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The XXI century home should be a digital habitat, a connected residence, but at the same time it should be involved in sustainability and the environment. The location of new technologies at home, and its acceptance by the user, requires, among other actions, a significant diffusion and activity to be undertaken. This work proposes the development of a Smart House network designed for its integration into a sustainable and bioclimatic solar house. The paper focuses on a specific aspect of the house design, the control system bus, developed for the management of the different parameters, variables, sensors and actuators which coexist at home. Finally, the system has been installed in a laboratory bioclimatic house. Environmental variable experiments based on the control of passive elements, such as phase shift gels, are presented. Experimental results show that the system is able to benefit from the bioclimatic elements in the house by taking into account the user preferences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a computational procedure to evaluate the fault tolerance of a linear-constrained model predictive control (LCMPC) scheme for a given actuator fault configuration (AFC). Faults in actuators cause changes in the constraints related to control signals (inputs), which in turn modify the set of MPC feasible solutions. This fact may result in an empty set of admissible solutions for a given control objective. Therefore, the admissibility of the control law facing actuator faults can be determined by knowing the set of feasible solutions. One of the aims of this paper is to provide methods to compute this set and to evaluate the admissibility of the control law for a given AFC, once the control objective and the admissibility criteria have been established. In particular, the admissible solution set for the predictive control problem, including the effect of faults (either through reconfiguration or accommodation), is determined using an algorithm that is implemented using set computations based on zonotopes. Finally, the proposed method is tested on a real application consisting of a part of the Barcelona sewer network. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the highlights of the 7th Spanish Conference on Electron Devices held at Universidade de Santiago de Compostela in Spain on February 11 to 13, 2009. The conference focused on the trends and future directions the electronic devices sector. Topics tackled at the event include materials and technology, device modelling, sensors, actuators and microsystems.

A piezoelectric actuator MEMS for middle ear implants has been proposed by a team in Spain. Their proposed design includes a novel attachment location and promises smaller cost, size and power consumption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]