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Publications

Publications by CPES

2016

Indoor localization using barely perceptible audio signals

Authors
Moutinho, J; Freitas, D; Araújo, RE;

Publication
U.Porto Journal of Engineering

Abstract
This paper presents a new approach to an audio-based indoor localization system. By using audio signals emitted by a public address sound system, mobile devices may globally localize themselves in an indoor environment where global navigation satellite systems are not viable or reliable. The use of data hiding techniques such as spread spectrum coding or echo hiding has allowed to convey information to a receiver avoiding people’s perception of the added audio content. Results demonstrate a relatively quite good localization with centimetre accuracy and precision and successful data transmission using barely perceptible audio signals.

2016

Model-based predictive control implementation for cooperative adaptive cruise control

Authors
Lopes, A; Araújo, RE;

Publication
U.Porto Journal of Engineering

Abstract
The automation of road vehicles has become a necessity to improve the efficiency and safety of this system. In a vehicle formation it is important to maintain a safety distance between the vehicles. The control of a vehicle spacing distance and longitudinal velocity can be achieved through the implementation of a model-based predictive controller. This implementation of a cooperative adaptive cruise control allows the access of another vehicle state information through vehicular communication technology and promote state prediction and ultimately system stability. The optimization algorithm performs the computation of the control input in a control horizon window and ensures that the spacing error takes only positive values. The results of the proposed controller are evaluated through the computational tool Simulink in the two-vehicle platoon. The controller is implemented in the precedent vehicle. To assess the performance of the proposed controller different control parameters and constraints were used.

2016

Price forecasting and validation in the Spanish electricity market using forecasts as input data

Authors
Ortiz, M; Ukar, O; Azevedo, F; Mugica, A;

Publication
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF ELECTRICAL POWER & ENERGY SYSTEMS

Abstract
The electricity sector has been subjected to major changes in the last few years. Previously, there existed a regulated system where electric companies could know beforehand the amount of energy each generator would produce, hence basing their largely operational strategy on cost minimization in order to increase their profits. In Spain, from 1988 till 1997, electricity prices were established by the 'Marco Legal Estable' Stable Legal Framework, where the Ministry of Industry and Energy acknowledged the existence of certain generation costs related to each type of technology. It was an industrial sector with no actual competition and therefore, with very few controllable risks. In the aftermath of the electricity market liberalization competition and uncertainty arose. Electricity spot prices became highly volatile due to the specific characteristics of electricity as a commodity. Long-term contracts allowed for hedge funds to act against price fluctuation in the electricity market. As a consequence, developing an accurate electricity price forecasting model is an extremely difficult task for electricity market agents. This work aims to propose a methodology to improve the limitations of those methodologies just using historical data to forecast electricity prices. In this manner, and in order to gain access to more recent data, instead of using natural gas prices and electricity load historical data, a regression model to forecast the evolution of natural gas prices, and a model based on artificial neural networks (ANN) to forecast electricity loads, are proposed. The results of these models are used as input for an electricity price forecast model. Finally, and to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methodology, several study cases applied to the Spanish market, using real price data, are presented.

2016

Optimal Cable Design of Wind Farms: The Infrastructure and Losses Cost Minimization Case

Authors
Cerveira, A; de Sousa, A; Solteiro Pires, EJS; Baptista, J;

Publication
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON POWER SYSTEMS

Abstract
Wind power is the source of electrical energy that has grown more over the last years, with annual rate in installed capacity around 20%. Therefore, it is important to optimize the production efficiency of wind farms. In a wind farm, the electrical energy is collected at a central substation from different wind turbines placed nearby. This paper addresses the optimal design of the cable network interconnecting the turbines to the substation aiming to minimize not only the infrastructure cost but also the cost of the energy losses in the cables. Although this problem is non-linear, different integer linear programming models are proposed considering the wind farm technical constraints. The models are applied to three real cases Portuguese wind farms. The computational results show that the proposed models are able to compute the optimal solutions for all cases.

2016

The Extraction from News Stories a Causal Topic Centred Bayesian Graph for Sugarcane

Authors
Drury, B; Rocha, C; Moura, MF; Lopes, AdA;

Publication
Proceedings of the 20th International Database Engineering & Applications Symposium, IDEAS 2016, Montreal, QC, Canada, July 11-13, 2016

Abstract
Sugarcane is an important product to the Brazilian economy because it is the primary ingredient of ethanol which is used as a gasoline substitute. Sugarcane is aflected by many factors which can be modelled in a Bayesian Graph. This paper describes a technique to build a Causal Bayesian Network from information in news stories. The technique: extracts causal relations from news stories, converts them into an event graph, removes irrelevant information, solves structure problems, and clusters the event graph by topic distribution. Finally, the paper describes a method for generating inferences from the graph based upon evidence in agricultural news stories. The graph is evaluated through a manual inspection and with a comparison with the EMBRAPA sugarcane taxonomy. © ACM 2016.

2016

PAMPO: using pattern matching and pos-tagging for effective Named Entities recognition in Portuguese

Authors
Rocha, Conceicao; Jorge, Alipio; Sionara, Roberta; Brito, Paula; Pimenta, Carlos; Rezende, SolangeO.;

Publication
CoRR

Abstract

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