What cost reslience?

Air traffic management research lacks a framework for modelling the cost of resilience during disturbance. There is no universally accepted metric for cost resilience. The design of such a framework is presented and the modelling to date is reported. The framework allows performance assessment as a function of differential stakeholder uptake of strategic mechanisms designed to mitigate disturbance. Advanced metrics, cost- and non-cost-based, disaggregated by stakeholder subtypes, will be deployed. A new cost resilience metric is proposed

The physiology of ventilation

The diffusion of gases brings the partial pressures of O2 and CO2 in blood and alveolar gas to an equilibrium at the pulmonary blood-gas barrier. Alveolar PCO2 (PACO2) dependson the balance between the amount of CO2 being added by pulmonary blood and the amount being eliminated by alveolar ventilation (V\u2d9 A). In steady-state conditions, CO2 output equals CO2 elimination, but during nonsteadystate conditions, phase issues and impaired tissue CO2 clearance make CO2 output less predictable. Lung heterogeneity creates regional differences in CO2 concentration, and sequential emptying raises the alveolar plateau and steepens the expired CO2 slope in expiratory capnograms. Lung areas that are ventilated but not perfused form part of the dead space. Alveolar dead space is potentially large in pulmonary embolism, COPD, and all forms of ARDS. When PEEP recruits collapsed lung units, resulting in improved oxygenation, alveolar dead space may decrease; however, when PEEP induces overdistention, alveolar dead space tends to increase. Measuring physiologic dead space and alveolar ejection volume at admission or examining the trend during mechanical ventilation might provide useful information on outcomes of critically ill patients with ARDS

Hub operations delay recovery based on cost optimisation - Dynamic cost indexing and waiting for passengers strategies

In this paper, two strategies for airlines’ operations at a hub are combined and analysed: dynamic cost indexing, to recover delay, and waiting for connecting passengers at the hub. Agent Based Modelling techniques have been used to model the airlines’ operations considering detailed passenger’s itineraries, an extended arrival manager operation with slot negotiation, and delay and uncertainty at different phases of the flights. Results show that, when optimising the total cost, there is a trade-off between connecting and non-connecting passengers with respect to the gate to gate trip time. Waiting for passengers arises as an interesting technique when minimising airline operating costs

CASSIOPEIA II D3.2 - Final technical report

The FlightPath 2050 presents Europe’s Vision for Aviation for the future. In what refers to air traffic management, this vision includes concrete goals for the punctuality of flights and capacity of the air traffic management system. Additionally, the document adds a concrete goal in what refers to passenger mobility, stating that 90% of the passengers should be able to travel door-to-door in Europe within 4 hours. Passenger mobility is obviously the ultimate goal of the air transport system, which mission is to transport passengers and freight, not airplanes. However, punctuality is currently mostly measured as aircraft operations performance. Moreover, most air traffic management technology improvements are targeting aircraft punctuality and not passenger punctuality. Passenger punctuality depends critically on passenger connectivity, as a missed connection impacts very negatively in passenger mobility performance. Increasing the predictability of air transport operations has limits. Not only meteorological conditions can affect the punctuality but also countless operational hazards impact the air traffic management system. Making the system adaptable to changes in the operational conditions, capable of re-configuring itself to accommodate to a new scenario seems a better approach than trying to make the system robust, which ultimately could be too expensive or impossible. Studying how different mechanisms improve the adaptability of the system is a complex problem. On one hand, it is a challenge to design a procedure that provides adaptability without impacting other performance metrics of the system. On the other hand, complex mechanisms usually require dedicated simulation frameworks, capable of modelling realistically a large number of parameters as well as providing a performance framework capable of evaluating in detail (e.g. beyond simple statistical properties) how the system adapts to the new conditions and how those mechanisms target a performance goal. The CASSIOPEIA DCI-4HD2D project extension studied how changing the trajectory of each aircraft to either minimise fuel consumption or to minimise time to destination can be used as a adaptability mechanism, to work together with other ATM improvements, to address passenger connectivity. Understanding how this mechanism, known as Dynamic Cost Indexing (DCI), increases the adaptability of the system, required the analysis, design and implementation of a complex software system as a collection of interacting, autonomous agents. This document reports on the cases of study selected and the analysis of the outcome of the simulations performed, assessing how DCI contributes to passenger connectivity and, ultimately, to passenger mobility improvement

One Dimensional Magnetized TG Gas Properties in an External Magnetic Field

With Girardeau's Fermi-Bose mapping, we have constructed the eigenstates of a TG gas in an external magnetic field. When the number of bosons $N$ is commensurate with the number of potential cycles $M$, the probability of this TG gas in the ground state is bigger than the TG gas raised by Girardeau in 1960. Through the comparison of properties between this TG gas and Fermi gas, we find that the following issues are always of the same: their average value of particle's coordinate and potential energy, system's total momentum, single-particle density and the pair distribution function. But the reduced single-particle matrices and their momentum distributions between them are different.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figure

Quorum-sensing regulates biofilm formation in Vibrio scophthalmi

Background: In a previous study, we demonstrated that Vibrio scophthalmi, the most abundant Vibrio species among the marine aerobic or facultatively anaerobic bacteria inhabiting the intestinal tract of healthy cultured turbot (Scophthalmus maximus), contains at least two quorum-sensing circuits involving two types of signal molecules (a 3-hydroxy-dodecanoyl-homoserine lactone and the universal autoinducer 2 encoded by luxS). The purpose of this study was to investigate the functions regulated by these quorum sensing circuits in this vibrio by constructing mutants for the genes involved in these circuits. Results. The presence of a homologue to the Vibrio harveyi luxR gene encoding a main transcriptional regulator, whose expression is modulated by quorumsensing signal molecules in other vibrios, was detected and sequenced. The V. scophthalmi LuxR protein displayed a maximum amino acid identity of 82% with SmcR, the LuxR homologue found in Vibrio vulnificus. luxR and luxS null mutants were constructed and their phenotype analysed. Both mutants displayed reduced biofilm formation in vitro as well as differences in membrane protein expression by mass-spectrometry analysis. Additionally, a recombinant strain of V. scophthalmi carrying the lactonase AiiA from Bacillus cereus, which causes hydrolysis of acyl homoserine lactones, was included in the study. Conclusions: V. scophthalmi shares two quorum sensing circuits, including the main transcriptional regulator luxR, with some pathogenic vibrios such as V. harveyi and V. anguillarum. However, contrary to these pathogenic vibrios no virulence factors (such as protease production) were found to be quorum sensing regulated in this bacterium. Noteworthy, biofilm formation was altered in luxS and luxR mutants. In these mutants a different expression profile of membrane proteins were observed with respect to the wild type strain suggesting that quorum sensing could play a role in the regulation of the adhesion mechanisms of this bacterium

Active wetting of epithelial tissues

Development, regeneration and cancer involve drastic transitions in tissue morphology. In analogy with the behavior of inert fluids, some of these transitions have been interpreted as wetting transitions. The validity and scope of this analogy are unclear, however, because the active cellular forces that drive tissue wetting have been neither measured nor theoretically accounted for. Here we show that the transition between 2D epithelial monolayers and 3D spheroidal aggregates can be understood as an active wetting transition whose physics differs fundamentally from that of passive wetting phenomena. By combining an active polar fluid model with measurements of physical forces as a function of tissue size, contractility, cell-cell and cell-substrate adhesion, and substrate stiffness, we show that the wetting transition results from the competition between traction forces and contractile intercellular stresses. This competition defines a new intrinsic lengthscale that gives rise to a critical size for the wetting transition in tissues, a striking feature that has no counterpart in classical wetting. Finally, we show that active shape fluctuations are dynamically amplified during tissue dewetting. Overall, we conclude that tissue spreading constitutes a prominent example of active wetting --- a novel physical scenario that may explain morphological transitions during tissue morphogenesis and tumor progression

Quantum internet using code division multiple access

A crucial open problem in large-scale quantum networks is how to efficiently transmit quantum data among many pairs of users via a common data-transmission medium. We propose a solution by developing a quantum code division multiple access (q-CDMA) approach in which quantum information is chaotically encoded to spread its spectral content, and then decoded via chaos synchronization to separate different sender-receiver pairs. In comparison to other existing approaches, such as frequency division multiple access (FDMA), the proposed q-CDMA can greatly increase the information rates per channel used, especially for very noisy quantum channels.Comment: 29 pages, 6 figure

Synthesis and structural characterization of a mimetic membrane-anchored prion protein

During pathogenesis of transmissible spongiform encephalopathies (TSEs) an abnormal form (PrPSc) of the host encoded prion protein (PrPC) accumulates in insoluble fibrils and plaques. The two forms of PrP appear to have identical covalent structures, but differ in secondary and tertiary structure. Both PrPC and PrPSc have glycosylphospatidylinositol (GPI) anchors through which the protein is tethered to cell membranes. Membrane attachment has been suggested to play a role in the conversion of PrPC to PrPSc, but the majority of in vitro studies of the function, structure, folding and stability of PrP use recombinant protein lacking the GPI anchor. In order to study the effects of membranes on the structure of PrP, we synthesized a GPI anchor mimetic (GPIm), which we have covalently coupled to a genetically engineered cysteine residue at the C-terminus of recombinant PrP. The lipid anchor places the protein at the same distance from the membrane as does the naturally occurring GPI anchor. We demonstrate that PrP coupled to GPIm (PrP-GPIm) inserts into model lipid membranes and that structural information can be obtained from this membrane-anchored PrP. We show that the structure of PrP-GPIm reconstituted in phosphatidylcholine and raft membranes resembles that of PrP, without a GPI anchor, in solution. The results provide experimental evidence in support of previous suggestions that NMR structures of soluble, anchor-free forms of PrP represent the structure of cellular, membrane-anchored PrP. The availability of a lipid-anchored construct of PrP provides a unique model to investigate the effects of different lipid environments on the structure and conversion mechanisms of PrP