Abstract
Nontechnical losses in electricity distribution networks are often associated with a countries' socioeconomic situation. Although the amount of global losses is usually known, the separation between technical and commercial (nontechnical) losses will remain one of the main challenges for DSO until smart grids become fully implemented and operational. The most common origins of commercial losses are energy theft and deliberate or accidental failures of energy measuring equipment. In any case, the consequences can be regarded as consumption anomalies. The work described in this paper aims to answer a request from a DSO, for the development of tools to detect consumption anomalies at end-customer facilities (HV, MV and LV), invoking two types of assessment. The first consists of the identification of typical patterns in the set of consumption profiles of a given group or zone and the detection of atypical consumers (outliers) within it. The second assessment involves the exploration of the load diagram evolution of each specific consumer to detect changes in the consumption pattern that could represent situations of probable irregularities. After a representative period, typically 12 months, these assessments are repeated, and the results are compared to the initial ones. The eventual changes in the typical classes or consumption scales are used to build a classifier indicating the risk of anomaly.

Abstract
Soil Moisture (SM) is one of the most critical factors for a crop's growth, yield, and quality. Although Ground-Penetrating RADAR (GPR) is commonly used in satelite observation to analyze soil moisture, it is not cost-effective for agricultural applications. Automotive RADAR uses the concept of Frequency-Modulated Continuous Wave (FMCW) and is more competitive in terms of price. This paper evaluates the viability of using a cost-effective RADAR as a substitute for GPR for soil moisture content estimation. The research consisted of four experiments, and the results show that the RADAR's output signal and the soil moisture sensor SEN0193 have a high correlation with values as high as 0.93 when the SM is below 15%. Such results show that the tested sensor (and its cost-effective working principle) are able to determine soil water content (with certain limitations) in a non-intrusive, proximal sensing manner.

Abstract
The promise of increased agility, autonomy, scalability, and reusability has made the microservices architecture a de facto standard for the development of large-scale and cloud-native commercial applications. Software patterns are an important design tool, and often they are selected and combined with the goal of obtaining a set of desired quality attributes. However, from a research standpoint, many patterns have not been widely validated against industry practice, making them not much more than interesting theories. To address this, we investigated how practitioners perceive the impact of 14 patterns on 7 quality attributes. Hence, we conducted 9 semi-structured interviews to collect industry expertise regarding (1) knowledge and adoption of software patterns, (2) the perceived architectural trade-offs of patterns, and (3) metrics professionals use to measure quality attributes. We found that many of the trade-offs reported in our study matched the documentation of each respective pattern, and identified several gains and pains which have not yet been reported, leading to novel insight about microservice patterns.

Abstract
The paper presents an approach for the retrofitting of industrial looms on the shop floor of a textile industry. This is a real case study, where there was a need to update the equipment, providing the machines with communication features aligned with the concept of Industry 4.0. The work was developed within the scope of the research project PRODUTECH-SIF: Solutions for the Industry of the Future. Temperature, Inductive, Acoustic and 3-axis Accelerometers sensors were installed in different parts of the machines for monitorization. Data acquisition and processing is done by a SmarBox developed on a cRIO 9040 from National Instruments. A SmartBox processes data from one to four looms, allowing these old machines to have communication capacity and to be monitored remotely through the factory plant's MES/ERP. Communication can be done through the OPC UA or MQTT architecture, both protocols aligned with the new trends for industrial communications. The sensor data will be used to feed production and manufacturing KPIs and for predictive maintenance. The approach presented in this paper allows industries with legacy equipment to renew and adapt to new market trends, improving productivity rates and reduced maintenance costs.

Abstract
Neighbourhood and health research often relies on personal location data (e.g., home address, daily itineraries), despite the risks of geoprivacy breaches. Thus, geoprivacy is an important emerging topic, contemplated in international regulations such as the General Data Protection Regulation. In this mini-review, we briefly assess the potential risks associated with the usage of personal location data and provide geoprivacy-preserving recommendations to be considered in epidemiological research. Risks include inference of personal information that the individual does not wish to disclose, reverse-identification and security breaches. Various measures should be implemented at different stages of a project (pre-data collection, data processing, data analysis/publication and data sharing) such as informed consent, pseudo-anonymization and geographical methods.

Abstract
Nowadays, human operators at grid control centers analyze a large volume of alarm information during outage’s events, and must act fast to restore the service. Currently, after the occurrence of short-circuit faults and its isolation via feeder protection, fault location and isolation is achieved via remotely controlled switching actions defined by operator’s experience. Despite operator’s experience and knowledge, this makes the process sub-optimal and slower. This paper proposes two novel machine learning-based algorithms to assist human operator decisions, aiming to: i) classify the complexity of a fault occurrence (Occurrences Classifier) based on its alarm events; ii) provide fast insights to the operator on how to solve it (Data2Actions). The Occurrences Classifier takes the alarm information of an occurrence and classifies it as a “simple” or “complex” occurrence. The Data2Actions takes a sequence of alarm information from the occurrence and suggests to the operator the more adequate sequence of switching actions to isolate the fault section on the overhead medium voltage line. Both algorithms were tested in real data from a Distribution System Operator between 2017 and 2020, and showed i) an accuracy of 86% for the Data2Actions, and ii) the Occurrences Classifier reached 74% accuracy for “simple” occurrences and 58% for “complex” ones, leading to an overall 65% accuracy. © 2022 IET Conference Proceedings. All rights reserved.