University of Seville

About: University of Seville is a education organization based out in Seville, Andalucía, Spain. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Model predictive control. The organization has 20098 authors who have published 47317 publications receiving 947007 citations. The organization is also known as: Universidad de Sevilla.

A bounded-search iterated greedy algorithm for the distributed permutation flowshop scheduling problem

Abstract: As the interest of practitioners and researchers in scheduling in a multi-factory environment is growing, there is an increasing need to provide efficient algorithms for this type of decision problems, characterised by simultaneously addressing the assignment of jobs to different factories/workshops and their subsequent scheduling. Here we address the so-called distributed permutation flowshop scheduling problem, in which a set of jobs has to be scheduled over a number of identical factories, each one with its machines arranged as a flowshop. Several heuristics have been designed for this problem, although there is no direct comparison among them. In this paper, we propose a new heuristic which exploits the specific structure of the problem. The computational experience carried out on a well-known testbed shows that the proposed heuristic outperforms existing state-of-the-art heuristics, being able to obtain better upper bounds for more than one quarter of the problems in the testbed.

Chronic stress enhances microglia activation and exacerbates death of nigral dopaminergic neurons under conditions of inflammation

Abstract: Parkinson’s disease is an irreversible neurodegenerative disease linked to progressive movement disorders and is accompanied by an inflammatory reaction that is believed to contribute to its pathogenesis. Since sensitivity to inflammation is not the same in all brain structures, the aim of this work was to test whether physiological conditions as stress could enhance susceptibility to inflammation in the substantia nigra, where death of dopaminergic neurons takes place in Parkinson’s disease. To achieve our aim, we induced an inflammatory process in nonstressed and stressed rats (subject to a chronic variate stress) by a single intranigral injection of lipopolysaccharide, a potent proinflammogen. The effect of this treatment was evaluated on inflammatory markers as well as on neuronal and glial populations. Data showed a synergistic effect between inflammation and stress, thus resulting in higher microglial activation and expression of proinflammatory markers. More important, the higher inflammatory response seen in stressed animals was associated with a higher rate of death of dopaminergic neurons in the substantia nigra, the most characteristic feature seen in Parkinson’s disease. This effect was dependent on glucocorticoids. Our data demonstrate that stress sensitises midbrain microglia to further inflammatory stimulus. This suggests that stress may be an important risk factor in the degenerative processes and symptoms of Parkinson’s disease.

HPLC determination of catechins and caffeine in tea.Differentiation of green, black and instant teas

Abstract: A simple and fast high performance liquid chromatographic method for five catechins and caffeine using an ODS column and a water-acetonitrile-formic acid mobile phase system was developed. The catechins (epicatechin, catechin, epigallocatechin, epigallocatechin gallate, epicatechin gallate) and caffeine were separated by an acetonitrile gradient within 20 min. The detection limit of the method was approximately 10 ng for all the compounds (by injecting 10 microL). Several green, black and instant teas were analysed using this method. By using the studied compounds as chemical descriptors, linear discriminant analysis was performed and complete differentiation of the green, black and instant teas was achieved.

Graduate entrepreneurship in the developing world: intentions, education and development

Abstract: Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to introduce the special issue by positioning and examining some of the key issues, tensions and challenges in graduate entrepreneurship in the developing world.Design/methodology/approach – The paper recognises the complexity and diversity of approaches considered by the different authors, highlighting a range of issues and challenges in their contributions. The paper is divided into the following sections: entrepreneurial intentions, attitudes and motivations; the role of higher education; and contextual cases, opportunities and challenges in graduate entrepreneurship.Findings – The paper suggests that there is a lack of research in the field of graduate entrepreneurship in the developing world, and that further research in developing countries may help to understand and shed light on the issues evolving around graduate entrepreneurial intentions, business start‐up and education. Some preliminary themes emerge from research included in this special issue. First, en...