The Candida parapsilosis complex comprises three genetically related species: Candida parapsilosis sensu stricto, Candida orthopsilosis and Candida metapsilosis. During the last decade, Candida parapsilosis sensu stricto has become the second most commonly isolated yeast from patients with blood stream invasive fungal infections, following Candida albicans. Despite its clinical significance, little is known about its distribution and behavior in oral cavity niches. Given this background, we intended to perform a molecular characterization of 38 isolates of the Candida parapsilosis complex collected from oral cavities of immunocompetent patients with and without gingivalperiodontal disease, with the aim of determining its distribution and establishing a correlation with clinical data. Besides, we assessed the virulence of the strains by examining the in vitro biofilm-forming capacity in two different culture media: YPD and RPMI 1640. Being more frequently isolated from oral cavities with pathological conditions, 89.5% of the strains were reconfirmed to be Candida parapsilosis sensu stricto. More than 70% of the Candida parapsilosis sensu stricto strains showed biofilm-forming capacity in both culture media, reflecting a statistically significant association between biofilm-forming capacity and the clinical conditions of the subjects from whom the strains were isolated. Among the three complex species, Candida parapsilosis sensu stricto is a normal commensal in the oral cavity, being more frequently recovered in inflammatory conditions. Gingival-periodontal disease may be a factor triggering overgrowth and virulence of Candida parapsilosis sensu stricto commensal strains.

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The Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) is a key to the efficient transportation management and supply-chain coordination. VRP research has often been too focused on idealized models with non-realistic assumptions for practical applications. Nowadays the evolution of methodologies allows that the classical problems could be used to solve VRP problems of real life. The evolution of methodologies allows the creation of variants of the VRP which were considered too difficult to handle by their variety of possible restrictions. A VRP problem that includes the addition of restrictions, which represent the variants in the problem, is called Rich VRP. This work presents an algorithm to optimize the transportation management. The authors are including a case of study which solves a real routing problem applied to the distribution of bottled products. The proposed algorithm shows a saving in quantity of vehicles and reduces the operation costs of the company.

Every enterprise faces the necessity of taking decisions in their everyday activities. The decision process is leaded by one or several Decision Makers (DMs) who are in charge of deciding the proper combination of resources to achieve the goals of the company. Among others, approaches based on outranking relations have been developed to create computable models that aid in the selection of the best alternatives in the decision process. Such models require the elicitation of a set of parameters, a task that so far still has areas of opportunity for research. This work presents an architecture that integrates the personality as a factor that influence the parameter values of preference models based on outranking relations. It is pointed out that with the development of this architecture, it will be possible to integrate personality models in direct parameter elicitation strategies for preference models.