Institutional buildings still lack effective, real-time mechanisms to detect energy consumption anomalies, causing inefficiencies, higher costs and environmental impact. Many current solutions remain centralized or isolated, which limits real-time detection, Internet of Things (IoT) integration and distributed intelligence. This gap is addressed by the Electricity Consumption Anomaly Detector (eCAD), a system that combines multi-agent architectures, artificial intelligence, and IoT within an edge-computing infrastructure that enables autonomous, real-time anomaly detection with minimal latency and efficient use of resources. eCAD processes heterogeneous data sources, including Wi-Fi access-point data, temporal patterns, and occupant-related variables such as academic context. This comprehensive feature set enables context-aware, autonomous identification of anomalous consumption. The system was deployed on the Smart University platform at the University of Alicante, where distributed agents collect, process, and visualize energy data in real time. Experimental results show an accuracy of 91.02%, with low false-positive and false-negative rates. Unlike most prior approaches, the proposed architecture offers a distinctive contribution: a holistic and scalable framework that integrates data acquisition, analysis, and visualization at the edge, validated in a real-world academic environment. Complementary analyses further confirmed the stability, operational impact, and scalability of the system.

Traditionally, drinking water supply infrastructures have been designed to store as much water as possible and to do so during the energy cheap hours. This approach is unsustainable today. The use of digital systems capable of modeling the behavior of infrastructures and the creation of intelligent control systems can help to make drinking water supply systems more efficient and effective, while still meeting minimum service requirements. This work proposes the development of a control system, based on multi-agent systems (MAS), capable of generating an intelligent control over a drinking water infrastructure, based on the use of local interests of the agents and with an emergent behavior coherent with the needs. To validate the proposal, a simulator based on the infrastructures of a medium-sized Spanish city of 5000 inhabitants has been built and the control has been simulated using the MAS. The results show how the system can maintain the objectives set, handling unknown situations, and facilitating the development of future physical systems based on a just-in-time paradigm that guarantees sustainability, as it allows the generation of virtualizations of the infrastructures and their behavior, thus being able to study the best option for an infrastructure to resolve a supply situation.

Most modern computer systems operate in distributed environments. To develop and test such applications, services, and systems, it is necessary to consider the physical devices, architectures, communication, security and deployment mechanisms involved. However, the requirements’ specification process still replicates that of traditional applications: details remain implicit and are hidden in the description. As a result, specifications are difficult to identify and, ultimately, tests are designed in the traditional way: they overlook constraints and fail to achieve the desired effects. Our objective is to design a methodology for specifying requirements in both traditional software and applications deployed in distributed environments. We present an iterative and incremental requirements specification methodology. This methodology allows us to describe functional requirements and incorporate non-functional or quality constraints, which is the main contribution of this proposal. To ensure that quality requirements are specified during the design phase, the methodology proposes a series of phases, stages and artefacts that ensure the discovery and consideration of these requirements. In order to find out the strengths and weaknesses of our methodology, we have carried out a comparative study with other similar proposals in the literature. To this end, evaluation criteria were defined by considering standards and good practices in Requirements Engineering. The results of the comparative study show that our methodology constitutes a solid procedure for a detailed requirements specification from the beginning of the software development cycle. This represents an advance over the rest of the proposals studied. Our methodology contributes to the simplification of the design and execution phases of software testing, enabling traceability between the specified requirements and the designed test cases.

The University of Alicante (UA), in Spain, is aligned with an Open Government strategy. Within this strategy, UA is carrying out the OpenData4U (Open Data for Universities) project which aims to provided mechanisms to open data from universities, finding out how open data contributes to open government in universities and to encourage reusing open data (not only for the sake of transparency, but also as a basis of novel data-intensive business models related to universities). This paper describes one of the output of the project: an approach for opening data from universities keeping in mind data quality criteria, and tailored to no specific technological scenario. This approach allowed UA to launch its open data portal http://datos.ua.es that is also reviewed in this paper. Also, some research challenges related to university open data are enumerated.

In this paper, Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) and Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) approaches are analyzed given that represent both emerging and key role for Intelligent Transportations Systems (ITS). However, It is worth noting that WSN and SOA approaches have begun to be applied into ITS separately and day by day these approaches tend to be combined to get the best outcomes for both safety and security for ITS applications. For this reason, a discussion of the principals ITS applications of these two approaches and a case study, that has been designed and implemented to illustrate their advantages, are presented. The case study is focused on support a very useful ITS service associated with the localization of parking spaces.

This paper presents a proposal enabling the modelling of manufacturing processes independently of the structure and composition of the industrial plant where these processes will ultimately be implemented. The rationale for the proposal is in the incorporation of knowledge, supported by ontologies regarding manufacturing processes, industrial machinery and the industrial plants involved. With this knowledge, process engineers can focus their efforts exclusively to define the activities to be performed on the raw material (abstract model), allowing the system to infer what other activities should be incorporated in the abstract model to obtain a particular manufacturing process tailored to a particular industrial plant. To refine the proposal, a case study is put forward in which the management system was able to infer the way for the raw material to be processed according to the abstract model and automatically composed the activities necessary for achieving it. Finally, an implementation of this management system for processes is presented together with the design of two models of industrial plant that demonstrate the validity of our proposal.

The maturity of IT, in conjunction with certain modern theories about Business Processes Management (BPM), has propitiated an appropriate scenario for meeting the needs of new business models, which are increasingly centred on mass customization. Integration solutions provided within the framework of manufacturing organisations have opened up a wide range of possibilities in process management, which, paradoxically, is causing the traditional bottleneck between the enterprise level and production levels to now be transferred to the process management and modelling levels. This paper proposes the incorporation of knowledge into the definition of the processes and services involved by means of an ontology, thus maximising the automation of process modelling and facilitating the work of process engineers.

In this paper we present an approach based on the use of embedded network devices for the deployment of small network services suitable for IT management in industrial and manufacturing environments. The novelty of the proposal resides in the fact that allows to unfold IT services that can be deployed without the need for specialized IT staff since the services in question have a zero maintenance design philosophy. They are presented under both conventional (client-server) and more open (SOA) standards, more specifically, as Web Services. To illustrate the specific the proposal, we have chosen as an example an embedded device able to monitor the correct operation of the applications and IT services located in the current manufacturing equipment and components.

In this paper we present an approach based on the use of embedded network devices for the deployment of small network services, such as DHCP, BOOTP, filters or very specific proxies. The novelty of the proposal resides in the very reduced size of the devices, in that every device is specialized in a certain network function, and specially designed to operate with minimum maintenance, and in the fact that they are presented under both conventional (client-server) and more open (SOA) standards, more concretely, as Web Services. At the same time, these embedded services can work in an individual way or in collaboration with other enterprise network services, either provided by means of conventional systems or by means of other embedded devices. To specify the proposal, we have chosen as example an embedded device able to manage the remote boot of network nodes by means of Wake on LAN (WoL) through Internet.

At present, with the expansion of information technologies at the industry, it is vital to implant proactive, self-managed systems that ensure continuous operation and, therefore, business continuity. This article proposes a regeneration system for industrial production elements that transfers the concept of high availability to the manufacturing levels of the organisation, acting automatically under open protocols when there is degradation or failure of any of the components, ensuring that normal operation is resumed within a delimited time. In addition to this proposal, we present a development scenario that allows the validity of the approach to be confirmed, while verifying the drastic reduction in recovery times, the support for the significant heterogeneity existing in these scenarios and their high level of automation, while practically dispensing with the intervention of system administrators

In this paper we present an approach based on the use of embedded network devices for the deployment of small network services, such as DHCP, BOOTP, filters or very specific proxies. The novelty of the proposal resides in the very reduced size of the devices, in that every device is specialized in a certain network function, and specially designed to operate with minimum maintenance, and in the fact that they are presented under both conventional (client-server) and more open (SOA) standards, more concretely, as Web services. At the same time, these embedded services can work in an individual way or in collaboration with other enterprise network services, either provided by means of conventional systems or by means of other embedded devices. To specify the proposal, we have chosen as example an embedded device able to manage the remote boot of network nodes by means of wake on LAN (WoL) through Internet.

In the present paper we propose a method that permits visualization of manufacturing devices from a functional perspective. The aim of this method is to raise the abstraction level of manufacturing devices from the lower levels of production to the enterprise level of the business model. The target of this new approach is to integrate in a transparent way the resources, processes and, in general, the business logic of manufacturing levels using existing business models and achieving business continuity and process automation. The proposed method comprises two phases: the first phase that we have named industrial machinery normalization process; and the second phase that we have named manufacturing processes reorganization process. This paper focuses mainly on the former, i.e. specification of the hardware normalization and industrial machinery functionalities process.

This article proposes a multiagent system for industrial production elements that transfers the concept of fault tolerance to the manufacturing levels of the organisation, acting automatically under open protocols when there is degradation or failure of any of the components, ensuring that normal operation is resumed within a delimited time. The main characteristics of this system are the drastic reduction in recovery times, the support for the significant heterogeneity existing in these scenarios and their high level of automation, while practically dispensing with the intervention of system administrators.