Recently, many European local authorities have set up Urban Consolidation Centres (UCC) for dealing with challenges arising from the environmental and social impacts of logistical activities in urban contexts through shipment synchronisation and carrier coordination policies. However, the number of successful UCC projects led by local authorities in Europe is low, with most of the UCCs failing to achieve financial sustainability after the initial experimental phase, which is often heavily supported by public funds.

A recently proposed mesoscale approach for the simulation of multicomponent flows with near-contact interactions is employed to investigate the early stage formation and clustering statistics of soft flowing crystals in microfluidic channels. Specifically, we first demonstrate the ability of the aforementioned mesoscale model to accurately reproduce main mechanisms leading to the formation of two basic droplet patterns (triangular and hexagonal), in close agreement with experimental evidence.

We discuss the well-posedness of the "transient eddy current" magneto-quasi-static approximation of Maxwell's initial value problem with bounded and measurable conductivity, with sources, on a domain. We prove the existence and uniqueness of weak solutions, and we provide global Hölder estimates for the magnetic part.

The popularity of the cloud computing paradigm is opening new opportunities for collaborative computing. In this paper we tackle a fundamental problem in open-ended cloud-based distributed computing platforms, i.e., the quest for potential collaborators. We assume that cloud participants are willing to share their computational resources for shared distributed computing problems, but they are not willing to disclose the details of their resources. Lacking such information, we advocate to rely on reputation scores obtained by evaluating the interactions among participants.

Background: Probiotics may prevent the allergic response development due to their antiinflammatory and immunomodulatory effects. The aim of this study is to determine if the prophylactic treatment with a mixture of Bifidobacterium animalis subsp. Lactis BB12 and Enterococcus faecium L3 would reduce symptoms and need for drug use in children with allergic rhinitis (AR). Methods: The study included 250 children aged from 6 to 17 years, affected by AR. Patients were randomly assigned to the intervention group (150) or to the placebo group (100).

Optimal embeddings for fractional-order Orlicz{Sobolev spaces into Campanato type s- paces are offered. This is a joint work in progress with Andrea Cianchi, Lubos Pick and Lenka Slavikova.

A novel approach for extracting gauge-invariant information about spin-orbit coupling in gravitationally interacting binary systems is introduced. This approach is based on the "scattering holonomy", i.e. the integration (from the infinite past to the infinite future) of the differential spin evolution along the two worldlines of a binary system in hyperboliclike motion. We apply this approach to the computation, at the first post-Minkowskian approximation (i.e.

In network analysis, many community detection algorithms have been developed. However, their implementation leaves unaddressed the question of the statistical validation of the results. Here, we present robin (ROBustness In Network), an R package to assess the robustness of the community structure of a network found by one or more methods to give indications about their reliability.

We consider a one-dimensional, isentropic, hydrodynamical model for a unipolar semiconductor, with the mobility depending on the electric field. The mobility is related to the momentum relaxation time, and field-dependent mobility models are commonly used to describe the occurrence of saturation velocity, that is, a limit value for the electron mean velocity as the electric field increases. For the steady state system, we prove the existence of smooth solutions in the subsonic case, with a suitable assumption on the mobility function.