest path between two points. The paper compares the performance of three methods: genetic algorithms, Dijkstra's algorithm and ant optimization algorithm to the determination of the cheapest path between different wind parks for maintenance.

Abstract

Abstract
Real estate appraisal is a very important activity in the modern economies. As such, the main ob-jective of this paper is to analyse the relationship between yields and income rents in assessing the Portu-guese real estate appraisal on the main Portuguese municipalities. Real estate market data series were analised during a four-year period (2006-2009) using income rents in €/m2. With the data it was possible to determine the average income rents and the capitalization rates, and carry out a comparison through a clusters analysis. The results show that the income approach can be used to explain the supply market va-lue of the dwellings at municipal level.

Abstract
Logic Programming languages, such as Prolog, offer a great potential for the exploitation of implicit parallelism. One of the most noticeable sources of implicit parallelism in Prolog programs is or-parallelism. Or-parallelism arises from the simultaneous evaluation of a subgoal call against the clauses that match that call. Nowadays, multicores and clusters of multicores are becoming the norm and, although, many parallel Prolog systems have been developed in the past, to the best of our knowledge, none of them was specially designed to explore the combination of shared and distributed memory architectures. Conceptually, an or-parallel Prolog system consists of two components: an or-parallel engine (i.e., a set of independent Prolog engines which we named a team of workers) and a scheduler. In this work, we propose a team-based scheduling model to efficiently exploit parallelism between different or-parallel engines running on top of clusters of multicores. Our proposal defines a layered approach where a second-level scheduler specifies a clean interface for scheduling work between the base or-parallel engines, thus enabling different scheduling combinations to be used for distributing work among workers inside a team and among teams.

Abstract
Micro grids play an important role in the context of smart grids, improving the system reliability, resilience and stability. In case of micro grids disconnected from the main grid, due to geographical reasons or failure in the service provider, the self-sustainability management is a key issue. This paper discusses agent-based automation and control approaches to handle the self-sustainability in electrical stand-alone micro grids. The proposed agent-based model is applied to a case study and simulated using the Netlogo agent-based modelling platform, allowing to analyze different control and prediction strategies to improve their self-sustainability.