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Demand response has been widely developed during recent years to increase efficiency and decrease the cost in the electric power sector by shifting energy use, smoothening the load curve, and thus ensuring benefits for all participating parties. This paper introduces a Demand Response Alert Service (DRAS) that can optimize the interaction between the energy industry parties and end users by sending the minimum number of relatable alerts to satisfy the transformation of the load curve. The service creates appliance models for certain deferrable appliances based on past-usage measurements and prioritizes households according to the probability of the use of their appliances. Several variations of the appliance model are examined with respect to the probabilistic association of appliance usage on different days. The service is evaluated for a peak-shaving scenario when either one or more appliances per household are involved. The results demonstrate a significant improvement compared to a random selection of end users, thus promising increased participation and engagement. Indicatively, in terms of the Area Under the Curve (AUC) index, the proposed method achieves, in all the studied scenarios, an improvement ranging between 41.33% and 64.64% compared to the baseline scenario. In terms of the F1 score index, the respective improvement reaches up to 221.05%.

In the modern business world it is increasingly often that Enterprises opt to bring their business model online, in their effort to reach out to more end users and increase their customer base. Whi...

The subjectivity that underlies the notion of quality does not allow the design and development of a universally accepted mechanism for software quality assessment. This is why contemporary research is now focused on seeking mechanisms able to produce software quality models that can be easily adjusted to custom user needs. In this context, we introduce QATCH, an integrated framework that applies static analysis to benchmark repositories in order to generate software quality models tailored to stakeholder specifications. Fuzzy multi-criteria decision-making is employed in order to model the uncertainty imposed by experts’ judgments. These judgments can be expressed into linguistic values, which makes the process more intuitive. Furthermore, a robust software quality model, the base model, is generated by the system, which is used in the experiments for QATCH system verification. The paper provides an extensive analysis of QATCH and thoroughly discusses its validity and added value in the field of software quality through a number of individual experiments.

In the era of Big Data, Cloud Computing and Internet of Things, most of the existing, integrated solutions that attempt to solve their challenges are either proprietary, limit functionality to a predefined set of requirements, or hide the way data are stored and accessed. In this work we propose Cenote, an open source Big Data management and analytics infrastructure for the Web of Things that overcomes the above limitations. Cenote is built on component-based software engineering principles and provides an all-inclusive solution based on components that work well individually. CCS CONCEPTS • Software and its engineering $\rightarrow$ Data flow architectures.

Smart metering systems have been gaining popularity as a vital part of the general smart grid paradigm. Naturally, as new technologies arise to cover this emerging field, so do security and privacy related issues regarding the energy consumer's personal data. These challenges impose the need for the development of new methods through a better understanding of the state-of-the-art. This paper aims at identifying the main categories of security and privacy techniques utilized in smart metering systems from a three-point perspective: i) a field research survey, ii) EU initiatives and findings towards the same direction and iii) a data-driven analysis of the state-of-the-art and the identification of its main topics (or themes) using topic modeling techniques. Detailed quantitative results of this analysis, such as semantic interpretation of the identified topics and a graph representation of the topic trends over time, are presented.

During the last few years, the REST architectural style has drastically changed the way web services are developed. Due to its transparent resource-oriented model, the RESTful paradigm has been incorporated into several development frameworks that allow rapid development and aspire to automate parts of the development process. However, most of the frameworks lack automation of essential web service functionality, such as authentication or database searching, while the end product is usually not fully compliant to REST. Furthermore, most frameworks rely heavily on domain specific modeling and require developers to be familiar with the employed modeling technologies. In this paper, we present a Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) engine that supports fast design and implementation of web services with advanced functionality. Our engine provides a front-end interface that allows developers to design their envisioned system through software requirements in multimodal formats. Input in the form of textual requirements and graphical storyboards is analyzed using natural language processing techniques and semantics, to semi-automatically construct the input model for the MDE engine. The engine subsequently applies model-to-model transformations to produce a RESTful, ready-to-deploy web service. The procedure is traceable, ensuring that changes in software requirements propagate to the underlying software artefacts and models. Upon assessing our methodology through a case study and measuring the effort reduction of using our tools, we conclude that our system can be effective for the fast design and implementation of web services, while it allows easy wrapping of services that have been engineered with traditional methods to the MDE realm.

As the popularity of the JavaScript language is constantly increasing, one of the most important challenges today is to assess the quality of JavaScript packages. Developers often employ tools for code linting and for the extraction of static analysis metrics in order to assess and/or improve their code. In this context, we have developed npn-miner, a platform that crawls the npm registry and analyzes the packages using static analysis tools in order to extract detailed quality metrics as well as high-level quality attributes, such as maintainability and security. Our infrastructure includes an index that is accessible through a web interface, while we have also constructed a dataset with the results of a detailed analysis for 2000 popular npm packages.

Energy markets have undergone important changes at the conceptual level over the last years. Decentralized supply, small-scale production and smart grid optimization and control are the new building blocks. These changes offer substantial opportunities for all energy market stakeholders, some of which however, remain largely unexploited. Small-scale consumers, as a whole, account for significant amount of energy in current markets (up to 40%), as individuals though their consumption is trivial, and their market power practically non-existent. Thus, it is necessary to assist small-scale energy market stakeholders combine their market power. Within the context of this work we propose Consumer Social Networks (CSNs) as a means for achieve the objective. We present a simulation environment for the creation of CSNs and provide a proof of concept on how CSNs can be formulated based on various criteria. Each cluster in a CSN may be treated as a nontrivial stakeholder with specific characteristics that can actively affect energy market pricing policies. We also show provide an indication on how demand response programs designed based on targeted incentives may lead to energy peak reductions.