The paper describes a joint university-industry project aimed at defining hardware and software requirements for the development of a prototypical microgrid platform on existing sites able to manage generation resources and load. The paper describes an architecture developed for integrating existing software tools for on-line load monitoring and control and for management of in-site generation. The system acquires data from field and stores information on a server, from which an optimization tool gets data in order to perform its calculations and give the optimal set points to the programmable generation resources. Results are reported about experimentation at test sites with different generating units, such as cogeneration of heat and power (CHP) and/or renewable power generating units equipped with a real-time monitoring tool

Abstract:In order to define the phytotoxic potential of Salvia species a database was developed for fast and efficient data collection in screening studies of the inhibitory activity of Salvia exudates on the germination of Papaver rhoeas L. and Avena sativa L.. The structure of the database is associated with the use of algorithms for calculating the usual germination indices reported in the literature, plus the newly defined indices (Weighted Average Damage, Differential Weighted Average Damage, Germination Weighted Average Velocity) and other variables usually recorded in experiments of phytotoxicity (LC50, LC90). Furthermore, other algorithms were designed to calculate the one-way ANOVA followed by Duncan's multiple range test to highlight automatically significant differences between the species. The database model was designed in order to be suitable also for the development of further analysis based on the artificial neural network approach, using Self-Organising Maps (SOM).

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A new method to analyze single ionic channel current conduction is presented. It is based on an automatic classification by K-means algorithm and on the concept of information entropy. This method is used to study the conductance of multistate ion current jumps induced by tetanus toxin in planar lipid bilayers. A comparison is presented with the widely used Gaussian best fit approach, whose main drawback is the fact that it is based on the manual choice of the base line and of meaningful fragments of current signal. On the contrary, the proposed method is able to automatically process a great amount of information and to remove spurious transitions and multichannels. The number of levels and their amplitudes do not have to be known a priori. In this way the presented method is able to produce a reliable evaluation of the conductance levels and their characteristic parameters in a short time.

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