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The year 2020 will be remembered as a year of turbulences. Our towns have been devastated by the pandemic, but the environment benefited from the drastic reduction in fossil fuel use. Citizens and civil society pressure led the courts to push governments to enhance their own climate policies, while the private sector purchased high ever quantities of renewable energy. The results of this study are once again an argument for the decisive share that photovoltaic energy must have in the balance of the future. For the fastest possible recovery of investment in renewable sources (the so-called Energy Payback Time-EPBT parameter) but also for the effective reduction of greenhouse gas emissions (acronym GHG, mainly CO 2 ), photovoltaic systems are one of the most sustainable and inexhaustible solutions. All despite the fact that their energy efficiency is strongly influenced by the location, having a degree of unpredictability dictated by the proverbial whims of weather. Our study is a comparative one. There are two main options for photo-voltaic (PV) systems: monocrystalline (mono-Si) and multicrystalline (multi-Si). We have chosen two different cities in Romania, a northern city (Iasi) and a southern one (Constanta). There are analyzed two essential elements: one from environmental perspective-the quantity of greenhouse gas (expressed in g of CO 2 directly or not produced for an energy of 1 kWh) and the second mainly financial, the EPBT. Due to solar radiation and the technical solution adopted, our calculations show that CO 2 , eq/kWh varies between 0.27 and 0.36 g range and the EPBT might varies from 1.33 to 1.54 years.

Nowadays, automation systems for naval propulsion groups with gas turbines use programmable logic controllers for a precise and reliable control. The automation system is designed so as to be able to connect using signal cables to the transducers monitoring the engine’s parameters, via adapters, so that the command and regulation functions to be fully automatized. These signals are managed by means of the software program implemented in the PLC, and subsequent data acquisition. One of the important problems is the available resource of the propulsion group, until capital repair is required. The remaining lifetime depends on the operating regimes of the gas turbine engine. This problem is more pronounced in the propulsion groups equipping navy ships, where the dynamic regimes of gas turbine engines are much more demanding, and hence the pre-established operating limits may be exceeded. The automation configuration presented herein ensures the accurate computation and precise control of essential parameters for which the direct measurement is not possible using transducers. These parameters are the exhaust gas temperature, the power developed by the engine and implicitly the torque developed at propeller shaft.

The paper analyzes the advantages and disadvantages of propulsion with gas turbine engines or in combination with electric motors. Gas turbine engines are used in marine propulsion for certain advantages such as high power generated at low weight, low maintenance and low nitrogen oxides emissions. Fuel consumption is higher than diesel propulsion. To reduce consumption, the gas turbine combines with a steam turbine which, with an electric generator, produces electricity for the needs of the ship. The analysis highlights the modern trend of using combined propulsion systems in shipping.

Our world and our lives are changing in many ways. Communication, networking, and computing technologies are among the most influential enablers that shape our lives today. Digital data and connected worlds of physical objects, people, and devices are rapidly changing the way we work, travel, socialize, and interact with our surroundings, and they have a profound impact on different domains, such as healthcare, environmental monitoring, urban systems, and control and management applications, among several other areas. Cities currently face an increasing demand for providing services that can have an impact on people’s everyday lives. The CityPulse framework supports smart city service creation by means of a distributed system for semantic discovery, data analytics, and interpretation of large-scale (near-)real-time Internet of Things data and social media data streams. To goal is to break away from silo applications and enable cross-domain data integration. The CityPulse framework integrates multimodal, mixed quality, uncertain and incomplete data to create reliable, dependable information and continuously adapts data processing techniques to meet the quality of information requirements from end users. Different than existing solutions that mainly offer unified views of the data, the CityPulse framework is also equipped with powerful data analytics modules that perform intelligent data aggregation, event detection, quality assessment, contextual filtering, and decision support. This paper presents the framework, describes its components, and demonstrates how they interact to support easy development of custom-made applications for citizens. The benefits and the effectiveness of the framework are demonstrated in a use-case scenario implementation presented in this paper.

Using the CityPulse framework we developed a proof of concept application for Brasov public transportation company. The application provides route recommendations and incident notifications for the citizens who travel by bus. This is achieved by processing in real-time the data streams about bus arrivals in stations and the incidents reported by citizens. The proof of concept application was presented to the representatives of Brasov municipality and public transport company.

The HolderCPS system presented in this paper falls into the category of recording systems created for the proactive maintenance of rotary bladed machines. Based on an innovative architecture, the Holder-type system contributes to machine equipment diagnosis and to early warnings on potential flaws in the functioning of the machine. The system is able to determine, in real time, the causes of the warnings and of the emergency stops of the machine, in order to avoid any potential failures, or the rendering inoperative of the machine. These causes can be established by monitoring the critical parameters of the machine: vibrations, temperature, and quality of the lubricating oil. Setting up the HolderCPS system, next to the rotary bladed machines, increases machine reliability by means of reliability-centered maintenance. As such, data collected and processed on the basis of algorithms relating to high speed mechanical systems, allow local diagnosis of the current state of the machine, or data transfer, by remote connection, to a laboratory where an off-line analysis can be performed.

This paper presents a framework for processing the data generated by Smart City sensors and IoT data streams in real-time. The scope of processing is to detect various event patterns from the raw data. The framework is extensible because at any moment new data sources can be registered or new specific event detection mechanism can be deployed. The framework offers a HTTP interface which can be used to provide details about each data stream. In order to connect to the heterogeneous data source end points and fetching the observations a concept of simple adaptable data wrappers is introduced. Having the streams registered into the framework, the domain expert can deploy (using a Java API) the event detection mechanism. The domain expert (maybe with some help from an application developer) has only to develop the data wrappers and event detection modules. Once the modules are developed, they can be deployed any time and on any numbers for different sensors of the same type, respective similar events to be detected.

In this paper we present the work done to develop a fault recovery component for the situation when the quality of the data streams from a smart city environment drops. The fault recovery component is able to generate estimated values when the stream generates invalid or missing observations. The component is easy to configure and deploy for a large number of data streams from a smart city environment. As a result of that, the fault recovery component contains an incremental learning model, which is able to train itself during component execution. The paper describes the architecture of the fault recovery component and the result of the evaluation done for three candidate incremental learning models.

Smart Cities represents a large living lab environment. Due to intensively interconnected and overlapped types of systems the approach to extract effective paths to the right information on the right time raise large problems in terms of data processing capabilities. Streams acquired from all around a city raise specific challenges regarding appropriate ways to use, to extract valuable insights. In this paper is presented an ongoing work in CityPulse project regarding a new approach to look on the convergence between autonomic networking and stream based prescriptive analytics applied to dynamic city problems. Research presented aim to highlight the possible role of prescriptive analytics inside the autonomic loop, with an obvious focus on analysis step. Problem under investigation is focused on the selection of appropriate streams provisioning to be used on various city services. Short state of the art and proposed technological setup is presented in upcoming sections together with a reference identified use case.

In order to combine the advantages of polysulfone (PSf) as a membrane material to that of crown ethers as complexant molecules, this paper presents the synthesis and characterization of new functionalized polysulfone membranes with crown ethers, as a potential material for sensors. The strong point of this material consists in covalent chemical bonding between crown ethers and polysulfone. This was realized by used of formylated polysulfone and amino crown ether. The above synthesized membrane was structurally characterized using Scanning Electron Microscopy, FT-IR spectroscopy and thermal analysis.

In order to combine the advantages of silica as an inorganic material (chemical resitance, optical properties) to that of polypyrrole as a conductive polymer one has attempted to obtain novel silica-polypyrrole composite particles by a newly improved technique consisting to in situ polymerization of adsorbed pyrrole into silica. The new synthesized material was characterized by FT-IR spectroscopy, Optical and Scanning Electron Microscopy and the ionic conductive properties were evaluated by Electrochemical Impedance Spectroscopy.

A new efficient method for TiO 2 fucntionalization with different molecules is presented in this paper. The method is based on TiO 2 functionalization with lysine, followed by reaction between amino group from lysine and a functional group from another molecule. In this case the reaction was performed with crown ether using cyanuric chloride as spacer. An infra red spectroscopy study was performed in order to characterize the synthesized molecules.

This paper presents the synthesis and characterization of magnetite particles (covered and stabilized with mercaptoetnol) functionalized with invertase, using cyanuric chloride as spacer. The above synthesized materials were structurally characterized using Scanning Electron Microscopy, FT-IR spectroscopy, thermal analysis.

In order to combine the advantages of functionalized multiwalled carbon nanotubes as a highly electronic conductive chemical species to that of polysulfone as a membrane material this paper reports the results concerning the synthesis of new polymeric-carbon nanotubes composite membranes based on polysulfone with functionalized double wall (DWNT) amino carbon nanotubes with sulfated cyclodextrine, are shown, with potential applications in gas sensing. The above synthesized membranes were structurally characterized using Scanning Electron Microscopy, Atomic Force Microscopy, FT-IR spectroscopy, thermal analysis.

New polymeric composite membranes polysulfone-polypyrrole has been prepared by a new technique consisting in phase inversion accompanied by chemical reaction. The membranes were synthesised from polysulfone/pyrrole-N, N'-dimethylformamide/ methanol system by phase inversion followed by remaining pyrrole in membrane pores polymerization in the presence of iron chloride. The obtained membrane was characterized by Fourrier transformed infrared spectroscopy (FT-IR), Thermogravimetric analysis (TGA), X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) and electrochemical characteristics were determined by Electrochemical Impedance Spectroscopy (EIS).

This paper represents the answer to many challenges in terms of numerical models for the transport of pollutants in drinking water. Due to these reasons this paper represents a particular methodology for estimating the velocity and dispersion coefficients. The aqueous solution transport and adsorption was performed using the COMSOL mathematical program.

The main objective of this work is to develop a framework for supporting the development of applications for logistic companies that transport perishable goods (food and medicines). Reducing the amount of lost and damaged perishable goods during transportation and storage represents a substantial global challenge, which imply the implementation of cold chain monitoring at all levels of the supply chains. The framework contains several components that enable: (1) the real-time monitoring of goods during transportation; (2) forecast the temperatures of parcels; (3) generate real-time alerts/early warning when the product are not stored according to the acceptance criteria.

Smart Cities are considered recently as a promising solution for providing efficient services to citizens with the use of Information and Communication Technologies. With the latest advances on the Internet of Things, a new era has emerged in the Smart City domain, opening new opportunities for the development of efficient and low-cost applications that aim to improve the Quality of Life in cities. Although there is much research in this area, which has resulted in the development of many commercial products, significant parameters like reliability, security and privacy have not been considered as very important up until now. The newly launched FP7-SmartCities-2013 project RERUM aims to build upon the advances in the area of Internet of Things in Smart Cities and develop a framework to enhance reliability and security of smart city applications, with the citizen at the center of attention. This work presents four applications that will be developed within RERUM, gives a general description of the open reliability and security issues that have to be taken into account and gives an overall view of the solutions that RERUM will develop to address these issues.

In order to combine the advantages of polysulfone (PSf) as a membrane material to that of polyaniline as a conductive polymer, one has attempted to obtain novel polysulfone-polyaniline composite membranes by a newly improved technique comparing to the existing ones. The strong point of this technique consists in a phase inversion by immersion precipitation accompanying by chemical reaction followed by the activation of polyaniline with sulfonated beta-cyclodextrine. The above synthesized membranes were structurally characterized using Scanning Electron Microscopy, FT-IR spectroscopy, thermal analysis. The ionic conductivity and electrochemical characteristics were also determined by Electrochemical Impedance Spectroscopy.

Geofencing is one of the components in the wider spectra of Ambient Assisted Living related applications. Such applications are meant to provide support to persons with disabilities or to those impaired, as well as to their caretakers. Within this context, geofencing targets the safe mobility of such persons. As mobility related data can be translated into events with a temporal dimension, we have developed a geofencing service based on the Complex Event Processing paradigm. This decision was supported also by the fact that Ambient Assisted Living applications, in general, are often considered for integration into event rich environments, such as those resulting from smart cities infrastructure. The ability of Complex Event Processing to handle vast amounts of time correlated events from multiple sources meets the requirements imposed by the geofencing service. This paper presents the architecture of a Complex Event Processing based geofencing service along with the results obtained during the evaluation phase of the first prototype.

This study reveals the synthesis of a membrane system by a simple and efficient procedure. The conditions used for preparing a membrane system to a substrate have a great effect on its performance. The determination of a suitable immobilisation procedure for specific application becomes complicated with the methods developed over the years. A hybrid coating of fiberglass served as substrate to obtain a photocatalytic system. The working procedure is based on the immersion of fiberglass in suspension consisting of sodium silicate solution and titanium dioxide. The new synthesised membrane system was characterized using X-ray spectroscopy, scanning electron microscopy and energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy. The present study is focused on the procedure for obtaining new materials for environmental applications and performance evaluation of membrane system in advanced oxidation processes. The photocatalytic activity of the membrane system was evaluated through the oxidation process of organic compounds from wastewater. A synthetic solution by 4-chlorophenol was used as test substance. Removal of phenols compounds from wastewater is extremely important from an environmental perspective.

International audience; Cloud computing is emerging as a major trend in the ICT industry. While most of the attention of the research community is focused on considering the perspective of the Cloud providers, offering mechanisms to support scaling of resources and interoperability and federation between Clouds, the perspective of developers and operators willing to choose the Cloud without being strictly bound to a specific solution is mostly neglected. We argue that Model-Driven Development can be helpful in this context as it would allow developers to design software systems in a cloud-agnostic way and to be supported by model transformation techniques into the process of instantiating the system into specific, possibly, multiple Clouds. The MODA-CLOUDS (MOdel-Driven Approach for the design and execution of applications on multiple Clouds) approach we present here is based on these principles and aims at supporting system developers and operators in exploiting multiple Clouds for the same system and in migrating (part of) their systems from Cloud to Cloud as needed. MODACLOUDS offers a quality-driven design, development and operation method and features a Decision Support System to enable risk analysis for the selection of Cloud providers and for the evaluation of the Cloud adoption impact on internal business processes. Furthermore, MODACLOUDS offers a run-time environment for observing the system under execution and for enabling a feedback loop with the design environment. This allows system developers to react to performance fluctuations and to redeploy applications on different Clouds on the long term.

Scheduling is required in a multitude of domains: public transportation, logistics, delivery of goods, events, component delivery for production plants or in the case of assembly lines. Most of the times, the scheduled activities are performed by agents, either humans or autonomous systems, operating in complex environments subject to change during the agents operation. Usually these changes in the environment have an impact on the initial data based upon which the scheduling was performed thus requiring new working configurations to be generated for the agents. This paper presents the solving of a scheduling problem which extends the traveling salesman scenario through the use of ASP (Answer Set Programming). The method was integrated and tested in the CoReMo simulator whose goal is to provide a platform for the development and evaluation of novel algorithms dealing with event-driven configuration systems.

This paper presents the synthesis and characterization of a new material: an iron/titanium dioxide composite (obtained by a novel method from colloidal iron and titanium tetrabutoxide) with a dye (Congo red) adsorbed onto the composites surface. The new synthesized materials were structurally characterized using Scanning Electron Microscopy, FT-IR spectroscopy and Energy-Dispersive X-ray spectroscopy.

This work presents a hybrid method for advanced removal of 4-chlorophenol from water by combining the membrane and photo-catalytic processes. The hybrid method consists of photo-catalytic oxidation procedure using a photo-catalytic reactor equipped with a TiO 2 -functionalized membrane obtained by the sol-gel method. The photo-catalytic activity is dependent on the alcohol solvent type used for synthesis, which determines the TiO 2 deposition and characteristics. At higher reaction time, the regenerated cellulose membrane becomes slightly unstable due to UV radiations and a strong oxidizing potential of the reaction medium.

This paper analyzes the development of an experimental setup for the steady state and transient analysis of Wide Area Measurement Systems (WAMS). The flexibility of the generated input signals for which the PMU performance is assessed represents a novel contribution of the designed setup. Transient disturbances modeled by mathematical functions or extracted from simulated networks within DigSILENT PowerFactory software are converted to COMTRADE files and uploaded into two signal generators in order to build relevant analogue waveforms for analyzing Phasor Measurement Units (PMUs) steady state and transient behavior. A novel characteristic of the design consists of the automated generating, acquisition and analysis procedure capable of processing the large quantity of results on which the steady state and transient performance assessment of WAMS is based. The assessment has revealed some equipment introduced phase shift errors, but their cause has been identified and overcome through the comparison of qualitative parameters of the input and output signals.

Active distribution networks emerged when power generation units have been connected into LV or MV grids. Most of these generators are based on renewables (PV, wind) which have an intermittent character and are dispersed over a large area. In order to cope with the unpredictability of the generation, the best solution is, despite its high cost, to deploy electrical energy storage units. Further intelligent control of the distribution network is using the storage not only for energy leverage (minutes-term balance of generation and consume) but also for system services, as during perturbations following faults in the network. This paper presents such an application - intended to cope with the lower level of inertia in the active distribution networks, due to intensive use of static converters for power transfer. The resulting virtual synchronous generator (VSG) is developed around electrical storages, selected as a function of the application case and desired nominal power of the VSG. All algorithms rely on the State of Charge (SOC) signal describing the storage status. An automated system dedicated to continuous estimation of the SoC is presented, as to be integrated into a more complex on-line VSG application.

The paper is presenting an algorithm for establishing the best types of electrical storages for the virtual synchronous generator (VSG), depending on the application case and desired nominal power of the VSG. The resulting application provides a description of available technologies in terms of characteristics matching the desired properties of the storage in accordance with the scenarios described by the user.