Nuevas herramientas en la economía: tratamiento de problemas de optimización mediante computación simbólica

RESUMEN. Este artículo trata de mostrar la potencia de las nuevas herramientas de cálculo simbólico a través de un sencillo problema de optimización matemática, abordando dicho problema desde dos puntos de vista: un estudio analítico y un estudio geométrico. Para su desarrollo se ha utilizado el programa Mathematica, uno de los más difundidos actualmente de la ya amplia familia de sistemas de cálculo simbólico.ABSTRACT. This article aims to show the strength of the new symbolic computation tools through an easy mathematical optimization problem, approaching the problem from two points: analytical and geometrical study. The program "Mathematica", currently one of the most widespread of the large family of symbolic computation systems, has been used

Análisis sobre las implicaciones de la nueva estructura de las titulaciones oficiales: El esquema "3+2"

En octubre de 2007 se produce la aprobación del Real Decreto 1393/2007 por el que se establecía la ordenación de las enseñanzas universitarias oficiales, dando de esa manera el pistoletazo de salida para la adaptación efectiva del Sistema Universitario Español al Espacio Europeo de Educación Superior (EEES). En ese Real Decreto inicial se fijaba el curso 2010-2011 como curso en el que ya no podrían ofertarse plazas de nuevo ingresos para las titulaciones actuales en aquel momento. La fijación de este marco normativo daba por tanto a las Universidades 3 cursos académicos para rediseñar todas sus titulaciones, pasar por los correspondientes procesos de verificación, adaptar sus normativas internas, diseñar nuevos modelos pedagógicos,… en definitiva, un cambio profundo de nuestro sistema universitario con unos plazos de ejecución cortos con objeto de llegar al horizonte del 2010 marcado en la Declaración de Bolonia como fecha prevista para la plena consecución de los objetivos del EEES

Identificación de documentos multilingües relacionados mediante algoritmos de clustering de hormigas

RESUMEN: Este artículo presenta una estrategia de representación documental y un algoritmo bioinspirado para realizar procesos de agrupamiento en colecciones multilingües de documentos en las áreas de la economía y la empresa. El enfoque propuesto permite al usuario identificar grupos de documentos económicos relacionados escritos en español o inglés usando técnicas inspiradas en comportamientos de organización y agrupamiento de objetos observados en algunos tipos de hormigas. Para conseguir una representación vectorial de cada documento independiente del idioma, se han utilizado dos recursos lingüísticos: un glosario económico y un tesauro. Cada documento es representado usando cuatro vectores de rasgos: palabras, nombres propios, términos económicos del glosario y descriptores del tesauro. La identificación de los nombres propios y la extracción y lematización de palabras se realizan usando herramientas específicas. El esquema tf-idf es utilizado para medir la importancia de cada rasgo en el documento, y se utiliza una combinación lineal convexa de separaciones angulares de los vectores de rasgos como medida de similitud de documentos. El trabajo muestra resultados experimentales de aplicación del algoritmo propuesto sobre un corpus español-inglés de documentos científicos de áreas económica y de gestión empresarial. Los resultados demuestran la utilidad y efectividad de las técnicas de ant clustering y del esquema de representación propuesto.ABSTRACT: This paper presents a document representation strategy and a bio-inspired algorithm to cluster multilingual collections of documents in the field of economics and business. The proposed approach allows the user to identify groups of related economics documents written in Spanish and English using techniques inspired on clustering and sorting behaviours observed in some types of ants. In order to obtain a language independent vector representation of each document two multilingual resources are used: an economic glossary and a thesaurus. Each document is represented using four feature vectors: words, proper names, economic terms in the glossary and thesaurus descriptors. The proper name identification, word extraction and lemmatization are performed using specific tools. The tf-idf scheme is used to measure the importance of each feature in the document, and a convex linear combination of angular separations between feature vectors is used as similarity measure of documents. The paper shows experimental results of the application of the proposed algorithm in a Spanish-English corpus of research papers in economics and management areas. The results demonstrate the usefulness and effectiveness of the ant clustering algorithm and the proposed representation scheme.This work has been partially supported by SistIngAlfa project, ref: ALFA II-0321-FA of the European Union and Project Ref. TIN2006-13615 of the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science

Integration of environmental sustainability and product quality criteria in the decision-making process for feeding strategies in seabream aquaculture companies

Economic criteria have traditionally been taken into account as the most important factor for the selection of the most suitable feed in aquaculture. However, currently, management decisions have become increasingly complex, taking into account issues such as environmental sustainability and product quality. In this regard, there is growing recognition that the quality of the environment in which an organization operates has a direct effect on its financial results. Unfortunately, the complex integration of all these factors, which are sometimes opposing, limits the ability of aquaculture producers to adapt their production strategy to cleaner production systems. In this context, the aim of this work is to address this problem with the development of a novel, multiple-criteria decision-making optimization methodology that allows producers to include different preferences in the design of feeding strategies. Here, this methodology is applied to gilthead seabream production. The results obtained show the utility of this methodology for integrating numerous criteria in the evaluation of various alternatives and for carrying out an efficient sensitivity analysis which test the impact of different hypotheses on stakeholders' preferences.This research was undertaken under the MedAID project, which has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under grant agreement no 727315 (http://www.medaid-h2020.eu/). The authors wish to thank the Ibero-American Program for the Development of Science and Technology (CYTED) and the Red Iberoamericana BigDSSAgro (Ref. P515RT0123) for their support of this work, and Juan B. Cabral for the package scikit-criteria for MCDM

Determination of feeding strategies in aquaculture farms using a multiple-criteria approach and genetic algorithms

Since the 1990s, fishing production has stagnated and aquaculture has experienced an exponential growth thanks to the production on an industrial scale. One of the major challenges facing aquaculture companies is the management of breeding activity affected by biological, technical, environmental and economic factors. In recent years, decision-making has also become increasingly complex due to the need for managers to consider aspects other than economic ones, such as product quality or environmental sustainability. In this context, there is an increasing need for expert systems applied to decision-making processes that maximize economic efficiency of the operational process. One of the production planning decisions more affected by these changes is the feeding strategy. The selection of the feed determines the growth of the fish, but also generates the greatest impact of the activity on the environment and determines the quality of the product. In addition, feed is the main production cost in finfish aquaculture. In order to address all these problems, the present work integrates a multiple-criteria methodology with a genetic algorithm that allows determining the best sequence of feeds to be used throughout the fattening period, depending on multiple optimization objectives. Results show its utility to generate and evaluate different alternatives and fulfill the initial hypothesis, demonstrating that the combination of several feeds at precise times may improve the results obtained by one feed strategies.This paper is part of the MedAID project which has received funding from the European Union's H2020 program under grant agreement 727315. The authors also wish to thank the Ibero-American Program for the Development of Science and Technology, CYTED, and the Red Iberoamericana BigDSSAgro (Ref. P515RT0123) for their support of this work

Aquaculture production optimisation in multicage farms subject to commercial and operational constraints

The new advances in production methods have led to an increase in aquaculture production to the extent that the industry can now aid traditional fishing in meeting the growing global demand for fish within the context of the depletion of fisheries' resources. In this new context, market competition has increased and the complexity of managing industrial-scale production processes involving biological systems is still a growing problem. This has also led, in many cases, to a lack of management capacity that increases when it comes to setting long-term strategic plans. This study presents a methodology that aims to help aquaculture managers in decision making. It integrates a multi-criteria model and a Particle Swarm Optimisation (PSO) technique in order to provide a production strategy that optimises the value of multiple objectives at a fish farm with multiple cages, batches, feeding alternatives and products. This multi-criteria approach takes into account not only the effect of biological performance on economic profitability, but also the effect on environmental sustainability and aspects of product quality. In addition, it enables consideration of new operational and commercial constraints, such as the maximum volume of fish harvested per week, based on labour and marketing constraints, or the minimum necessary volume of fish harvested on specific dates to comply with commercial agreements. Results obtained demonstrate the utility of this novel approach to decision-making optimisation in aquaculture both when establishing overall strategic planning and when adopting new ways of producing.info:eu-repo/grantAgreement/EC/H2020/727315/EU/Mediterranean Aquaculture Integrated Development/MedAID

A fuzzy multicriteria approach for IT Governance evaluation

This work seeks to provide a new multi-criteria approach to assess IT Governance (ITG) in the area of Strategic Alignment. The complete methodological development process is described. The evaluation model uses Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process (FAHP) and it is targeted to IT processes, more specifically to the COBIT© IT maturity levels, domains and processes, thus providing a differentiated analysis of importance for each item. Its relevance is related to addressing isolated and individual evaluation criteria that are normally practiced in audits of processes. The model allows generating information that extends the guarantees of compliance and corporate governance from different organizations. This research demonstrates that the combined use of multi-criteria decision methodologies and soft computing proves to be particularly suitable for Strategic Alignment such as the focal area of COBIT. The model was applied in a big retail Brazilian company

Modelización automática de problemas de redes de distribución mediante tecnología JAVA

Esta comunicación presenta un programa informático desarrollado para el tratamiento gráfico de problemas de redes de distribución y su modelización de forma automática en los lenguajes de algunos de los programas de investigación operativa más conocidos y utilizados. El programa ha sido desarrollado utilizando el lenguaje de programación Java, por lo que puede ser utilizado a través de Internet. Mediante una interfase gráfica muy intuitiva, el usuario puede diseñar la red de transporte, estableciendo los valores de los diferentes parámetros del problema y variando determinadas características del mismo. Una vez diseñada la topología de la red, el software genera código fuente que puede ser utilizado directamente en programas tales como Lindo, Lingo, Gams, Mathematica,... Igualmente, tiene la posibilidad de generar un documento LaTeX con la explicación del modelo obtenido

Characterisation of the manufacturing sectors of high and medium-high technology compared with other industrial sectors

This study aims to identify the main characteristics of the activities concentrating on RandD and innovation in the industrial sector of high and medium-high technology, and also the main differences with regard to non technological sectors. In order to do so we use data on 1540 manufacturing companies in Spain in two subgroups according to the National Classification of Economic Activities (CNAE). The data correspond to the values of 44 variables organised into 5 blocks of activity that have to do with RandD and innovation. The study includes an exploratorydescriptive analysis with the aim of providing information, and evidence of the outstanding characteristics of sectors with more technological components compared with other industrial manufacturing sectors. Although the study refers to Spanish companies, a large proportion of the results are easily transferrable to similar socioeconomic environments

Un algoritmo híbrido basado en colonias de hormigas para la resolución de problemas de distribución en planta orientados a procesos

En este trabajo se presenta un algoritmo híbrido para resolver problemas de distribución en planta, considerando la posibilidad de incluir restricciones de tipo espacial o prioridades de cercanía. El algoritmo integra dos técnicas metaheurísticas: por un lado los algoritmos basados en colonias de hormigas (ACO) y por otro lado un algoritmo genético (AG) que permite mejorar el conjunto de soluciones obtenidas por las hormigas artificiales. En el ACO, un conjunto de hormigas artificiales construyen, de forma concurrente, un conjunto de posibles soluciones del problema por medio de asignaciones parciales de secciones o talleres a áreas de la planta. En ese proceso de asignación utilizan información heurística obtenida a partir de los datos del problema (distancias entre áreas, flujos entre secciones, capacidades de las áreas,...) y también la información que las hormigas precedentes aportan sobre el grado de eficiencia de las soluciones previamente obtenidas. En el trabajo se muestra la eficacia del algoritmo a partir de una implementación usando el software Mathematica