In this paper we introduce a new decentralized digital currency, called NRGcoin. Prosumers in the smart grid trade locally produced renewable energy using NRGcoins, the value of which is determined on an open currency exchange market. Similar to Bitcoins, this currency offers numerous advantages over fiat currency, but unlike Bitcoins it is generated by injecting energy into the grid, rather than spending energy on computational power. In addition, we propose a novel trading paradigm for buying and selling green energy in the smart grid. Our mechanism achieves demand response by providing incentives to prosumers to balance their production and consumption out of their own self-interest. We study the advantages of our proposed currency over traditional money and environmental instruments, and explore its benefits for all parties in the smart grid.

The paper presents a cross-country analysis of the second generation of currency boards (CB) introduced in three East European countries: Bulgaria, Estonia and Lithuania. We focus on their institutional, legal and political characteristics which are closely associated with the operation of the automatic mechanism (AM) of currency boards. The presence of an automatic mechanism within the framework of the currency board is often cited as a major counterpoint to the "discretion and subjectivity" of a classical central bank. Since there is no precise definition of automatic mechanisms in the literature, we define it as: "the presence of a positive cointegration relationship between the balance of payments and the reserve money (or money supply) and absence of discretionary variables in the model." When discretionary variables are present in the model in one form or another, we may speak of a "mechanism for adjustment through discretionconscious or unconscious." Within the framework of the second generation of currency boards, we reduce the channel of discretion to the presence of atypical balance sheet items and employment of a number of monetary policy instruments. We seek in this article to compare currency board automatic mechanism in Bulgaria, Estonia and Lithuania.L'article procède d'une analyse transversale par pays de la deuxième génération des "bureaux d'émission" (currency boards) introduits dans trois pays de l'Europe de l'Est. L'accent est mis sur les caractéristiques institutionnelles, juridiques et politiques qui sont étroitement associées à l'opération du mécanisme automatique (MA) des bureaux d'émission. L'existence d'un mécanisme automatique dans la structure d'un bureau d'émission est souvent mise en avant comme l'argument majeur à l'encontre de la "discrétion" et la "subjectivité" d'une banque centrale classique. Parce qu'il n'existe aucune définition précise du mécanisme automatique dans la littérature, nous la définissons comme "la présence d'une relation positive de cointégration entre la balance des paiements et les réserves monétaires (ou l'offre de monnaie) et l'absence de variables discrétionna-ires dans le modèle". Quand des variables discrétionnaires sont présentes dans le modèle sous une forme ou une autre, nous pouvons parler d'un "mécanisme d'ajustement discrétionnaire -conscient ou inconscient". Au sein de la structure de la deuxième génération des bureaux d'émission, la discrétion se réduit à la présence de postes atypiques dans le bilan et à l'emploi d'un certain nombre d'instruments de politique monétaire.L'article propose une comparaison du mécanisme automatique en Bulgarie, Estonie et Lithuanie.Brought to you by | HEC Bibliotheque Maryriam ET J.

Assigning scheduled tasks to a multi-skilled workforce is a known NP-complete problem with many applications in health care, services, logistics and manufacturing. Optimising the use and composition of costly and scarce resources such as staff has major implications on any organisation's health. The present paper introduces a new, versatile two-phase matheuristic approach to the shift minimisation personnel task scheduling problem, which considers assigning tasks to a set of multi-skilled employees, whose working times have been determined beforehand. Computational results show that the new hybrid method is capable of finding, for the first time, optimal solutions for all benchmark instances from the literature, in very limited computation time. The influence of a set of problem instance features on the performance of different algorithms is investigated in order to discover what makes particular problem instances harder than others. These insights are useful when deciding on organisational policies to better manage various operational aspects related to workforce. The empirical hardness results enable to generate hard problem instances. A set of new challenging instances is now available to the academic community.

The 5th generation (5G) wireless communication network is expected to support up to 1000x more connections per cell with reduced latency below 1 ms. Maintaining uplink synchronization for each individual device as conventional 4G does, known as the Timing Advance adjustment, will lead to significant signaling overhead, especially for small traffic scenarios, like IoT services, "always-on-line" TCP connections, etc. This paper shows that the Timing Advance is not necessary if we introduce FBMC waveform in combination with suitable multiple access schemes. The resulting system is highly robust against timing misalignment while attaining high spectral efficiency.