Videogames now enable players to spend virtual fortunes on exotic virtual goods and even create and sell virtual artefacts. Online consumers may also browse endlessly through virtual marketplaces and create and display virtual goods. These virtual commodities are desired and enjoyed as if they were real, but are not actually bought, or owned in a material sense – often resulting in frustration ...

Double dispatch is the ability of selecting dynamically a method not only according to the run-time type of the receiver (single dispatch), but also to the run-time type of the argument. This mechanism unleashes the power of dynamic binding in object-oriented languages, so enhancing re-usability and separation of responsibilities. However, many mainstream languages, such as, e.g., C++ and Java,...

Accurate demand forecasts are important for managing energy efficiently in electric grids. However, building models for demand forecasting is a challenging task as it depends on numerous factors that are both intrinsic and external to the grid. Furthermore, these factors are time-varying and non-linear as well. This makes demand forecasting a cumbersome task. This investigation proposes a simpl...

A power system operation at minimum cost is no longer the only criterion for electrical power dispatch. Combined economic emission dispatch problem is obtained by considering both the economy and emission objectives with required constraints. This problem can be solving optimization techniques. Many optimization techniques are slow for such complex optimization tasks and are not suitable for on...

Since Ancient Days, human beings have exchanged money for goods, or even some goods for other kind of goods. The goods that were exchanged characterized the different ages through History. Today, we are in the so-called Information Age and, therefore, a core part of current interactions take place around data exchanges. Serge Abiteboul et al.’s “Data on the Web” aims at laying the foundations f...

In this paper we present a new functional traversal abstraction for processing OO data structures that decomposes traversal computation into three function objects and a traversal control function. Function objects compute and combine values over a general traversal while the control function allows programmers to limit the extent of a traversal. Our new abstraction is supported by a Java libra...

In this paper, we present a parallel dispatch model with secure route structures for protecting the dispatch route information of mobile agents. This model facilitates efficient dispatching of agents in a hierarchical manner, and ensures route security by exposing minimal route information to hosts. It also provides the capability for detecting attacks. Based on the secure dispatch model, two e...

Due to the environmental concerns that arise from the emissions produced by fossil-fueled electric power plants, the classical economic dispatch, which operates electric power systems so as to minimize only the total fuel cost, can no longer be considered alone. Thus, by environmental dispatch, emissions can be reduced by dispatch of power generation to minimize emissions. The environmental/eco...

Since renewable energies have been and will be massively integrated, electrical power grids require more refined generation dispatch modes and smarter communication methods. In this paper, the real-time generation dispatch and communication architecture of smart grid with renewable energy are studied. Firstly, the technical characteristics and application background of smart grid communication ...