Abstract
One of the major challenges in knowledge discovery is how to extract meaningful and useful knowledge from the complex structured data that one finds in Scientific and Technological applications. One approach is to explore the logic relations in the database and using, say, an Inductive Logic Programming (ILP) algorithm find descriptive and expressive patterns. These patterns can then be used as features to characterize the target concept, The effectiveness of these algorithms depends both upon the algorithm we use to generate the patterns and upon the classifier Rule mining provides an excellent framework for efficiently mining the interesting patterns that are relevant. We propose a novel method to select discriminative patterns and evaluate the effectiveness of this method on a complex discovery application of practical interest.

Abstract
This paper proposes a practical approach to solve the short-term thermal scheduling (STTS) problem with environmental concerns. Under deregulation, minor changes in the energy price may give a significant change in the power generation of thermal units. Hence, the influence of price forecasting on STTS with environmental concerns is an important research issue, which is analysed in this paper considering different price profiles. This analysis is made in connection with a case study based on the standard IEEE 30-bus system.

Abstract
Evolvable and collaborative production systems are becoming an emergent paradigm towards flexibility and automatic re-configurability. The reconfiguration of those systems requires the existence of distributed and modular control components that interact in order to accomplish control activities. This paper focuses on service-oriented production systems, which behavior is regulated by the coordination of services that are provided and required by control components with different roles. Internally, these components are independent of the implementations, but an internal modular and event based structure is presented. Individual control and interaction is achieved by using embedded or inter-service control processes for which High-Level Petri Nets are proposed. Supporting the predefined control, decision support systems are used to provide conflict resolution and other decision-making functions.

Abstract
A fully automatic methodology based on image processing is proposed to evaluate the quality of spray application sampled by water-sensitive papers (WSP). The methods proposed permit a computation of the fraction of spray coverage, an evaluation of the homogeneity of the spray spatial spread at various scales and directions, and extraction of stain and droplet size range and distribution. This allows the number of droplets per unit area and the standard droplet size spectra factors to be computed. The methods were tested with a number of test samples scanned at different resolutions, proving to be effective in situations where there is high spray coverage in the WSP, thus with considerable overlap between stains. The most suitable scanning resolution was found to be 600 dpi. The results obtained by the image processing methods were successfully compared with a manual (visual) counting of stains in a test sample.

Abstract
This paper describes a robust localization system, similar to the used by the teams participating in the Robocup Small size league (SLL). The system, developed in Object Pascal, allows real time localization and control of an autonomous omnidirectional mobile robot. The localization algorithm is done resorting to odometry and global vision data fusion, applying an extended Kalman filter, being this method a standard approach for reducing the error in a least squares sense, using measurements from different sources.

Abstract
Despite the considerable success of Inductive Logic Programming (ILP), deployed ILP systems still have efficiency problems when applied to complex problems. Several techniques have been proposed to address the efficiency issue. Such proposals include query transformations, query packs, lazy evaluation and parallel execution of ILP systems, to mention just a few. We propose a novel technique that avoids the procedure of deducing each example to evaluate each constructed clause. The technique takes advantage of the two stage procedure of Mode Directed Inverse Entailment (MDIE) systems. In the first stage of a MDIE system, where the bottom clause is constructed, we store not only the bottom clause but also valuable additional information. The information stored is sufficient to evaluate the clauses constructed in the second stage without the need for a theorem prover. We used a data structure called Trie to efficiently store all bottom clauses produced using all examples (positive and negative) as seeds. The technique was implemented and evaluated using two well known data sets from the ILP literature. The results are promising both in terms of execution time and accuracy.