Scheduling commercial advertisements for television

The problem of scheduling the commercial advertisements in the television industry is investigated. Each advertiser client demands that the multiple airings of the same brand advertisement should be as spaced as possible over a given time period. Moreover, audience rating requests have to be taken into account in the scheduling. This is the first time this hard decision problem is dealt with in the literature. We design two mixed integer linear programming (MILP) models. Two constructive heuristics, local search procedures and simulated annealing (SA) approaches are also proposed. Extensive computational experiments, using several instances of various sizes, are performed. The results show that the proposed MILP model which represents the problem as a network flow obtains a larger number of optimal solutions and the best non-exact procedure is the one that uses SA

Estudio de biodisponibilidad de especies de plata derivada del uso de nanomateriales en aditivos para alimentación animal

En las ultimas décadas, debido al aumento de la demanda de productos de origen animal y enconsecuencia a la necesidad de aumentar la producción, se ha hecho uso de los antibióticoscomo promotores del crecimiento animal. Sin embargo, esta práctica, prohibida por la UniónEuropea en el año 2006, conlleva un aumento potencial de los procesos de resistencia a losantibióticos para los consumidores de productos de origen animal. En este contexto, y debido algran desarrollo de la nanotecnología en los últimos años, los nanomateriales base plata hansurgido como una alternativa al uso de antibióticos debido a sus propiedades antibacterianas.El objetivo de este trabajo es el estudio de la disponibilidad de posibles especies de plata a partirde muestras de heces de cerdo y gallinaza procedente de pollos que han sido alimentados conun nanomaterial base plata como aditivo en el pienso en sustitución al uso de antibióticos. Conel fin de evaluar su impacto medioambiental, se ha determinado el contenido total de plata enlas heces y gallinaza mediante ataque ácido en microondas y Espectroscopía de Masas conPlasma de Acoplamiento Inductivo (ICP-MS) y mediante digestión alcalina y Espectroscopía deAbsorción Atómica con llama (EAA-Llama). Posteriormente se ha determinado la concentraciónde plata liberada al medio acuoso tras el proceso de lixiviación mediante EAA-Llama e ICP-MS.Además, con el fin de caracterizar la materia particulada presente en los lixiviados se ha hechouso de la Microscopía de Transmisión electrónica (TEM) acoplada a Espectroscopía de Rayos-XDispersiva (EDS).<br /

CIBERER : Spanish national network for research on rare diseases: A highly productive collaborative initiative

Altres ajuts: Instituto de Salud Carlos III (ISCIII); Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación.CIBER (Center for Biomedical Network Research; Centro de Investigación Biomédica En Red) is a public national consortium created in 2006 under the umbrella of the Spanish National Institute of Health Carlos III (ISCIII). This innovative research structure comprises 11 different specific areas dedicated to the main public health priorities in the National Health System. CIBERER, the thematic area of CIBER focused on rare diseases (RDs) currently consists of 75 research groups belonging to universities, research centers, and hospitals of the entire country. CIBERER's mission is to be a center prioritizing and favoring collaboration and cooperation between biomedical and clinical research groups, with special emphasis on the aspects of genetic, molecular, biochemical, and cellular research of RDs. This research is the basis for providing new tools for the diagnosis and therapy of low-prevalence diseases, in line with the International Rare Diseases Research Consortium (IRDiRC) objectives, thus favoring translational research between the scientific environment of the laboratory and the clinical setting of health centers. In this article, we intend to review CIBERER's 15-year journey and summarize the main results obtained in terms of internationalization, scientific production, contributions toward the discovery of new therapies and novel genes associated to diseases, cooperation with patients' associations and many other topics related to RD research

Hyper-heuristic approaches for the response time variability problem

We propose two classes for the implementation of hyper-heuristic algorithms. The first is based on constructive heuristics, whereas the second uses improvement methods. Within the latter class, a general framework is designed for the use of local search procedures and metaheuristics as low-level heuristics. A dynamic scheme to guide the use of these approaches is also devised. These ideas are tested on an NP-hard scheduling problem known as the response time variability problem (RTVP). An intensive computational experiment shows, especially in the second class where the new best results are found, the effectiveness of the proposed hyper-heuristics