Milicia, fueros y acción del poder real sobre Aragón entre 1562-1642

Entre els anys 1562 i 1642 les relacions mantingudes entre la Corona i el regne d’Aragó, així com la dialèctica política i jurisdiccional que en va derivar, es van veure condicionades per la pretensió per part de la Monarquia de configurar un aparell de guerra capaç de respondre a les exigències derivades dels objectius polítics que perseguia en l’àmbit internacional. En arribar a les Corts de Saragossa de 1645-1646 les condicions del «servei d’armes aragonès» no havien canviat gaire, si més no en allò relatiu als seus aspectes estructurals i de mobilització. Però l’accès a aquest servei perseguit per la Corona en l’exercici del seu poder, per mitjà d’un procés de transformació social i d’adaptació dels furs del regne a tal fi, era una realitat.Between the years 1562 and 1642 the relations maintained between the Spanish crown and the kingdom of Aragon, as well as the political and jurisdictional dialectics that they created, were conditioned by the desire on behalf of the Spanish monarchy to consolidate a war appartus capable of responding to the demands derived from the political objectives that it was pursuing in the international sphere. By the time of the Cortes of Saragossa which began in 1645, the conditions of the Aragonese military subsidies had hardly changed from earlier periods, at least with regard to its structural aspects and ways of mobilization. But the crown’s ability to intervene into it, through a process of social transformation and of adaptation of the fueros (laws and privileges) of the kingdom to such effect was a reality

Simulation-based optimization of PCM melting temperature to improve the energy performance in buildings

Globally, a considerable amount of energy is consumed by the building sector. The building envelope can highly influence the energy consumption in buildings. In this regard, innovative technologies such as thermal energy storage (TES) can help to boost the energy efficiency and to reduce the CO2 emissions in this sector. The use of phase change materials (PCM), due to its high heat capacity, has been the centre of attention of many researchers. A considerable number of papers have been published on the application of PCM as passive system in building envelopes. Researches have shown that choosing the PCM melting temperature in different climate conditions is a key factor to improve the energy performance in buildings. In the present paper, a simulation-based optimization methodology will be presented by coupling EnergyPlus and GenOpt with an innovative enthalpy-temperature (h-T) function to define the optimum PCM peak melting temperature to enhance the cooling, heating, and the annual total heating and cooling energy performance of a residential building in various climate conditions based on Köppen-Geiger classification. Results show that in a cooling dominant climate the best PCM melting temperature to reduce the annual energy consumption is close to the maximum of 26ºC (melting range of 24ºC-28ºC), whereas in heating dominant climates PCM with lower melting temperature of 20ºC (melting range of 18ºC-22ºC) yields higher annual energy benefits. Moreover, it was found that the proper selection of PCM melting temperature in each climate zone can lead to notable energy savings for cooling energy consumption, heating energy consumption, and total annual energy consumption.The work is partially funded by the Spanish government (ENE2015-64117-C5-1-R (MINECO/FEDER) and ENE2015-64117-C5-3-R (MINECO/FEDER)). The authors would like to thank the Catalan Government for the quality accreditation given to their research group GREA (2014 SGR 123). GREA is certified agent TECNIO in the category of technology developers from the Government of Catalonia. This project has received funding from the European Commission Seventh Framework Program (FP/2007-2013) under Grant agreement Nº PIRSES-GA-2013-610692 (INNOSTORAGE) and from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement No 657466 (INPATH-TES). Alvaro de Gracia would like to thank Ministerio de Economia y Competitividad de España for Grant Juan de la Cierva, FJCI-2014-19940

Modeling energy consumption in automated vacuum waste collection systems

In a world where resources are scarce and urban areas consume the vast majority of these resources, it is vital to make cities greener and more sustainable. A smart city is a city in which information and communications technology are merged with traditional infrastructures, coordinated and integrated using new digital technologies. The increasing amount of waste generated, and the collection and treatment of waste poses a major challenge to modern urban planning in general, and to smart cities in particular. To cope with this problem, automated vacuum waste collection (AVWC) uses air suction on a closed network of underground pipes to transport waste from the drop off points scattered throughout the city to a central collection point, reducing greenhouse gas emissions and the inconveniences of conventional methods (odours, noise, etc.). Since a significant part of the cost of operating AVWC systems is energy consumption, we have developed a model with the aim of applying constraint programming technology to schedule the daily emptying sequences of the drop off points in such a way that energy consumption is minimized. In this paper we describe how the problem of deciding the drop off points that should be emptied at a given time can be modeled as a constraint integer programming (CIP) problem. Moreover, we report on experiments using real data from AVWC systems installed in different cities that provide empirical evidence that CIP offers a suitable technology for reducing energy consumption in AVWC.This work has been partially funded by projects: ARINF (TIN2009-14704-C03-01/03) and TASSAT (TIN2010-20967-C04-01/ 03) from Spain MICINN and project Newmatica (IPT-2011-1496- 310000) from program INNPACTO funded by MICINN (until 2011) and MINECO (from 2011)

The more the merrier? Number of reviews versus score on TripAdvisor and Booking.com

The aim of this research is to confirm whether there is a relationship between the number of reviews and the hotel’s score on Booking.com and TripAdvisor and whether the relationship is different depending on the geographical area. Moreover, the study endeavors to confirm whether the number of reviews influences the score on each website. With the analysis of about 13,899 hotels in 146 cities, our findings suggest that there is some lineal relationship between the amount of reviews and the score on TripAdvisor but not on Booking.com. Moreover, by regions on TripAdvisor hotels from Middle East and Africa and Asia and Pacific have a stronger relationship between reviews and score than those from Europe and America.This work was partially funded by the Spanish Ministry of the Economy, INDUSTRY and Competitiveness [grant number TIN2015-71799-C2-2-P], [grant number ECO2017-88984-R] and [grant number ENE2015-64117-C5-1-R]. This research article has received a grant for its linguistic revision from the Language Institute of the University of Lleida (2016 call)

Statistical modelling of CSP solving algorithms performance

The goal of this work is to try to create a statistical model, based only on easily computable parameters from the CSP problem to predict runtime behaviour of the solving algorithms, and let us choose the best algorithm to solve the problem. Although it seems that the obvious choice should be MAC, experimental results obtained so far show, that with big numbers of variables, other algorithms perfom much better, specially for hard problems in the transition phase