Online identification of appliances from power consumption data collected by smart meters

The efficient use of resources is a matter of great concern in today’s society, especially in the energy sector. Although the main strategy to decrease energy use has long been focused on supply, over the last few years, there has been a shift to the demand side. Under this new line of action, demand-side management networks have emerged and extended from the household level to larger installations, with the appearance of the concepts of Smart Grids and even Smart Cities. The extended use of Smart Meters for measuring residential electricity consumption facilitates the creation of such intelligent environments. In this context, this article proposes a system which extracts value from the collected consumer information to identify the appliances belonging to that smart environment by means of machine learning techniques. Considering the large amount of information that would be handled when millions of homes were sending data, big data technology has been used. An experiment to evaluate the classification method was carried out with seven devices and three different configurations. The results are also reported, achieving promising results, with recognition rates of 75 % after 1 h of training and 100 % after 4 h.     

Sufficient conditions for stability and stabilization of networked control systems with uncertainties and nonlinearities

In this paper, we consider the problem of robust stability and stabilization for networked control systems (NCS) with uncertain/nonlinear dynamics AUTHOR: Please check that authors and their affiliations are correct. in which the network‐induced delays are time‐varying and bounded. Based on some recent achievements, a relatively simple Lyapunov–Krasovskii functional is proposed to derive sufficient conditions both for analysis and synthesis of NCS in the form of LMIs depending on the delay bounds. The effectiveness of the proposed method is illustrated by several benchmark examples available in the literature. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Is It Possible to Retain Customer Loyalty When a Service Has Failed?

This article aims to analyze the impact of recovery on loyalty in the context of a service chain characterized by the e‐quality–perceived value–loyalty relationship. A sample of 91 out of 1,201 respondents claimed to have had service problems with an online travel agency website. A causal model to test relationships was performed using structural equations modeling, and it was found that data fit with the proposed model. The really important point to retaining customers is quality. It is not so clear that the recovery effort might affect loyalty. Our findings underpin some previous stream of literature confirming that recovery does not always affect loyalty. Although the literature has not reached a consensus in this topic, we add new elements in this debate.     

Mobilizing Company Members' Full Innovative Potential

Most of the literature on innovation management highlights the fundamental role played by people in the innovation process and the need to fully develop the creative and innovative potential of organizations' members. This article offers the result of extensive research carried out among some of the most innovative companies in the Basque Country, a highly innovative region located in the north of Spain. It draws interesting conclusions about how these innovative companies combine strong leadership, human resource practices, and an organizational culture that enhances innovation capabilities among the company's employees. More specifically, it answers questions such as the following: Are human resources policies, leadership, and innovation culture implemented equally in Basque innovative companies? Do companies make the same effort in deploying these elements or routines and practices related to them? Can we see a pattern in the use of these elements among innovative firms? © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Minimising total tardiness in the m-machine flowshop problem: A review and evaluation of heuristics and metaheuristics

In this work, a review and comprehensive evaluation of heuristics and metaheuristics for the m-machine flowshop scheduling problem with the objective of minimising total tardiness is presented. Published reviews about this objective usually deal with a single machine or parallel machines and no recent methods are compared. Moreover, the existing reviews do not use the same benchmark of instances and the results are difficult to reproduce and generalise. We have implemented a total of 40 different heuristics and metaheuristics and we have analysed their performance under the same benchmark of instances in order to make a global and fair comparison. In this comparison, we study from the classical priority rules to the most recent tabu search, simulated annealing and genetic algorithms. In the evaluations we use the experimental design approach and careful statistical analyses to validate the effectiveness of the different methods tested. The results allow us to clearly identify the state-of-the-art methods.     

Understanding users and their needs

Gaze-control enables people to control a computer by using eye-gaze to select items on screen. Gaze-control is a necessity for people who have lost all motor control of their body and only have control over eye movements. In addition, gaze-control can be the quickest and least tiring option for a far broader group of people with varying disabilities. This paper reports findings from gaze-control user trials involving users from both groups: people who are totally paralyzed, as well as people with a wide range of complex disabilities. The trials conducted involved four different centres supporting people with disabilities in three different European countries. Several gaze-control systems were trialled by a large number of users with varying needs and abilities. The perceived benefits of gaze-control are described, and recommendations for successful assessment and implementation of gaze-control are provided.     

Single-mode, optical-fiber sensors and tunable wavelength filters based on the resonant excitation of metal-clad modes

The resonant excitation of metal-clad modes, including fundamental and higher-order modes, in a multilayer structure deposited on the polished cladding of a single-mode optical fiber is theoretically analyzed and experimentally demonstrated. The excitation of metal-clad modes is shown as a resonant power transfer from the fiber to the metal-clad mode that takes place for an external refractive-index value such that the effective index of the metal-clad mode reaches the cladding level. The observed attenuation on the TM polarization provides a suitable transducing mechanism for refractive-index sensor devices as well as the principle for developing tunable wavelength-polarized filters with a wide range of optical performance characteristics.