Sustainable Urban Mobility Plans (SUMP) are increasingly popular planning tools in cities with environmental issues where numerous actions are usually proposed to reduce pollution from urban transport. However, the diagnosis and implementation of these processes requires broad consensus from all stakeholders and the ability to fit them into urban planning in such a way that it allows the proposals to become realistic actions. In this study, a review of the sustainable urban mobility plans of 47 cities in Spain during the last 15 years has been carried out, analyzing both the diagnosis and proposal of solutions and their subsequent implementation. From the results obtained, a new framework based on a structured hybrid methodology is proposed to aid decision-making for the evaluation of alternatives in the implementation of proposals in SUMP. This hybrid methodology considers experts’ and stakeholders’ opinion and applies two different multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) methods in different phases to present two rankings of best alternatives. From that experience, an analysis based on the MCDM methods called ‘Sequential Interactive Modelling for Urban Systems (SIMUS)’ and weighted sum method (WSM) was applied to a case study of the city of Cartagena, a southeastern middle-size city in Spain. This analytic proposal has been transferred to the practical field in the SUMP of Cartagena, the first instrument of this nature developed after COVID-19 in Spain for a relevant city. The results show how this framework, based on a hybrid methodology, allows the development of complex decision mapping processes using these instruments without obviating the need to generate planning tools that can be transferred from the theoretical framework of urban reality.

The ecological crisis we are facing, in addition to depleting non-renewable raw materials, has driven the emergence of biocomposite (BC) materials as a sustainable alternative that can create new opportunities for industrial product design and development. The use of biological resources in economic processes, as the bioeconomic (BE) model proposes, can lead to a transformation from the traditional linear extractive production logic to a new productive paradigm. This paper analyses technical and scientific information on the valorisation of agri-food waste to which innovative and efficient techniques and technologies have been applied, resulting in natural resource use in new products. Our review aims to explore and assess the production, development and industrial exploitation of renewable biological resources as a way to bridge the transition from the linear economic model to a circular bioeconomy (CBE) paradigm shift. For a detailed exploration and assessment of the research problem, this paper presents a comparative study between two paradigmatic projects organised and financed by different R&D programmes of the European Union (EU). We identify the agents and strategies of a potential BC innovation system, and we propose a conceptual model for the creation of an innovative and alternative industrial-scale productive value chain to replace petrochemical-based composite materials with BC and establish a new paradigm of production and consumption.

This paper proposes a methodology aiming at determining the most influent working variables and geometrical parameters over the pressure drop and heat transfer during the condensation process of several refrigerant gases using heat exchangers with pipes mini channels technology. A multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) methodology was used; this MCDM includes a mathematical method called SIMUS (Sequential Interactive Modelling for Urban Systems) that was applied to the results of 2543 tests obtained by using a designed refrigeration rig in which five different refrigerants (R32, R134a, R290, R410A and R1234yf) and two different tube geometries were tested. This methodology allows us to reduce the computational cost compared to the use of neural networks or other model development systems. This research shows six variables out of 39 that better define simultaneously the minimum pressure drop, as well as the maximum heat transfer, saturation pressure fluid entering the condenser being the most important one. Another aim of this research was to highlight a new methodology based on operation research for their application to improve the heat transfer energy efficiency and reduce the CO₂ footprint derived of the use of heat exchangers with minichannels.