The energy sector is currently undergoing a significant shift, driven by the growing integration of renewable energy sources and the decentralization of electricity markets, which are now extending into local communities. This transformation highlights the pivotal role of prosumers within these markets, and as a result, the concept of Renewable Energy Communities is gaining traction, empowering their members to curtail reliance on non-renewable energy sources by facilitating local energy generation, storage, and exchange. Also in a community, management efficiency depends on being able to predict future consumption to make decisions regarding the purchase, sale and storage of electricity, which is why forecasting the consumption of community members is extremely important. This study presents an innovative approach to manage community energy balance, relying on Machine Learning (ML) techniques, namely eXtreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost), to forecast electricity consumption. Subsequently, a decision algorithm is employed for energy trading with the public grid, based on solar production and energy consumption forecasts, storage levels and market electricity prices. The outcomes of the simulated model demonstrate the efficacy of incorporating these techniques, since the system showcases the potential to reduce both the community electricity expenses and its dependence on energy from the centralized distribution grid. ML-based techniques allowed better results specially for bi-hourly tariffs and high storage capacity scenarios with community bill reductions of 9.8%, 2.8% and 5.4% for high, low, and average photovoltaic (PV) generation levels, respectively.

Forecasting road flow has strong importance for both allowing authorities to guarantee safety conditions and traffic efficiency, as well as for road users to be able to plan their trips according to space and road occupation. In a summer resort, such as beaches near cities, traffic depends directly on weather conditions, variables that should be of great impact on the quality of forecasts. Will the use of a dataset with information on transit flows enhanced with meteorological information allow the construction of a precise traffic flow forecasting model, allowing predictions to be made in advance of the traffic flow in suitable time? The present work evaluates different machine learning methods, namely long short-term memory, autoregressive LSTM, and a convolutional neural network, and data attributes to predict traffic flows based on radar and meteorological sensor information. The models trained to predict the traffic flow have shown that weather conditions were essential for this forecast, and thus, these variables were employed in the evaluated deep-learning models. The results pointed out that it is possible to forecast the traffic flow at a reasonable error level for one-hour periods, and the CNN model presented the lowest prediction error values and consumed the least time to build its predictions.

The autonomous identification of animal births has a significant added value, since it enables for a prompt timely human intervention in the process, protecting the young and the mothers’ health, without requiring continuous human surveillance. Wearable inertial sensors have been employed for a variety of animal monitoring applications, thanks to their low cost and the fact that they allow less invasive monitoring process. Alarms triggered by the occurrence of events must be generated close to the events to avoid delays caused by communication latency, which is why this type of mechanism is typically implemented at the network’s edge and integrated with existing auxiliary mechanisms on the Internet. Although the detection of births in cattle has been carried out commercially for some years, there is no solution for small ruminants, especially goats, where the literature does not even report any attempts. The current work consisted of a first attempt at developing an automatic birth monitor using inertial sensing, as well as detection techniques based on Machine Learning, implemented in a network edge device to assure real-time alarm triggering. Thus, two concept drift detection techniques and seven kidding detection mechanisms were developed using data classification models. The work also includes the testing and comparison of learning results, both in terms of accuracy and of computational costs of the detection module, for algorithms implemented. The results revealed that, despite their simplicity, concept drift algorithms do not allow kidding detection, whereas classification-algorithm-based static learning models do, despite the unbalanced character of the dataset and its reduced size. The learning findings are quite promising in terms of computational cost and its suitability for deployment on edge devices. The algorithm demonstrates behavior changes four hours before kidding and allows for the identification of the kidding hour with an accuracy of 61%, as well as the capacity to improve the overall learning process with a larger dataset.

Monitoring sheep’s behavior is of paramount importance, because deviations from normal patterns may indicate nutritional, thermal or social stress, changes in reproductive status, health issues, or predator attacks. The night period, despite being a more restful period in which animals are theoretically sleeping and resting, represents approximately half of the life cycle of animals; therefore, its study is of immense interest. Wearable sensors have become a widely recognized technique for monitoring activity, both for their precision and the ease with which the sensorized data can be analyzed. The present dataset consists of data from the sensorization of 18 Serra da Estrela sheep, during the nocturnal period between 18 November 2021 and 16 February 2022. The data contain measurements taken by ultrasound and accelerometry of the height from neck to ground, as well as measurements taken by an accelerometer in the monitoring collar. Data were collected every 10 s when the animals were in the shelter. With the collection of data from various sensors, active and inactive periods can be identified throughout the night, quantifying the number and average time of those periods.

The detection of kidding in production animals is of the utmost importance, given the frequency of problems associated with the process, and the fact that timely human help can be a safeguard for the well-being of the mother and kid. The continuous human monitoring of the process is expensive, given the uncertainty of when it will occur, so the establishment of an autonomous mechanism that does so would allow calling the human responsible who could intervene at the opportune moment. The present dataset consists of data from the sensorization of 16 pregnant and two non-pregnant Charnequeira goats, during a period of four weeks, the kidding period. The data include measurements from neck to floor height, measured by ultrasound and accelerometry data measured by an accelerometer existing at the monitoring collar. Data was continuously sampled throughout the experiment every 10 s. The goats were monitored both in the goat shelter (day and night) and during the grazing period in the pasture. The births of the animals were also registered, both in terms of the time at which they took place, but also with details regarding how they took place and the number of offspring, and notes were also added.

Monitoring road traffic is extremely important given the possibilities it opens up in terms of studying the behavior of road users, road design and planning problems, as well as because it can be used to predict future traffic. Especially on highways that connect beaches and larger urban areas, traffic is characterized by having peaks that are highly dependent on weather conditions and rest periods. This paper describes a dataset of mobility patterns of a coastal area in Aveiro region, Portugal, fully covered with traffic classification radars, over a two-year period. The sensing infrastructure was deployed in the scope of the PASMO project, an open living lab for co-operative intelligent transportation systems. The data gathered includes the speed of the detected objects, their position, and their type (heavy vehicle, light vehicle, two-wheeler, and pedestrian). The dataset includes 74,305 records, corresponding to the aggregation of road information at 10 min intervals. A brief analysis of the dataset shows the highly dynamic nature of traffic during the two-year period. In addition, the existence of meteorological records from nearby stations, and the recording of daily data on COVID-19 infections, make it possible to cross-reference information and study the influence of weather conditions and infections on traffic behavior.