Abstract
The experimental component is an essential method in Engineering education. Sometimes the availability of laboratories and components is compromised, and the COVID19 pandemic worsened the situation. Resorting to an accurate simulation seems to help this process by allowing students to develop the work, program, test, and validate it. Moreover, it lowers the development time and cost of the prototyping stages of a robotics project. As a multidisciplinary area, robotics requires simulation environments with essential characteristics, such as dynamics, connection to hardware (embedded systems), and other applications. Thus, this paper presents the Simulation environment of SimTwo, emphasizing previous publications with models of sensors, actuators, and simulation scenes. The simulator can be used for free, and the source code is available to the community. Proposed scenes and examples can inspire the development of other simulation scenes to be used in electrical and mechanical Engineering projects.

Abstract
Developing innovative systems and operations to monitor forests and send alerts in dangerous situations, such as fires, has become, over the years, a necessary task to protect forests. In this work, a Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is employed for forest data acquisition to identify abrupt anomalies when a fire ignition starts. Even though a low-power LoRaWAN network is used, each module still needs to save power as much as possible to avoid periodic maintenance since a current consumption peak happens while sending messages. Moreover, considering the LoRaWAN characteristics, each module should use the bandwidth only when essential. Therefore, four algorithms were tested and calibrated along real and monitored events of a wildfire. The first algorithm is based on the Exponential Smoothing method, Moving Averages techniques are used to define the other two algorithms, and the fourth uses the Least Mean Square. When properly combined, the algorithms can perform a pre-filtering data acquisition before each module uses the LoRaWAN network and, consequently, save energy if there is no necessity to send data. After the validations, using Wildfire Simulation Events (WSE), the developed filter achieves an accuracy rate of 0.73 with 0.5 possible false alerts. These rates do not represent a final warning to firefighters, and a possible improvement can be achieved through cloud-based server algorithms. By comparing the current consumption before and after the proposed implementation, the modules can save almost 53% of their batteries when is no demand to send data. At the same time, the modules can maintain the server informed with a minimum interval of 15 min and recognize abrupt changes in 60 s when fire ignition appears.

Abstract
Indoor Air Quality (IAQ) describes the air quality of a room, and it refers to the health and comfort of the occupants. Typically, people spend around 90% of their time in indoor environments where the concentration of air pollutants and, occasionally, more than 100 times higher than outdoor levels. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), indoor air pollution is responsible for the death of 3.8 million people annually. It has been indicated that IAQ in residential areas or buildings is significantly affected by three primary factors, they are outdoor air quality, human activity in buildings, and building and construction materials. In this context, this work consists of a real-time IAQ system to monitor thermal comfort and gas concentration. The system has a data acquisition stage, captured by the WSN with a set of sensors that measures the data and send it to be stored on the InfluxDB database and displayed on Grafana. A Linear Regression (LR) algorithm was used to predict the behavior of the measured parameters, scoring up to 99.7% of precision. Thereafter, prediction data is stored on InfluxDB in a new database and displayed on Grafana. In this way, it is possible to monitor the actual measurement data and prediction data in real-time. © 2023, ICST Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering.

Abstract
Increasing population in cities combined with efforts to obtain more sustainable living spaces will require a smarter Solid Waste Management System (SWMS). A critical step in SWMS is the collection of wastes, generally associated with expensive costs faced by companies or municipalities in this sector. Some studies are being developed for the optimization of waste collection routes, but few consider inland cities as model regions. Here, the model region considered for the route optimization using Guided Local Search (GLS) algorithm was Bragança, a city in the northeast region of Portugal. The algorithm used in this work is available in open-source Google OR-tools. Results show that waste collection efficiency is affected by the upper limit of waste in dumpsters. Additionally, it is demonstrated the importance of dynamic selection of dumpsters. For instance, efficiency decreased 10.67% for the best upper limit compared to the traditional collection in the regular selection of dumpsters (levels only). However, an improvement of 50.45% compared to traditional collection was observed using dynamic selection of dumpsters to be collected. In other words, collection cannot be improved only by letting dumpsters reach 90% of waste level. In fact, strategies such as the dynamic selection here presented, can play an important role to save resources in a SWMS.

Abstract
Forests worldwide have been suffering from fires damages, provoking incalculable losses in fauna and flora, economic losses, people and animals' deaths, among other problems. To avoid forest fires catastrophes, it is fundamental to develop innovative operations, such as a forest fire monitoring system. This work concentrates efforts on defining the optimum sensor allocation in a forest fires monitoring system based on a wireless sensor network. Thus, a bi-objective mathematical model is developed to solve the problem, in which the first objective consists of minimising the forest fire hazard of a given forest region, and the second objective refers to the sensors spreading into this region. The developed mathematical model was solved by genetic algorithm and the results demonstrated that the methodology was capable of presenting suitable solutions for the problem. © 2023 American Institute of Physics Inc.. All rights reserved.

Abstract
Forests worldwide have been devastated by fires. Forest fires cause incalculable damage to fauna and flora. In addition, a forest fire can lead to the death of people and financial damage in general, among other problems. To avoid wildfire catastrophes is fundamental to detect fire ignitions in the early stages, which can be achieved by monitoring ignitions through sensors. This work presents an integer programming approach to decide where to locate such sensors to maximize the coverage provided by them, taking into account different types of sensors, fire hazards, and technological and budget constraints. We tested the proposed approach in a real-world forest with around 7500 locations to be covered and about 1500 potential locations for sensors, showing that it allows obtaining optimal solutions in less than 20 min. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.