La cultura del trabajo y la igualdad en la Nueva Granada

Basada en los conceptos de Alexis de Tocqueville, esta investigación busca explicar de qué manera la cultura del trabajo influyó en la igualdad de condiciones. Para esto fue necesario analizar cómo la sociedad neogranadina acogía nuevas teorías y prácticas del mundo moderno liberal en su estructura socio-económica y política, haciendo indispensable, en primer lugar, realizar un estudio detallado de la situación de la Nueva Granada en los aspectos mencionados, durante finales del siglo XVIII y gran parte del siglo XIX. En principio se puede deducir que la cultura del trabajo no tuvo influencia en la igualdad de condiciones, porque la concepción protestante de la salvación del alma no halló en los neogranadinos la aceptación que requería para hacer de este un pueblo trabajador y tampoco se pudo garantizar una situación de igualdad de condiciones desde un aspecto cultural, sino que estuvo presente por medio de leyes que no eran respetadas.

Scheduling the repair of aircraft components - a case study

In aircraft components maintenance shops, components are distributed amongst repair groups and their respective technicians based on the type of repair, on the technicians skills and workload, and on the customer required dates. This distribution planning is typically done in an empirical manner based on the group leader’s past experience. Such a procedure does not provide any performance guarantees, leading frequently to undesirable delays on the delivery of the aircraft components. Among others, a fundamental challenge faced by the group leaders is to decide how to distribute the components that arrive without customer required dates. This paper addresses the problems of prioritizing the randomly arriving of aircraft components (with or without pre-assigned customer required dates) and of optimally distributing them amongst the technicians of the repair groups. We proposed a formula for prioritizing the list of repairs, pointing out the importance of selecting good estimators for the interarrival times between repair requests, the turn-around-times and the man hours for repair. In addition, a model for the assignment and scheduling problem is designed and a preliminary algorithm along with a numerical illustration is presented.

Abstraction and use of groundwater for heating buildings in a hard rock environment

In order to turn more efficient the heating of class rooms in the lower floor of the old building of the University of Évora (a XVI century building), five drillings were organised inside the area of the university (Figure 1). The purpose was to use the temperature differential of groundwater in relation to air, by means of a heat exchanger, and use this process to heat the rooms using less energy, turning the heating process less expensive. The wells were drilled in fractured rocks (gneisses), and the purpose was to locate them at least around 100 m one from each other, whilst trying to have a hydraulic connection in-between. From the five initial wells, four were successful in terms of productivity, but just two of them (RA1 and RA2) proved to be hydraulically connected. The wells were equipped with screens for all their drilled depth (100 m), except for the first six meters and some two or three pipes of six meters each, to allow space for the installation for submersible pumps. The length of the installed screens guarantees a good efficiency of the system. In the wells with no connection, the heating system can work using each single well for abstraction and injection, but the process is much less efficient than in the cases where interaction between wells is possible through the rock’s fracture network.