Flexible manufacturing systems (FMS) are essential for small/medium batch and job shop manufacturing. These types of production systems are used to manufacture a considerable variety of products with medium/small production volumes. Therefore, the manufacturing platforms supporting these types of production must be #exible and organized in #exible manufacturing cells (FMC). Programming FMCs remains a di$cult task and is an actual area of research and development. This paper reports an object-oriented approach developed for FMC programming. The work presented was "rst thought for application in industrial robot manipulators, and later extended to other FMC equipments just by putting the underlying ideas in a general framework. Initially, the motivation for this work was to develop means to add force control to a standard industrial robot manipulator. This problem requires remote access to the robot controller, remote programming and monitoring, as also is required to program and monitor any other FMC equipment. The proposed approach is distributed based on a client/server model and runs on Win32 platforms, i.e., Microsoft Windows and Windows NT. Implementation for the special case of industrial robot manipulators is presented, along with some application examples used for educational, research and industrial purposes.

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Inorganic sulfites as reducing agents were successfully used in combination with typical reversible addition-fragmentation chain transfer (RAFT) agents, for the controlled DET-RAFT (DET: dissociative electron transfer) of methacrylates, methyl acrylate (MA) and styrene (Sty) near room temperature (30 °C). The polymerizations were first-order in respect to monomer conversion and polymers with narrow molecular weight distributions (Ð < 1.2) and "living" features were obtained. MALDI-TOF experiments demonstrate the integrity of the chain ends and clearly show the absence of SO2 in the polymer chains. Kinetic studies revealed that an increase of either temperature or concentration of sulfites provided faster reactions, without loss of control. Ab initio quantum chemistry calculations suggested that in the presence of the reducing agent, the RAFT agent undergoes one electron reduction to a stable radical anion that can then undergo fragmentation to yield the initiating carbon-centered radical. The new metal-free DET-RAFT developed proved to be versatile and robust, as it could be also used for the polymerization of different relevant monomers, such as glycidyl methacrylate (GMA), 2-(diisopropylamino)ethyl methacrylate (DPA) and 2-(dimethylamino)ethyl methacrylate (DMAEMA).

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In the last decade, several studies have been focused on revealing the microRNA (miRNA) repertoire and determining their functions in farm animals such as poultry, pigs, cattle, and fish. These small non-protein coding RNA molecules (18–25 nucleotides) are capable of controlling gene expression by binding to messenger RNA (mRNA) targets, thus interfering in the final protein output. MiRNAs have been recognized as the main regulators of biological features of economic interest, including body growth, muscle development, fat deposition, and immunology, among other highly valuable traits, in aquatic livestock. Currently, the miRNA repertoire of some farmed fish species has been identified and characterized, bringing insights about miRNA functions, and novel perspectives for improving health and productivity. In this review, we summarize the current advances in miRNA research by examining available data on Neotropical and other key species exploited by fisheries and in aquaculture worldwide and discuss how future studies on Neotropical fish could benefit from this knowledge. We also make a horizontal comparison of major results and discuss forefront strategies for miRNA manipulation in aquaculture focusing on forward-looking ideas for forthcoming research.

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This paper introduces a new multi-agent approach for collaborative management of logistic and supply systems based on the ant colony optimisation (ACO) meta-heuristic. The logistic system and its suppliers can be modelled as partners of a supply chain. The management methodology is defined as a set of distributed scheduling problems that exchange information during the optimisation process. Each problem is solved by an ant colony agent that uses the pheromone matrix as the communication platform. A simulation example shows that the proposed coordination mechanism improves the supply-chain performance compared to a traditional management approach, where both problems are considered separately.