Abstract
Smart grids play an important role in the modernization and optimization of the existing electrical grid, to accomplish the current European Union Energy and Climate targets. Smart grids require distributed applications to manage the grid more efficiently. The performance of the distributed applications impacts on the communications delay time and on the timely interaction with the devices located in the users' Home Area Networks. This paper presents the results of the ENCOURAGE project related to the development of a software platform to support smart grids. The work presented in this paper assesses four different middleware configurations and analyses the results on the delay performance tests. The results show that the mean end-to-end delay is between 310 ms and 453 ms in proper conditions. In terms of operational costs, the optimal configuration enables managing houses with less than 0.25 Euros per month per house. This paper justifies the maturity of the technology to support smart grids, and the possibility to transfer the ENCOURAGE project results to the industry.

Abstract
The need for maintenance is based on the wear of components of machinery. If this need can be defined reliably beforehand so that no unpredicted failures take place then the maintenance actions can be carried out economically with minimum disturbance to production. There are two basic challenges in solving the above. First understanding the development of wear and failures, and second managing the measurement and diagnosis of such parameters that can reveal the development of wear. In principle the development of wear and failures can be predicted through monitoring time, load or wear as such. Monitoring time is not very efficient, as there are only limited numbers of components that suffer from aging which as such is result of chemical wear i.e. changes in the material. In most cases the loading of components influences their wear. In principle the loading can be stable or varying in nature. Of these two cases the varying load case is much more challenging than the stable one. The monitoring of wear can be done either directly e.g. optical methods or indirectly e.g. vibration. Monitoring actual wear is naturally the most reliable approach, but it often means that additional investments are needed. The paper discusses the above issues and what are the requirements that follow from these for optimising maintenance based of the use of Cyber Physical Systems. © 2016 IEEE.

Abstract
Software transactional memory (STM) is a synchronisation paradigm which improves the parallelism and composability of modern applications executing on a multi-core architecture. However, to abort and retry a transaction multiple times may have a negative impact on the temporal characteristics of a real-time task set. This paper addresses this issue: It provides a framework in which an upper-bound on the worst-case response time of each task is derived, assuming that tasks are scheduled by following either the Non-Preemptive During Attempt (NPDA), Non-Preemptive Until Commit (NPUC) or Stack Resource Policy for Transactional Memory (SRPTM) policy.

Abstract
It is a known fact that processes running concurrently on different cores in a multicore environment interfere with each other on the processor shared resources. The contention on these shared resources considerably slows down the execution on every core since sometimes the cores must stall while their requests to access the resources are being served. But by how much the execution may be slowed down due to this interference? In this paper we answer this question with numbers coming from experimentation. That is, we quantify the magnitude of the impact of the interference on the execution time by running programs taken from the TACLeBench benchmark suite, a popular benchmark suite in the real-time research community, on the first generation of Kalray manycore processor family, the MPPA-256 (the development board) that goes by the codename "Andey". © Vincent Nélis, Patrick Meumeu Yomsi and Luís Miguel Pinho.

Abstract
The present research work presents an experimental campaign of ambient vibration tests performed on twenty infill masonry walls from two buildings under construction and from another existent building. The main objective is to evaluate the influence of the boundary conditions, geometric dimensions, presence of openings with different dimensions as well as the existence of grooves along the wall for the installation of electrical cables, in the out-of-plane main frequencies of the infill walls tested. In the paper, it is presented a detailed description of the studied buildings, testing setups, equipment used, and further information regarding the walls tested. The main test results are presented and discussed.

Abstract
Commercial-of-the-shelf based multi-core systems present timing anomalies that cannot be ignored by the real-time systems community due to their unpredictable behaviour. These timing anomalies, often caused by applications' uncontrolled accesses to shared resources such as the components in the memory hierarchy or in the 1/0 subsystem, introduce interference that may lead to deadline misses if the problem is neglected. The Acquisition Execution Restitution (AER) execution model was previously proposed to circumvent this problem and, therefore, mitigate inter-task interference. In this model, applications decouple communication (acquisition and restitution phases) from the actual execution in a way that at most one acquisition or restitution phase is in execution at any instant of time while the execution phase of different tasks can progress in parallel on multiple cores. Thus, keeping each task's derived worst-case execution time closer to the one measured in isolation. In this paper, we study the AER execution model and compare it against a global Earliest Deadline First (EDF) approach where interferences are considered. Our results show that a priority assignment heuristic which assigns the priorities based on the tasks' periods dominates all the other proposed heuristics and that due to interference it can also schedule task sets which are not schedulable by using the global EDF approach.