Managing Interacting Criteria: Application to Environmental Evaluation Practices

The need for organizations to evaluate their environmental practices has been recently increasing. This fact has led to the development of many approaches to appraise such practices. In this paper, a novel decision model to evaluate company’s environmental practices is proposed to improve traditional evaluation process in different facets. Firstly, different reviewers’ collectives related to the company’s activity are taken into account in the process to increase company internal efficiency and external legitimacy. Secondly, following the standard ISO 14031, two general categories of environmental performance indicators, management and operational, are considered. Thirdly, since the assumption of independence among environmental indicators is rarely verified in environmental context, an aggregation operator to bear in mind the relationship among such indicators in the evaluation results is proposed. Finally, this new model integrates quantitative and qualitative information with different scales using a multi-granular linguistic model that allows to adapt diverse evaluation scales according to appraisers’ knowledge

Preventing the Undesired Surface Veiling after Nanolime Treatments on Wall Paintings: Preliminary Investigations

During the last decades, the discovery of nanolime and its introduction in the field of Cultural Heritage has entailed a significant advance for the consolidation of historic wall paintings. Nevertheless, its use is not completely generalized yet within the conservation practitioner’s community due to its undesired white veiling deposit on the surface after treatment which usually covers the pictorial layer. Given the scarcity of existing literature which specify how to mitigate this undesired side-effect, the aim of this work is to carry out the first assessment of possible cleaning and treatment methods to eliminate those deposits and, at the same time, to analyse their effects on the consolidation properties. To do that, we have developed laboratory fresco wall paintings specimens. After applying an artificial ageing cycle to all of them, we consolidated them with CaloSil IP25, one of the most currently used commercial product in the practice. The elimination of the whitish deposits has been investigated with different methods: (1) wiping off the superficial excess of product immediately after each application during the treatment; (2) mechanical cleaning (scalpel) after consolidation; chemical cleaning with rigid gels of water (3), ethylenediaminetetraacetic acid (EDTA) (4) and citric acid (5) after consolidation. The effectiveness of each cleaning method has been assessed by non-destructive methods before and after the consolidation, and repeated after cleaning, by measuring differences in colour, water absorption by capillarity (i.e., sponge test), superficial adhesion (i.e., Scotch Tape Test) and by quantifying the thickness of the deposits eliminated by means of photogrammetry. Results show that both the mechanical cleaning and the removal of the excess of product after each application during the treatment yielded the most promising results for conservation practice.Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación, Gobierno de España, with the project PID 2019-105706GB-I00/SRA (State Research Agency/10.13039/501100011033).Marie Skłodowska-Curie (MSCA-IF) grant agreement No 893762 (NANOMORT

Photosensitizer-Mesoporous Silica Nanoparticles Combination for Enhanced Photodynamic Therapy

Mesoporous silica nanoparticles (MSNs) are widely known for their versatile applications. One of the most extended is as drug delivery systems for the treatment of cancer and other diseases. This review compiles the most representative examples in the last years of functionalized MSNs as photosensitizer carriers for photodynamic therapy (PDT) against cancer. Several commercially available photosensitizers (PSs) demonstrated poor solubility in an aqueous medium and insufficient selectivity for cancer tissues. The tumor specificity of PSs is a key factor for enhancing the PDT effect and at the same time reducing side effects. The use of nanoparticles and particularly MSNs, in which PS is covalently anchored or physically embedded, can overcome these limitations. For that, PS-MSNs can be externally decorated with compounds of interest in order to act as an active target for certain cancer cells, demonstrating enhanced phototoxicity in vitro and in vivo. The objective of this review is to collect and compare different nanosystems based on PS-MSNs pointing out their advantages in PDT against diverse types of cancers.We gratefully acknowledge financial support from MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 (project PID2020-114347RB-C32), and Gobierno Vasco-Eusko Jaurlaritza (project IT1639-22). R.P.-M. thanks UPV/EHU, MIU and NGEU for their postdoctoral contract (MARSA21/71)

Run-Time Auditing for Business Processes Data Using Constraints

Business processes involve data that can be modified or up dated by various activities. These data must satisfy the business rules associated to the process. These data are normally stored in a rela tional database, and hence the database has to be analyzed to determine whether the business rules can be satisfied. This paper presents a framework including a run-time auditing layer where the correctness of a database can be analyzed at different check points of a business process according to the data flow. It provides an early detection of incorrect action on stored data. Furthermore, in or der to manage the current business rules, the use of the constraint pro gramming paradigm is proposed and the enlargement of the Constraint Database Management Systems to support business rulesJunta de Andalucía P08-TIC-04095Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología TIN2009-1371

Fault diagnosis in databases for business processes

Business processes involve data that can be modified or updated by various activities. These data must satisfy the business rules associated to the process. As the information treated in a business process tends to be extensive, data are normally stored in a relational database, and hence the database has to be analyzed to determine whether the business rules are satisfied and what values are incorrect. This paper proposes the use of model-based diagnosis in the business processes scenario. This scenario combines business processes, business rules, relational databases and where the faults are the instances of the variables introduced by the users. These considerations make it necessary to introduce a new way for representing the model, and the design of new algorithms to solve it. This model provides a means for the detection of incorrect tuples of different tables of the database by avoiding the analysis of the full database. Furthermore, in order to manage the current business rules, the use of a constraint paradigm is proposed and by using Max- CSPs to isolate incorrect values.Junta de Andalucía P08-TIC-04095Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología TIN2009-1371

Developing a labelled object-relational constraint database architecture for the projection operator

Current relational databases have been developed in order to improve the handling of stored data, however, there are some types of information that have to be analysed for which no suitable tools are available. These new types of data can be represented and treated as constraints, allowing a set of data to be represented through equations, inequations and Boolean combinations of both. To this end, constraint databases were defined and some prototypes were developed. Since there are aspects that can be improved, we propose a new architecture called labelled object-relational constraint database (LORCDB). This provides more expressiveness, since the database is adapted in order to support more types of data, instead of the data having to be adapted to the database. In this paper, the projection operator of SQL is extended so that it works with linear and polynomial constraints and variables of constraints. In order to optimize query evaluation efficiency, some strategies and algorithms have been used to obtain an efficient query plan. Most work on constraint databases uses spatiotemporal data as case studies. However, this paper proposes model-based diagnosis since it is a highly potential research area, and model-based diagnosis permits more complicated queries than spatiotemporal examples. Our architecture permits the queries over constraints to be defined over different sets of variables by using symbolic substitution and elimination of variables.Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología DPI2006-15476-C02-0

Distributed Model-Based Diagnosis using Object-Relational Constraint Databases

This work presents a proposal to diagnose distributed systems utilizing model-based diagnosis using distributed databases. In order to improve aspects as versatility, persistence, easy composition and efficiency in the diagnosis process we use an Object Relational Constraint Database (ORCDB). Thereby we define a distributed architecture to store the behaviour of components as constraints in a relational database to diagnose a distributed system. This work proposes an algorithm to detect which components fail when their information is distributed in several databases, and all the information is not available in a global way. It is also offered a proposal to define, in execution time, the allocation of the sensors in a distributed system.Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología DPI2003-07146-C02-0

Applying Constraint Databases in the Determination of Potential Minimal Conflicts to Polynomial Model-Based Diagnosis

Model-based Diagnosis allows the identification of the parts which fail in a system. The models are based on the knowledge of the system to diagnose, and may be represented by constraints associated to the components. The variables of these constraints can be observable or non-observable, depending on the situation of the sensors. In order to obtain the potential minimal diagnosis in a system, an important issue is related to finding out the potential minimal conflicts in an efficient way. We consider that Constraint Databases represent an excellent option in order to solve this problem in complex systems. In this work we have used a novel logical architecture of Constraint Databases which has allowed obtaining these potential conflicts by means of the corresponding queries. Moreover, we have considered Gröbner Bases as a projection operator to obtain the potential minimal conflicts of a system. The first results obtained on this work, which are shown in a heat exchangers example, have been very promising.Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología DPI2003-07146-C02-0

NMUS: Structural Analysis for Improving the Derivation of All MUSes in Overconstrained Numeric CSPs

Models are used in science and engineering for experimentation, analysis, model-based diagnosis, design and planning/sheduling applications. Many of these models are overconstrained Numeric Constraint Satisfaction Problems (NCSP), where the numeric constraints could have linear or polynomial relations. In practical scenarios, it is very useful to know which parts of the overconstrained NCSP instances cause the unsolvability. Although there are algorithms to find all optimal solutions for this problem, they are computationally expensive, and hence may not be applicable to large and real-world problems. Our objective is to improve the performance of these algorithms for numeric domains using structural analysis. We provide experimental results showing that the use of the different strategies proposed leads to a substantially improved performance and it facilitates the application of solving larger and more realistic problems.Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia DIP2006-15476-C02-0

Business Process Configuration According to Data Dependency Specification

Configuration techniques have been used in several fields, such as the design of business process models. Sometimes these models depend on the data dependencies, being easier to describe what has to be done instead of how. Configuration models enable to use a declarative representation of business processes, deciding the most appropriate work-flow in each case. Unfortunately, data dependencies among the activities and how they can affect the correct execution of the process, has been overlooked in the declarative specifications and configurable systems found in the literature. In order to find the best process configuration for optimizing the execution time of processes according to data dependencies, we propose the use of Constraint Programming paradigm with the aim of obtaining an adaptable imperative model in function of the data dependencies of the activities described declarative.Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología TIN2015-63502-C3-2-RFondo Europeo de Desarrollo Regiona