Metodología para la estimación de la combinación de velocidades máximas que permiten alcanzar el tiempo de viaje comercialmente requerido en una infraestructura ferroviaria

Over the past 30 years, high speed railway in Europe has experienced a great development due to, among other things, the reduction of travel times, the increase of frequency and the continuous improvement of service quality. However, the construction of a new high speed railway infrastructure requires an enormous mobilization of resources, has a long lifetime but the alternative uses of this huge investment are very few. Consequently, this kind of investment is always preceded by a rigorous analysis in order to ensure the best possible result. In an analysis of these characteristics, there are different variables that have an influence on costs and benefits that a high speed line could generate and, therefore, it can be asserted that there are certain railway parameters with direct impact on the profitability of a high speed line. Among them, maximum design speed of a high speed line can be highlighted; speed plays a crucial role in a framework in which the efficiency and the social benefit are essential. The design speed has an impact on the profitability and, especially, on the economic and financial Net Present Value (NPV) of a high speed line; for example, a higher design speed implies higher investment costs (this impact is different depending on the type of terrain) and, sometimes, implies greater maintenance costs, but also brings journey time reductions and, consequently, an increase in the number of passengers that implies an increase in revenues and time savings. Besides, design speed has a direct impact on the exploitation costs of the railway undertakings. In short, the effects of the speed on the profitability are countless and complex. However, this parameter is usually a default parameter; usually it has been previously established (pre-determined) to an economic appraisal. Actually, if we analyse real experiences, real high speed lines currently in service or under construction, maximum design speed is essentially the same all over the European high speed networks (350 km/h), although it hasn¿t been found out a solid reason behind this pre-determined speed. This problem becomes more complex when the line is considered as a set of shorter sections. If each one of these sections is assigned a maximum design speed, it will arise many maximum speeds combinations per line, therefore, there is no longer a single speed, but now there is a combination of maximum speeds. Each combination of maximum speeds entails different investment cost, thereby, there will be multiple investment costs per line and, therefore, different economic and financial profitability in a single project as it is a railway infrastructure. At this point, this study develops a methodology capable of obtaining the maximum design speeds combination that allows to obtain the maximum incomes with the minimal cost, which implies to achieve the maximum profitability of a high speed line. In short, it will be developed and defined a methodology which determines the combination of maximum speeds that obtains the best results in terms of social-economic benefit (greater social-economic NPV) taking into account certain limitations (financial profitability and investment cost restrictions). The methodology proposed is applied in a theoretical scenario which corresponds to the Madrid-Valencia high speed line with a single route. The objective is to determine the economic and financial profitability of the scenario proposed, considering a new railway layout and different to the one nowadays exists. This economic and financial analysis is assessed for four different ticket prices, allowing not only to determine the combination of maximum speeds that obtains the maximum profitability of the line, but also allows to know the effect of the ticket price paid by the travellers on the economic and financial profitability.En los últimos 20 años, el sistema ferroviario de alta velocidad en Europa ha sufrido un gran desarrollo, debido entre otras cosas, a la reducción de tiempos de viaje, al incremento en las frecuencias y a la mejora en la calidad del servicio. Sin embargo, la construcción de una nueva infraestructura ferroviaria requiere una ingente movilización de recursos, tiene una vida útil muy larga y son pocos los posibles usos alternativos de la inversión realizada. No debe extrañar por ello que cualquier inversión de este tipo esté siempre precedida de un análisis minucioso con el fin de asegurar el mejor resultado posible. Dentro de un análisis de estas características, existen diferentes parámetros que influyen en los costes y los beneficios atribuibles a una línea de alta velocidad y, por lo tanto, puede decirse que existen determinados parámetros que influyen en su rentabilidad. Entre todos ellos, se destaca la velocidad máxima de diseño; la velocidad (en todas sus posibles acepciones) juega un papel muy importante en un escenario de eficiencia, es una pieza básica en la rentabilidad socio-económica de una infraestructura ferroviaria. La velocidad de diseño influyen en la rentabilidad y en concreto en el VAN socio-económico y financiero de una línea de múltiples formas: por ejemplo, una velocidad de diseño mayor supone costes mayores de inversión (con incidencia diferente según el tipo de terreno) y, en ocasiones, mayores costes de mantenimiento, pero también reduce el tiempo de viaje y, como consecuencia, generalmente implica un incremento en el número de viajeros dispuestos a viajar (mayor atractivo), lo que supone mayores ingresos y ahorros de tiempo. Además tienen un efecto directo sobre los costes de explotación del operador de transporte. En suma, los efectos de la velocidad sobre la rentabilidad son muy numerosos y complejos. Sin embargo, este parámetro, generalmente se predetermina, es decir, suele estar definido con anterioridad a la evaluación socio-económica de la línea. La velocidad máxima de diseño es prácticamente la misma a lo largo de toda la red de alta velocidad europea (350 km/h), lo que no ofrece, sin embargo, la información de si otras decisiones previas (otras velocidades máximas de diseño) conducirían a un mejor resultado. Este problema toma mayor grado de complejidad cuando se considera la línea (trazado) como un conjunto de tramos más pequeños. Si a cada uno de estos tramos se le asigna una velocidad máxima de diseño, aparecerán múltiples combinaciones de velocidades máximas por línea, por lo tanto, ya no se dispone de una única velocidad sino que se dispone de una combinación de velocidades. Cada combinación de velocidades máximas supondrá un coste de inversión diferente, por lo que existirán múltiples costes por cada trazado y, como consecuencia, diferentes rentabilidades. Ante esta situación compleja, se plantea una metodología capaz de determinar la combinación de velocidades máximas que permite obtener los máximos retornos con los mínimos costes. En definitiva, se desarrollará y definirá una metodología capaz de determinar la combinación de velocidades máximas que obtenga mejores resultados en términos socio-económicos (mayor VAN socio-económico) sujetos a las restricciones que se determinen (limitación de la rentabilidad financiera y de los coste de inversión). La metodología propuesta se aplica en un escenario teórico que corresponde a la línea Madrid-Valencia con una única ruta. El objetivo consiste en estimar la rentabilidad económica y financiera del conjunto para la ruta Madrid-Valencia, considerando un trazado nuevo y diferente al que hoy en día existe. Este análisis económico y financiero se realiza para cuatro precios de billete diferentes, lo que permite no solo determinar el cuadro de velocidades máximas que obtiene la máxima rentabilidad de la línea sino que también permite conocer el efecto del precio del billete pagado por los viajeros en la rentabilidad del proyecto

HOMA metabolic assessment in normoglycemic and diabetic canines.

Introducción: La Diabetes Mellitus es una patología producida por un aumento en los niveles de glucosa a nivel sanguíneo, fenómeno mediado por factores ambientales y genéticos. Esta alza en los niveles de glicemia se puede deber a una falla en la producción, ya sea parcial o absoluta de insulina, así como también por una pérdida en la sensibilidad a la insulina por parte de los tejidos. Dado que los pacientes diabéticos solo responden a manejos de insulinización, y que son en su mayoría delgados, estos caninos pueden tener insulinoresistencia, sin llegar a desarrollar intolerancia a la glucosa o diabetes. Objetivo: El objetivo de este trabajo fue evaluar la insulinoresistencia por medio del modelo matemático HOMA en pacientes con distinta condición corporal. Métodos: Se determinaron los niveles de insulina a través de ensayo IRMA y el análisis estadístico utilizó prueba de X2 y análisis de varianza ANOVA. Resultados: El análisis de varianza ANOVA entre los grupos, no mostró diferencias estadísticamente significativas entre el grupo HOMA normoglicémico del paciente obeso y normopeso, así como tampoco entre el grupo HOMA diabético y normopeso. El índice de correlación X2 no mostró una asociación significativa entre la condición corporal y el índice HOMA alterado, (X2 =3,056; p = 0.08). Los niveles de insulina fueron mayores en pacientes obesos respecto a normopeso, aunque esta diferencia no fue estadísticamente significativa (F = 1.004; p = 0.394). Conclusión: El estudio realizado no mostró diferencias significativas en los niveles HOMA asociada a aumentos en su condición corporal, lo cual se podría relacionar a un mayor estado de insulinodeficiencia por sobre el estado de insulinoresistencia.Introduction: Diabetes mellitus is caused by an increase in blood glucose levels, a phenomenon mediated by environmental and genetic factors. This increase in blood glucose levels may be due to a partial or absolute failure to produce insulin as well as a loss in tissue sensitivity to insulin. Given that diabetic patients respond only to insulin therapy and are mostly thin, canines can develop insulin resistance, without developing glucose intolerance or diabetes. Aims: We aim to evaluate insulin resistance using the mathematical model homeostatic model assessment (HOMA) in patients with different body condition. Insulin levels were determined using the IRMA assay, and X2 test and analysis of variance (ANOVA) were used for the statistical analysis. Results: ANOVA between the groups showed no significant differences between the normoglycemic HOMA group of the obese and normal weight patients and between the diabetic and normal weight HOMA group. The X2 correlation index did not show a significant association between the body condition and the altered HOMA index (X2 = 3.056, p = 0.08). Insulin levels were higher in obese patients than in those with normal weight, although the difference was not significant (F = 1.004, p = 0.394). Conclusion: In addition, there were no significant differences in HOMA levels associated with increases in the body condition, which could be related with a higher state of insulin deficiency over the state of insulin resistance

Qualitative examination of the perceived effects of a comprehensive smoke-free law according to neighborhood socioeconomic status in a large

Smoke-free legislations aim to protect non-smokers from second-hand smoke (SHS) exposure and improve population health outcomes. The aim of this study was to explore residents' perceptions to understand how people living in distinctive SES neighborhoods are differently affected by comprehensive smoke-free laws in a large city like Madrid, Spain. We conducted a qualitative project with 37 semi-structured interviews and 29 focus group discussions in three different SES neighborhoods within the city of Madrid. Constructivist grounded theory was used to analyze the transcripts. One core category arose in our analyses: Neighborhood inequalities in second-hand smoke (SHS) exposure in outdoor places. The enactment of the comprehensive smoke-free law resulted in unintended consequences that affected neighborhoods differently: relocation of smokers to outdoor setting, SHS exposure, noise disturbance and cigarette butt littering. Changes in the urban environment in the three neighborhoods resulted in the denormalization of smoking in outdoor public places, which was more clearly perceived in the high SES neighborhood. Changes in the built environment in outdoor areas of hospitality venues were reported to actually facilitate smoking. Comprehensive smoke-free laws resulted in denormalization of smoking, which might be effective in reducing SHS exposure. Extending smoking bans to outdoor areas like bus stops and hospitality venues is warranted and should include a public health inequalities perspective

ATVS-UAM NIST LRE 2009 System Description

Official contribution of the National Institute of Standards and Technology; not subject to copyright in the United States.ATVS-UAM submits a fast, light and efficient single system. The use of a task-adapted nonspeech-recognition-based VAD (apart from NIST conversation labels) and gender-dependent total variability compensation technology allows our submitted system to obtain excellent development results with SRE08 data with exceptional computational efficiency. In order to test the VAD influence in the evaluation results, a contrastive equivalent system has been submitted exclusively changing ATVS VAD labels with BUT publicly contributed ones. In all contributed systems, two gender-independent calibrations have been trained with respectively telephone-only and mic (either mic-tel, tel-mic or mic-mic) data. The submitted systems have been designed for English speech in an application-independent way, all results being interpretable in the form of calibrated likelihood ratios to be properly evaluated with Cllr. Sample development results with English SRE08 data are 0.53% (male) and 1.11% (female) EER in tel-tel data (optimistic as all English speakers in SRE08 are included in total variability matrices), going up to 3.5% (tel-tel) to 5.1% EER (tel-mic) in pessimistic cross-validation experiments (25% of test speakers totally excluded from development data in each xval set). The submitted system is extremely light in computational resources, running 77 times faster than real time. Moreover, once VAD and feature extraction are performed (the heaviest components of our system), training and testing are performed respectively at 5300 and 2950 times faster than real time

Multilevel and session variability compensated language recognition: ATVS-UAM systems at NIST LRE 2009

Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works. J. Gonzalez-Dominguez, I. Lopez-Moreno, J. Franco-Pedroso, D. Ramos, D. T. Toledano, and J. Gonzalez-Rodriguez, "Multilevel and Session Variability Compensated Language Recognition: ATVS-UAM Systems at NIST LRE 2009" IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Signal Processing, vol. 4, no. 6, pp. 1084 – 1093, December 2010This work presents the systems submitted by the ATVS Biometric Recognition Group to the 2009 Language Recognition Evaluation (LRE’09), organized by NIST. New challenges included in this LRE edition can be summarized by three main differences with respect to past evaluations. Firstly, the number of languages to be recognized expanded to 23 languages from 14 in 2007, and 7 in 2005. Secondly, the data variability has been increased by including telephone speech excerpts extracted from Voice of America (VOA) radio broadcasts through Internet in addition to Conversational Telephone Speech (CTS). The third difference was the volume of data, involving in this evaluation up to 2 terabytes of speech data for development, which is an order of magnitude greater than past evaluations. LRE’09 thus required participants to develop robust systems able not only to successfully face the session variability problem but also to do it with reasonable computational resources. ATVS participation consisted of state-of-the-art acoustic and high-level systems focussing on these issues. Furthermore, the problem of finding a proper combination and calibration of the information obtained at different levels of the speech signal was widely explored in this submission. In this work, two original contributions were developed. The first contribution was applying a session variability compensation scheme based on Factor Analysis (FA) within the statistics domain into a SVM-supervector (SVM-SV) approach. The second contribution was the employment of a novel backend based on anchor models in order to fuse individual systems prior to one-vs-all calibration via logistic regression. Results both in development and evaluation corpora show the robustness and excellent performance of the submitted systems, exemplified by our system ranked 2nd in the 30 second open-set condition, with remarkably scarce computational resources.This work has been supported by the Spanish Ministry of Education under project TEC2006-13170-C02-01. Javier Gonzalez-Dominguez also thanks Spanish Ministry of Education for supporting his doctoral research under project TEC2006-13141-C03-03. Special thanks are given to Dr. David Van Leeuwen from TNO Human Factors (Utrech, The Netherlands) for his strong collaboration, valuable discussions and ideas. Also, authors thank to Dr. Patrick Lucey for his final support on (non-target) Australian English review of the manuscript

Possibilities of RutasOptiRed Package

AbstractPlanning the operations of Renfe Operadora trains on Adif's (Spanish) railway network is very complex. The reasons are the coexistence of two track gauges, two kinds of electrification systems and five types of signaling systems; together with fixed and variable gauge rolling stock, sometimes able to run under different types of electrification and signaling systems. There is even a multiple unit hybrid series (730). The authors have developed a microscopic simulation computer package that calculates timings and minimal paths, and estimates costs, consumptions and emissions. The package is topology-independent and can perform computations for any type of trains. We shall focus here on its use, the structure of its input files and its possibilities

Deep learning based domain adaptation for mitochondria segmentation on EM volumes.

[EN] BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE: Accurate segmentation of electron microscopy (EM) volumes of the brain is essential to characterize neuronal structures at a cell or organelle level. While supervised deep learning methods have led to major breakthroughs in that direction during the past years, they usually require large amounts of annotated data to be trained, and perform poorly on other data acquired under similar experimental and imaging conditions. This is a problem known as domain adaptation, since models that learned from a sample distribution (or source domain) struggle to maintain their performance on samples extracted from a different distribution or target domain. In this work, we address the complex case of deep learning based domain adaptation for mitochondria segmentation across EM datasets from different tissues and species. METHODS: We present three unsupervised domain adaptation strategies to improve mitochondria segmentation in the target domain based on (1) state-of-the-art style transfer between images of both domains; (2) self-supervised learning to pre-train a model using unlabeled source and target images, and then fine-tune it only with the source labels; and (3) multi-task neural network architectures trained end-to-end with both labeled and unlabeled images. Additionally, to ensure good generalization in our models, we propose a new training stopping criterion based on morphological priors obtained exclusively in the source domain. The code and its documentation are publicly available at https://github.com/danifranco/EM_domain_adaptation. RESULTS: We carried out all possible cross-dataset experiments using three publicly available EM datasets. We evaluated our proposed strategies and those of others based on the mitochondria semantic labels predicted on the target datasets. CONCLUSIONS: The methods introduced here outperform the baseline methods and compare favorably to the state of the art. In the absence of validation labels, monitoring our proposed morphology-based metric is an intuitive and effective way to stop the training process and select in average optimal models.I. Arganda-Carreras would like to acknowledge the support of the 2020 Leonardo Grant for Researchers and Cultural Creators, BBVA Foundation. This work is supported in part by the University of the Basque Country UPV/EHU grant GIU19/027 and by Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades, Agencia Estatal de Investigación, under grant PID2019-109820RB-I00, MCIN/AEI /10.13039/501100011033/, cofinanced by European Regional Development Fund (ERDF), “A way of making Europe.

Hard-less common mode active EMI filter

Active EMI filters appear as an alternative to classical EMI filters based on passive components. Active EMI filters can provide more compact, cheaper and lighter solutions than passive approach. In this paper we present a theoretical analysis of the 4 possible configurations. Expressions of the transfer function and insertion losses considering impedances of mains and source of noise are presented. The voltage-current topology is identified as the more convenient solution. Finally, preliminary experimental results of a prototype capable to provide attenuation up to 100MHz are shown.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Criteria to discriminate between wines aged in oak barrels and macerated with oak fragments

Wine aging in barrels is carried out to increase stability and achieve more complex aromas. In the last few years, however, the practice of macerating wine with small fragments of toasted oak (chips) has become increasingly common. This conveys similar tastes, aromas, and wooden notes to the wine as those obtained with traditional barrel aging, but much faster and at a fraction of the cost. Without proper regulation, this could lead to fraud if wine macerated with chips is offered as barrel aged wine. In the present study, 75 volatile compounds have been determined by applying gas chromatography–mass spectrometry (MS) and flame ionization detection (FID). It has been found that compounds directly related to the wood have greater discriminative power for telling apart wines aged in barrels from those macerated with oak fragments, but no single compound permits flawless classification. Therefore, we have studied the effect of the addition of oak fragments of different origins, different oak types, different formats and subjected to different toasting processes on a set of 231 samples from 6 Spanish Denominations of Origin wines (DOs), and compared them to those same wines aged in oak barrels. In light of the results, we have developed a set of criteria which allows distinguishing with high degree of accuracy between wines which have been aged in barrels and those macerated with oak fragments. The application of these criteria to different wines allows correct classification in over 90% of cases.Peer ReviewedPublishe

Estrategias de climatización pasivas y semi-pasivas para viviendas en clima cálido-húmedo

La presente investigación se centra en tratar de resolver problemas relacionados con el confort higrotérmico para viviendas en clima cálido-húmedo, tratando de implementar sistemas pasivos y/o semi-pasivos de climatización y deshumidificación del ambiente. Se proponen una serie de estrategias sugeridas por la bibliografía revisada y se evalúa su desempeño empleando software de simulación y modelos matemáticos detallados