Service scheduling in garden maintenance

Neoturf is a Portuguese company working in the area of project, building and garden’s maintenance. Neoturf would like to have a procedure for scheduling and routing efficiently the clients from garden maintenance services. The company has two teams available during the whole year and an additional team during summer to handle all the maintenance jobs. Each team consists of two or three employees with a vehicle fully equipped with the tools that allow to carry out every kind of maintenance service. In the beginning of each year, the number and frequency of maintenance interventions to conduct during the year, on each client, are accorded. Each client is assigned to the same team and, usually, time windows are established so that visits to the client should occur only within these periods. As the Neoturf costumers’ are geographically spread over a wide region, the total distance on visiting clients is a factor that has a heavy weight on the costs of the company. Neoturf is concerned with reducing these costs, while satisfying the agreements with the clients

On the normalization of Killing vectors and energy conservation in two-dimensional gravity

We explicitly show that, in the context of a recently proposed 2D dilaton gravity theory, energy conservation requires the ``natural'' Killing vector to have, asymptotically, an unusual normalization. The Hawking temperature $T_H$ is then calculated according to this prescription.Comment: 7 pages, Latex, no figure

Can conformal Transformations change the fate of 2D black holes?

By using a classical Liouville-type model of two dimensional dilaton gravity we show that the one-loop theory implies that the fate of a black hole depends on the conformal frame. There is one frame for which the evaporation process never stops and another one leading to a complete disappearance of the black hole. This can be seen as a consequence of the fact that thermodynamic variables are not conformally invariant. In the second case the evaporation always produces the same static and regular end-point geometry, irrespective of the initial state.Comment: Some typos corrected. A few comments and two references added. Accepted for publication in PLB. Latex, 11 pages, no figure

What heavy quanta bounds could be inferred from a Higgs discovery?

The Higgs couplings can receive non-decoupling corrections due to heavy quanta, and deviations from the SM can be used to test its presence. The possible Higgs signal recently reported at LEP, with mh=115 GeV, severely constrains the presence of heavy quanta, such as a heavy fourth family. At Tevatron, the Higgs production by gluon fusion, followed by the decay h -> WW*, can also be used to probe the existence of heavy colored particles, including additional families, chiral sextet and octet quarks. Within the MSSM, we also find that gluon fusion is a sensitive probe for the squark spectrum.Comment: 12 pages, 3 tables, 1 figure. Accepted in Mod. Phys. Lett. A (2001

Sparse inversion of Stokes profiles. I. Two-dimensional Milne-Eddington inversions

Inversion codes are numerical tools used for the inference of physical properties from the observations. Despite their success, the quality of current spectropolarimetric observations and those expected in the near future presents a challenge to current inversion codes. The pixel-by-pixel strategy of inverting spectropolarimetric data that we currently utilize needs to be surpassed and improved. The inverted physical parameters have to take into account the spatial correlation that is present in the data and that contains valuable physical information. We utilize the concept of sparsity or compressibility to develop an new generation of inversion codes for the Stokes parameters. The inversion code uses numerical optimization techniques based on the idea of proximal algorithms to impose sparsity. In so doing, we allow for the first time to exploit the presence of spatial correlation on the maps of physical parameters. Sparsity also regularizes the solution by reducing the number of unknowns. We compare the results of the new inversion code with pixel-by-pixel inversions, demonstrating the increase in robustness of the solution. We also show how the method can easily compensate for the effect of the telescope point spread function, producing solutions with an enhanced contrast.Comment: 13 pages, 8 figures, accepted for publication in A&