This paper presents a new method to improve reliability and also minimize losses in radial distribution systems (RDS), trough a process of network reconfiguration, using a genetic algorithm approach. The methodology adopted to enhance reliability, uses the Monte Carlo simulation and an historical data of the network such as the level of reliability and the severity of potential contingencies in each branch. The method analyses the RDS in two perspectives. A first perspective of optimization considering no investment, therefore using only the switches presented in the network, and a second perspective of optimization where is given the possibility to place a limited number of tie-switches and thus get better results. Here, the number of tie-switches and the branches that can receive them are defined by a decision agent. The effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated through the analysis of a 69 bus RDS.

Web repositories are large scale warehouses of data downloaded from the Web, needed by applications that summarize that data to produce results that help people use information. Time is a central dimension in Web data, because the Web is continuously changing and it is impossible to get a snapshot of a large portion of the Web instantaneously. Developers of applications that manage Web data usually distribute the operations performed by their applications over several processing nodes, to scale-up to the amount of data that may be processed. Versus is a model for a repository providing time oriented distributed Web data management. Time is managed by versioning the objects saved in the repository. Distribution is managed by using a hierarchy of workspaces. Distributed threads work on data stored in the lower level workspaces, and save it by checking-in that data into the workspace in the next upper level. Versus applications can specify the granularity of the distribution and the conflict resolution policies they want to implement. This allows a great control over the repository, increasing the number and type of applications it is suitable to support. The Versus model was embodied in a prototype that is being used to build applications for managing data collected from the Web

The principles of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) argue for the design of systems composed of re-usable coarse-grained software components which consume and provide services in a service ecosystem. Despite being commonly mentioned in an enterprise context, these are very present in the web - most web applications expose some of their data via APIs, which are then used by other web and mobile applications. The proliferation of user-owned connected devices has brought value to mobile application developers which can make use of locally-available sensors and capabilities and send their information to the web, centralizing the data flows. A more distributed approach would have device capabilities offered directly on the network as services hosted by the user. These pervasive user-hosted services could be made discoverable and available over a public federated service infrastructure. The infrastructure would provide transport over an identity layer, where endpoints are addressed by their identities instead of network identifiers, and on top of which services can be exposed to be consumed by trusted friends or anonymous users, as the hosting user prefers. The work presented in this paper explores the possibility of implementing a distributed social SOA over Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP). It differs from traditional SOA because it attempts to counter relative centralization of the web, in favour of a fully-distributed service ecosystem where each peer can behave both as service consumer and provider. Finally, an analysis is done on how suitable XMPP is to serve as a base protocol for such infrastructure.