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Global warming forces the automotive industry to reduce real driving emissions and thus, its CO2 footprint. Besides maximizing the individual efficiency of powertrain components, there is also energy-saving potential in the choice of driving strategy. Many research works have noted the potential of model predictive control (MPC) methods to reduce energy consumption. However, this results in a complex control system with many parameters that affect the energy efficiency. Thus, an important question remains: how do these partially uncertain (system or controller) parameters influence the energy efficiency? In this article, a global variance-based sensitivity analysis method is used to answer this question. Therefore, a detailed powertrain model controlled by a longitudinal nonlinear MPC (NMPC) is developed and parameterized. Afterwards, a qualitative Morris screening is performed on this model, in order to reduce the parameter set. Subsequently, the remaining parameters are quantified using Generalized Sobol Indices, in order to take the time dependence of physical processes into account. This analysis reveals that the variations in vehicle mass, battery temperature, rolling resistance and auxiliary consumers have the greatest influence on the energy consumption. In contrast, the parameters of the NMPC only account for a maximum of 5% of the output variance.

Unsupervised learning for monocular camera motion and 3D scene understanding has gained popularity over traditional methods, which rely on epipolar geometry or non-linear optimization. Notably, deep learning can overcome many issues of monocular vision, such as perceptual aliasing, low-textured areas, scale drift, and degenerate motions. In addition, concerning supervised learning, we can fully leverage video stream data without the need for depth or motion labels. However, in this work, we note that rotational motion can limit the accuracy of the unsupervised pose networks more than the translational component. Therefore, we present RAUM-VO, an approach based on a model-free epipolar constraint for frame-to-frame motion estimation (F2F) to adjust the rotation during training and online inference. To this end, we match 2D keypoints between consecutive frames using pre-trained deep networks, Superpoint and Superglue, while training a network for depth and pose estimation using an unsupervised training protocol. Then, we adjust the predicted rotation with the motion estimated by F2F using the 2D matches and initializing the solver with the pose network prediction. Ultimately, RAUM-VO shows a considerable accuracy improvement compared to other unsupervised pose networks on the KITTI dataset, while reducing the complexity of other hybrid or traditional approaches and achieving comparable state-of-the-art results.

In this work, the online printing shop scheduling problem introduced in (Lunardi et al., Mixed Integer Linear Programming and Constraint Programming Models for the Online Printing Shop Scheduling Problem, Computers & Operations Research, to appear) is considered. This challenging real scheduling problem, that emerged in the nowadays printing industry, corresponds to a flexible job shop scheduling problem with sequencing flexibility; and it presents several complicating specificities such as resumable operations, periods of unavailability of the machines, sequence-dependent setup times, partial overlapping between operations with precedence constraints, and fixed operations, among others. A local search strategy and metaheuristic approaches for the problem are proposed and evaluated. Based on a common representation scheme, trajectory and populational metaheuristics are considered. Extensive numerical experiments with large-sized instances show that the proposed methods are suitable for solving practical instances of the problem; and that they outperform a half-heuristic-half-exact off-the-shelf solver by a large extent. Numerical experiments with classical instances of the flexible job shop scheduling problem show that the introduced methods are also competitive when applied to this particular case.