The international competitiveness of cava: success of a particular firm or the district ?

First of all, the author wonders about the degree of success of the Catalan sparkling wine industry in the recent past. The comparison with the Italian sparkling spumante and also with the case of the most celebrated sparkling wine in the world, champagne, shows a very positive trend of the cava production and exports in the last three decades of the XXth century. Secondly, this paper focuses on the agent or cause responsible of this success. Is it due to a particular firm or should it be attributed to the whole industrial cava cluster around the area of Sant Sadurni dAnoia? More than two thirds of the exports correspond to a particular firm. In this sense, we should attribute the success to it. However, the historical explanation of the development of the industrial cava cluster in the main and well-kwown viticultural Catalan area of Penedes, shows that all producers have benefit from the Marshalian external economies due to this concentration. And the paper shows that the leading export firm would never have succeeded in the international market without the existence of this kind of invisible advantages.skilled labor, wine industry, wine trade, spumante, cava, cluster, champagne, sparkling wine, protectionism

L’estudi de l’impacte social en el marc de la docència i la recerca en enginyeria civil

La construcció d’infraestructures desencadena una sèrie d’impactes -directes i indirectes o induïts-, positius i negatius que modifiquen l’espai on es desenvolupen les activitats econòmiques, les formes de vida i els hàbits de la societat afectada. Amb això s’inicia un procés de transformació més o menys dinàmica, però sempre irreversible. La docència i la recerca en aquest àmbit fa més de tres dècades que és va iniciar al LESEC de l’ETS de Camins, Canals, i Ports de Barcelona i des d’aleshores compta amb docència des del grau, al tercer cicle. S´han dirigit tesis de doctorat d’aquest tema i una sèrie de tesines de final de carrera: http://www.itt.upc.edu/lesec. L’objectiu d’aquesta línea de recerca es introduir l´importancia de l´impacte social en els estudis d´impacte ambiental i sensibilitzar sobre les transformacions socials impulsades per la construcció d’infraestructures. Per altre banda, es tracta de desenvolupar la capacitat crítica y de reflexió de l’alumne en l’àmbit de la docència, amb l’observació i anàlisi del medi social i fer que comprengui que les obres d’enginyeria civil provoquen canvis i que es poden orientar a buscar solucions consensuades amb els actors socials en presència. En la nostra línia de recerca es permet constatar que, des d’un punt de vista territorial, a més dels impactes ambientals i morfològics, les infraestructures produeixen una sèrie d’impactes induïts (canvis en la jerarquia de la xarxa d’assentaments i en els factors de localització de les activitats econòmiques, potenciació de certes àrees i marginació d’unes altres, etc.), i tanmateix, impactes induïts en l’economia (modificació en el nivell de renda, en el nombre i nivell de la població activa, inducció d’activitats econòmiques, etc.). Es determinen les infraestructures con elements de canvi de la societat implicada i s’identifiquen els agents d’aquest canvi als promotors, gestors, beneficiaris, afectats. En definitiva, es tracta de comprendre el rol de les infraestructures des de les relacions i els interessos socials, ambientals, polítics, econòmics, i , en conseqüència l’objecte de la dialèctica, els conflictes i les estratègies que es generen.Peer Reviewe

Synergies between app-based car-related shared mobility services for the development of more profitable business models

Purpose: Emerging shared mobility services are an opportunity for cities to reduce the number of car single trips to both improve traffic congestion and the environment. Users of shared mobility services, such as carsharing, ridesharing and singular and shared ride-hailing services, often need to be customers of more than one service to cover all their transport needs, since few mobility providers offer more than one of these services from a single platform. On the other hand, providers offering these services separately do not optimize costly resources and activities, such as the vehicles or the technology. Hence, the aim of this paper is to find synergies between the different app-based car-related shared mobility services that foster the development of new business models, to increase the profitability of these services. Design/methodology/approach: The research approach is built on the literature of car-related shared mobility services business models, supported by the review of certain outstanding services websites, and face-to-face interviews with users and drivers of these transport services. The analysis is presented by means of the Business Model Canvas methodology. Findings: Based on the synergies found, this paper suggests a few different approaches for services to share some resources and activities. Originality/value: This study identifies the common features of carsharing, ridesharing and singular and shared ride-hailing services to develop more profitable business models, based on providing the services in aggregated form, or outsourcing activities and resources. In addition, the implications of these proposals are discussed as advantages and drawbacks from a business perspectivePeer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Deep Policies for Width-Based Planning in Pixel Domains

Width-based planning has demonstrated great success in recent years due to its ability to scale independently of the size of the state space. For example, Bandres et al. (2018) introduced a rollout version of the Iterated Width algorithm whose performance compares well with humans and learning methods in the pixel setting of the Atari games suite. In this setting, planning is done on-line using the "screen" states and selecting actions by looking ahead into the future. However, this algorithm is purely exploratory and does not leverage past reward information. Furthermore, it requires the state to be factored into features that need to be pre-defined for the particular task, e.g., the B-PROST pixel features. In this work, we extend width-based planning by incorporating an explicit policy in the action selection mechanism. Our method, called $\pi$-IW, interleaves width-based planning and policy learning using the state-actions visited by the planner. The policy estimate takes the form of a neural network and is in turn used to guide the planning step, thus reinforcing promising paths. Surprisingly, we observe that the representation learned by the neural network can be used as a feature space for the width-based planner without degrading its performance, thus removing the requirement of pre-defined features for the planner. We compare $\pi$-IW with previous width-based methods and with AlphaZero, a method that also interleaves planning and learning, in simple environments, and show that $\pi$-IW has superior performance. We also show that $\pi$-IW algorithm outperforms previous width-based methods in the pixel setting of Atari games suite.Comment: In Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS 2019). arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1806.0589

Electronic and photonic switching in the atm era

Broadband networks require high-capacity switches in order to properly manage large amounts of traffic fluxes. Electronic and photonic technologies are being used to achieve this objective both allowing different multiplexing and switching techniques. Focusing on the asynchronous transfer mode (ATM), the inherent different characteristics of electronics and photonics makes different architectures feasible. In this paper, different switching structures are described, several ATM switching architectures which have been recently implemented are presented and the implementation characteristics discussed. Three diverse points of view are given from the electronic research, the photonic research and the commercial switches. Although all the architectures where successfully tested, they should also follow different market requirements in order to be commercialised. The characteristics are presented and the architectures projected over them to evaluate their commercial capabilities.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version