Elecnor (Spain)

During 2015-2016, a European Consortium of 15 partners from 8 different countries, developed the DEMETRA (DEMonstrator of EGNSS services based on Time Reference Architecture), a project funded by the European Union in the frame of the Horizon 2020 program. This project aims at developing and experimenting time dissemination services dedicated to specific users like traffic control, energy distribution, finance, telecommunication, and scientific institutions. Nine services have been developed. These services provide time dissemination with accuracy levels from millisecond to the sub-ns, and also additional services like certification, calibration, or integrity. Five of these services are based on the European GNSS. After a development phase (see PTTI 2016 presentation) the full DEMETRA system has been working during six months for demonstration. The paper will report about the experimentation results, showing performances and limits of the proposed time dissemination services, aiming to foster the exploitation of the European GNSS for timing applications.

This document describes the uplink commanding system for the ESA Gaia mission. The need for commanding, the main actors, data flow and systems involved are described. The system architecture is explained in detail, including the different levels of configuration control, software systems and data models. A particular subsystem, the automatic interpreter of human-readable onboard activity templates, is also carefully described. Many lessons have been learned during the commissioning and are also reported, because they could be useful for future space survey missions.

Healthy life style has increased its penetration among people in the last years. The number of licenses for practicing snow and mountain activities certificates it with an over 7% increase year by year. Due to this, expert skiers or excursionist have slightly modified traditional patterns in their activities, moving from controlled zones, such as ski resorts or typical mountain paths, to non-protected zones, thus increasing the risk of suffering an avalanche. Over 150 people die buried by snow avalanches every year, in this scenario survival probabilities are tightly related with the time employed for finding victims, being critical the first 15 minutes. Most of the existing solutions require the presence of special elements not allowing the start of the rescue once the avalanche has finished, or when allows it, they are not as quick as needed in this kind of scenarios. This work presents an alternative solution focused on accelerating the detecting process and the rescue by facilitating its use with a very intuitive set of orders. Exploiting the possibilities offered by GNSS and ICT technologies (low power low range mesh networks), the system will be capable of detecting buried victims with only the information generated by the system. Furthermore, the context information provided by a control center accelerates the rescue process and optimizes the work of professional rescue team. This paper presents the theoretical basis of signal propagation through the snow and the set of functions implemented for accomplishing the system scope.

Nuclear Power Plant design and operations are strongly conditioned by the operating licence conditions and regulations. The present paper tries to emphasize some areas where reliability methods are of value to improve plant operations whithin the bounds defined by legally applicable nuclear regulation.KeywordsNuclear Power PlantPreventive MaintenanceCorrective MaintenanceOutage TimeProbabilistic Safety AssessmentThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.