In recent years, electrical power and energy systems have undergone an unprecedented revolution never observed before. The liberalisation of electricity markets, the integration of electrical vehicles, information technology innovation, advanced communication systems, and smart-metering, etc., are all contributing to major changes in the basic operations of electrical power systems in their entirety. Consequently, all these aspects must enable electrical power and energy systems to become more intelligent, providing benefits, not only for the utilities and power systems operators, but also for consumers and society as a whole. This book aims to share, address and disseminate state-of-the-art research, development and implementation results of microgrids in a simple way, in order to bring researchers, engineers and practitioners world-wide together, from both academia and industry, with the aim of fostering new advances; identifying challenges and opportunities in technology operation; and planning and design interactions among engineers, researchers and stakeholders in this important field of knowledge. This textbook consists of six chapters that have been written by relevant academics, researchers and engineers. Most of the chapters include state-of-the-art of algorithms, methods, know-how and examples of applications in academic or industrial problems, as well as their solutions through the most adequate optimisation technique. Researchers, engineers and students are encouraged to develop their own simple computer programs in order to solve the problems they encounter using the techniques outlined in this book.

In recent years more attention has been devoted to the computer aided scheduling problems in industries process. Computer programs are now available in order for production engineers to develop an understanding for how a decision can be taken while making the scheduling process easier to determine when, where and how to produce a set of products. Due to the discrete decisions involved, these scheduling problems have a combinatorial nature and are therefore challenging from a computational complexity standpoint. With the tools, scheduling studies can be run to simulate present industry conditions and to help with the long-range planning of new facilities for a given production plan. The tools also provide an opportunity for the production engineers to do such things as optimise the production process and apply diverse mathematical optimisation techniques.