University of Almería

About: University of Almería is a education organization based out in Almería, Spain. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Context (language use). The organization has 4674 authors who have published 10905 publications receiving 233036 citations. The organization is also known as: University of Almeria & Universidad de Almería.

Mechanisms of Policy Change: A Proposal for a Synthetic Explanatory Framework

Abstract: Since the early 1990s, the theoretical debate on policy change in the field of policy studies has been clearly dominated by three major reference approaches – the advocacy coalition framework (ACF), the punctuated-equilibrium theory (PET), and the multiple streams approach (MS). Their success led the reference approaches to evolve separately without explicitly establishing communication across theoretical boundaries. This has greatly limited the advance of the debate in order to get a better understanding of policy change. The three reference approaches have proved to offer widely contrasting and accepted accounts of policy change. They also present a number of shortcomings which render partial the explanations and limit their applicability. Starting from the analysis of these points, this article is devoted to the main purpose of presenting a synthetic theoretical framework that both profits from the strengths and commonalities of the three reference approaches – by emphasizing the complementari...

A memetic algorithm applied to the design of water distribution networks

Abstract: The optimal design of water distribution networks is a real optimization problem that consists of finding the best way to convey water from the sources to the users, satisfying their requirements. Many researchers have reported algorithms for minimizing the network cost applying a large variety of techniques, such as linear programming, non-linear programming, global optimization methods and meta-heuristic approaches. However, a totally satisfactory and efficient method is not available as yet. Many works have assessed the performance of these techniques using small or medium-sized benchmark networks proposed in the literature, but few of them have tested these methods with large-scale real networks. This paper introduces a new memetic algorithm for the optimal design of water distribution networks. In order to establish an accurate conclusion, five other approaches have also been adapted, namely simulated annealing, mixed simulated annealing and tabu search, scatter search, genetic algorithms and binary linear integer programming. The results obtained in three water distribution networks show that the memetic algorithm performs better than the other methods, especially when the size of the problem increases.