Abstract
This paper presents how the ICT infrastructure developed in the European ENCOURAGE project, centered around a message oriented middleware, enabled energy savings in buildings and households. The components of the middleware, as well as the supervisory control strategy, are overviewed, to support the presentation of the results and how they could be achieved. The main results are presented on three of the pilots of the project, a first one consisting of a single household, a second one of a residential neighborhood, and a third one in a university campus. © 2016 IEEE.

Abstract
The FlexOffer (FO) concept was initially created within the EU FP7 project MIRABEL [1]. It permits exposing demand and supply loads with associated flexibilities in time and quantity for energy commerce, load levelling, and different use-cases. To put it in a simple way, a FO specifies an amount of energy, a duration, an earliest begin time, a latest finish time, and a price, e.g., "I want 50 KWh over 3 hours between 5 PM and 12 PM, for a value of 0.25 €/kWh".

Abstract

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.