Abstract
Smart grid (SG) technologies are playing a key role in the electric grid transformation, bringing out promising benefits for different actors and empowering customers. However, this transition imposes new challenges concerning the operation and management of energy, particularly at the distribution level of the electric grid. This chapter provides an overview of achieved advances toward the widespread implementation of SG, including technological and infrastructure developments. Transactive energy presents a distributed decision-making coordination approach using automated energy transactions that is enabled by the intelligence and connectivity benefits of SG. The way in which these transactions can be integrated in a local market environment and how advances in transactive energy, supported by the infrastructure already developed to enable SG, are leading to the emergence of local energy markets is discussed in this chapter. © 2021 Elsevier Inc.

Abstract
The remote maintenance of home appliances, like washing machines, air conditioning, and heating system is a complex problem, but with the help of the ongoing developments on Internet of Things, Data Analysis and Artificial Intelligence, the problem can now be tackled with success. This paper mostly focus in presenting the architecture developed within the aim of the SMART-PDM project for the acquisition of data on the operation of home appliances and then it also shows some preliminary results for washing machines, which give some hints on how to fine tune the system to achieve predictive maintenance and condition monitoring.

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In democratic countries, government websites became an important channel for interaction with the public administration in the last few years. Nevertheless, several issues have an impact on the way users access to content and information. Lack of accessibility and usability or, in the broad sense, lack of concern with user needs, can still be found in many government websites. To address the problem, a previous literature review on e-government information delivery attributes was performed. Based on this review, a large set of attributes related to quality was obtained to evaluate these dimensions in the context of e-government. The purpose of this study is to better understand which of these attributes are the most valued, in the users' perspective, for evaluating content delivered by government websites. A qualitative approach was adopted, using Focus Group interviews as a strategy to obtain data and Thematic Analysis to analyze such data. The main results highlighted the attributes related to content delivery, interaction, and emotional aspects. User Experience, accessibility, and usability were prioritized by Focus Group participants.

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Visible Light Communication (VLC) has been emerging as a promising technology to address the increasingly high data-rate and time-critical demands that the Internet of Things (IoT) and 5G paradigms impose on the underlying Wireless Sensor Actuator Networking (WSAN) technologies. In this line, the IEEE 802.15.7 standard proposes several physical layers and Medium Access Control (MAC) sub-layer mechanisms that support a variety of VLC applications. Particularly, at the MAC sub-layer, it can support contention-free communications using Guaranteed Timeslots (GTS), introducing support for time-critical applications. However, to effectively guarantee accurate usage of such functionalities, it is vital to derive the worst-case bounds of the network. In this paper, we use network calculus to carry out the worst-case bounds analysis for GTS utilization of IEEE 802.15.7 and complement our model with an in-depth performance analysis. We also propose the inclusion of an additional mechanism to improve the overall scalability and effective bandwidth utilization of the network.

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