Pilar González - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by Pilar González

WIT Transactions on the Built Environment, 2005

Many industrial strategies have been developed in order to improve manufacturers’ environmental r... more Many industrial strategies have been developed in order to improve manufacturers’ environmental responsibility and consumer’s consciousness over the last few decades. However, not many of these efforts have involved the service industries. Information about environmental performance of services is becoming increasingly important today. One of the most extensive tools used to assess the environmental impact of a product, process or activity is LCA (life cycle assessment). It is an iterative process for assessing the consumption of resources, environmental impact and waste generation associated with the whole life cycle. This methodology has been standardized by different institutions (CEN, ISP AND SETAC), and has been applied successfully in a great number of companies. This paper presents a LCA applied to the passengers’ transportation service using SIMAPRO 5.1, comparing the impacts if using public road transport with those associated with the use of particular cars for a regional ...

In recent years, the increase in the number of vehicles has led to a major consumption of fuel an... more In recent years, the increase in the number of vehicles has led to a major consumption of fuel and lubricants. Considerable amounts of lubricant oil and their packages are sent to waste deposits every year. On the other hand, the main oil industries in the world are looking at analyzing different alternatives to solve this kind of problem. Effective strategies for environmental management of residual oil waste and the lubricant oil packages are being studied in order to give the desired information to stakeholders all over the world. In Brazil, different states of the country bring possible solutions to this question through setting a solid waste management policy. Nevertheless, some specificities are not considered properly. This work brings an evaluation of possible perspectives for oil package disposal. In this paper, after a brief discussion about environment-related questions, 21 disposal alternatives for post-consumed lubricant oil packages were identified, 5 of which were con...

Computers & Operations Research, 2017

The dynamic nature of airports demands the development of scheduling algorithms that are computat... more The dynamic nature of airports demands the development of scheduling algorithms that are computationally efficient and therefore amenable to replanning when new traffic events occur. The main objective of this research is to design an algorithm with very low computational times able to minimize delays in the scheduled times of arrival and departure flights in an airport with a mixed-operation runway, under wake vortex separation and Constrained Position Shifting restrictions. The simulated annealing algorithm obtains a 95% improvement on time delays in less than one second of computation for the test instances generated, which means that it can be used online for high-demand scenarios to reduce delays. It has also been tested in a public testbed as well as in a real environment, showing an improvement of 30% in the time delays of real operations at London Gatwick airport.

Waste Management, 2010

The recent growth in the number of electrical and electronic devices is viewed as one the priorit... more The recent growth in the number of electrical and electronic devices is viewed as one the priority waste streams in European Union waste management policy. This paper presents the findings of a survey to study domestic habits with respect to Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) in Spain. A specific problem when performing this estimation arises from the fact that consumers quite often store old appliances at home when they are no longer used. Focusing on four different types of appliance, survival analysis (SA) is used to study both the usage span and the reasons for no longer using each device. The time that the discarded products were kept at home before being disposed of was studied using competing risks (CR) analysis. The results of the analysis provide information on the distribution of the studied variables for the different outcomes as well as the influence exerted by the socio-demographic variables considered. Relations between these characteristics and the storage time of the appliances before disposal emerge based on survey data. For instance, the CR model finds that the storage time of the some appliances (i.e. refrigerator) is related to these social-demographics factors. However, other appliances (i.e. microwave oven) are less influenced by these factors. The attitude and motivation of the respondents to the survey as regards the End-of-Life of appliances were also analysed. A majority of respondents do not store discarded appliances at home. The first reason for storing appliances at home is the possibility of it being useful in the future and the second that the respondents did not know what to do with them.

Environmental Development

Hezkuntzaren Ikerkuntzarako Ereduak XIII, Biltzar Nazionala: [Donostia, 27, 28, 29, ekaina, 2007], 2007, ISBN 978-84-9746-382-9, págs. 603-608, 2007

Waste Management & Research, 2010

The household appliance industry is one of the most important sectors from both the economic and ... more The household appliance industry is one of the most important sectors from both the economic and environmental point of view. A greater understanding of the way in which consumers of these items behave would help to better plan the recycling needs as a function of previous purchase figures. This paper presents the findings of a field survey of Spanish consumer habits with respect to different common household appliances as regards replacement time and the reasons for replacing these appliances. The methodology used is based on survival analysis; specifically, a competing risks model. A Cox proportional hazards model is also used for the sake of comparison. Our results show that as the number of people and/or persons under 18 years in the household increases, the lifetimes of some types of appliance decrease significantly. Competing risk model shows that the probability of replacing the refrigerator due to malfunction and technological obsolescence increases with the increase of fami...

International Journal of Service Industry Management, 2002

The problem of capacity management is one of the most difficult to tackle in business management;... more The problem of capacity management is one of the most difficult to tackle in business management; a situation which is aggravated in the majority of services, due to uncertain demand and personalized requirements, which make it difficult to plan and assign productive capacity. While overstaffing implies extra costs, insufficient capacity implies a lower level of attention to customer needs and therefore a lack of perceived quality. The present article tackles this problem, presenting a model that enables minimum staffing to be easily determined. By taking into account historical staffing data associated with quality data, minimum recommended workload is calculated as a function of the theoretical staff needed according to standard time. The model has been applied in two real cases.

VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations, 2017

Hundreds of thousands of people in Europe are daily receiving food thanks to local food banks, ru... more Hundreds of thousands of people in Europe are daily receiving food thanks to local food banks, run basically by volunteers who collect donations, and distribute them to organizations. In this paper, data from a sample of food banks working in 13 European countries are analysed using Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA), trying to learn about their profiles and find some clues about the efficiency of their operations, comparing them according to variables such as the number of volunteers and permanent staff, the tonnage of food delivered and the number of people served. Significant inefficiencies were found in the sector as a result of some food banks' high performance, thus setting a high level standard of operational efficiency. Some additional results regarding food bank sizes and performance are presented.

International Journal of Sustainability in Higher Education

Purpose This study aims to explore a holistic framework for implementing and reporting sustainabl... more Purpose This study aims to explore a holistic framework for implementing and reporting sustainable development goals (SDGs) in universities. The aim is to define elements of the content as well as the context, which will allow us to understand and compare sustainable development processes at the university level. Using the 2030 Agenda context, this research describes a university profile which is accountable to its stakeholders, thus aligning its sustainability report with the SDGs. Design/methodology/approach This research has considered the entire Spanish university system and relies on data collection from sustainability reports published by 50 public universities and 34 private universities. Through an analysis of the contents of public reports, the aim is to build an index like the social responsibility dissemination index, but specific to the 2030 Agenda in the university context. Findings The holistic model, based on a dissemination index, showed diverse methods of implementi...

Nursing economic$, 2002

An aging population, emerging technology, heightening patient expectations, rising health care co... more An aging population, emerging technology, heightening patient expectations, rising health care costs, shorter patient stays, and growing pressure to improve quality have made the management of nursing resources even more critical today. While approaching a model for staffing levels, the authors considered factors such as patient acuity, work redesign, and minimum quality standards. The methodology for analysis included estimating the time needed to complete nursing tasks and calculating the average number of tasks per patient. With respect to nursing quality measures, the study examined the adequacy of nursing documentation including admission history, assessments, nursing procedures, and discharge report as well as nursing-driven outcomes such as fall and phlebitis rates. Lastly, the authors determined the theoretical number of staff needed to provide nursing care according to quality standards.

The purpose of this research is to review the evolution of school furniture design from the late ... more The purpose of this research is to review the evolution of school furniture design from the late nineteenth century to the present, from two-person school benches to the individual seating found today. To this end, a study has been made of the changes that have taken place in school furniture, not all of them positive from an ergonomic perspective, both from the point of view of form and dimensions, and in terms of the materials used in its construction. In addition, the most important causes behind these changes have been identified. The adaptation of school furniture to the anthropometry or physical needs of children is the main reason behind the most significant advances made in this field.

CIRIEC-España, revista de economía pública, social y cooperativa

Los bancos de alimentos son organizaciones sin ánimo de lucro basadas en voluntariado cuyo objeti... more Los bancos de alimentos son organizaciones sin ánimo de lucro basadas en voluntariado cuyo objetivo es recuperar y redistribuir excedentes alimenticios entre las personas necesitadas a través de otras entidades. Este estudio se centra en las relaciones de un banco de alimentos con sus organizaciones beneficiarias, que se clasifican en entidades de consumo y entidades de reparto. El trabajo asume una estructura metodológica híbrida cuantitativa-cualitativa, con una primera fase, de carácter exploratorio mediante una encuesta dirigida a todas esas entidades, y una segunda, consistente en un taller participativo para devolución, contraste y profundización de los datos recogidos en la anterior. Los resultados muestran las diferencias entre ambos tipos de entidades en el actual marco de crisis socioeconómica, y sus problemas comunes que se resumen en las dificultades para satisfacer la demanda cuando es muy heterogénea y creciente, y cuando la oferta sigue reglas independientes.

Journal of Air Transport Management

Abstract While air transport brings very significant economic and social benefits to the cities a... more Abstract While air transport brings very significant economic and social benefits to the cities and regions served by airports, aircraft noise is the single major cause of community opposition to airport operations, becoming a critical issue that affects the sustainability of future traffic growth. However, planning operations exclusively focusing on noise impact may result in an increase of fuel consumption or delays. This paper develops a suitable bi-objective model for landing aircraft, which finds a schedule that minimises noise impact, total fuel consumption and delays, under wake vortex separation and Constrained Position Shifting restrictions. The results of this model are compared with real operations in a major European airport to assess the potential level of improvements. By comparing with real data from Madrid-Barajas airport, the research shows potential improvements of up to 4.5% reduction of total fuel consumption (without increasing noise levels) only by modifying the sequence of arrivals, and up to 43% (without extra fuel consumption) of reduction in noise impact over the populations under study.

Sustainability

Food banks make up an increasing phenomenon of nonprofit organizations answering to new social ne... more Food banks make up an increasing phenomenon of nonprofit organizations answering to new social needs related to the global socioeconomic crisis. In order to explore if they are suitably adapting to their environments in Spain, one of the countries most seriously affected by the crisis in South Europe, this work assumes a hybrid qualitative-quantitative structure composed of an exploratory case study based on semi-structured interviews followed by a survey addressed to all the Spanish food banks. Much of the academic literature has concerned the appropriateness of food banks as a delivery mechanism in the context of welfare state withdrawal. This paper takes this in a different direction by examining Spanish food banks from an organizational management point of view. Wary of concerns about the institutionalization of food charity, on the one hand, and recognizing the escalating daily reliance on food banks, on the other, this paper seeks to address potential technical supply problems and challenges food banks face and open debate about the organizational networks of food banks more generally. The results show nonprofit entities based on a voluntary workforce who run supply chains in order to join both social and business targets. Their situation, performance, resources, mutual relationships and the links with other entities are described, paying special attention to the changes induced by the latest contextual changes. In short, food banks are efficiently organized and well established in their territories as a coherent social movement, although they should improve in their strategic view, coordination, resources and sources of these, to satisfy more adequately their increasingly complex demands.

Transportation Research Part D: Transport and Environment

One of the biggest obstacles to the building of new airports and expanding runway capacity is env... more One of the biggest obstacles to the building of new airports and expanding runway capacity is environmental concerns, especially noise. In this paper, we review what has been previously studied in the literature concerning the noise reduction problem around airports from the Air Traffic Control (ATC) perspective. In order to facilitate the knowledge of the current situation, a regulation summary from the USA and EU is provided. We mainly focus our research on operational procedures, since they are one of the easiest improvements nowadays for reducing the impact of noise around airports. Moreover, the paper sums up the modelling, monitoring and simulation tools related to noise at airports proposed in the literature. Finally, special care is taken to review the optimization tools, the objective of which is to take into account the noise problem in order to help, or propose alternatives, to reduce its impact from airport operations.

Sustainability, 2016

There is a growing increase in the number of disadvantaged people whose basic needs, such as food... more There is a growing increase in the number of disadvantaged people whose basic needs, such as food, should be covered. In crisis periods, food banks and other entities have a special role to play in that social function. This research focuses on the marketplaces that are great generators of organic food waste due to the fact that almost all of their stalls are dedicated to the sales of fresh food. The work combines both qualitative (interviews with the person responsible for most of the marketplaces in a northern Spain region and with two health inspectors, as well as a participatory workshop with different stakeholders related to food recovery: a regional waste management company, a food bank and several beneficiary entities) and quantitative techniques (a massive survey of the market stalls where the interviews were previously conducted). The results allow us to estimate the volume of organic waste generated by these marketplaces and to propose guidelines that would facilitate a better management of the food surpluses with potential for use, in the first place, as donations to food banks and, secondly, as recoverable bio-waste.

International Journal for Simulation and Multidisciplinary Design Optimization, 2008

Over the last 10 years, the need to guarantee safety in the habitability of buildings has led to ... more Over the last 10 years, the need to guarantee safety in the habitability of buildings has led to the development of different models (which are usually classified either as optimization, simulation, or risk assessment approaches) that help define how urgent evacuation of the building should take place in the event of a fire or any other circumstance that requires such a measure. This paper presents an optimization model embedded in a simulation model that enables the user to define which evacuation routes should be used to minimize the time needed to evacuate all occupants. The system is presented here along with an experimental framework designed to assess the quality of the proposed solutions and the system's performance with respect to different types of buildings. Results analysis show improvements around 9% of the time needed to evacuate a building, using an experimental framework that considers three main factors: type of building, number of exit doors and capacity flow in the corridors.