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The artistic object is born from an initial moment or state that triggers a creative or creation process. This beginning is described by many as a fleeting moment during which a creative idea suddenly arises. I consider here that a creative vision is something that occurs in a very similar way, being able to capture a unified all like the finished artistic object, even if it amounts to a micro instant. This phenomenon uncovers a new form of capturing time and, therefore, a way to face temporality; the past, present and future are united and blend to originate new meanings.

The ‘vision of death’ is a concept that I explored in a musical composition, more specifically in the work Death Vision (On a January Day), in which performance becomes its possibility for representation and materialisation. The composition of the work arises from a personal vision of death, yet, to the performer, it is a construction of his or her own vision through musical interpretation. Be it in ‘vision’ as in ‘death’, some musical aspects connected with time stand out and communicate between themselves in a subtle manner. I will identify these moments through some examples of performances and representations in a cinematographic context, such as Wings of Desire by Wim Wenders (1987), Scena by Tomás Maia and André Maranha (2008) and Vai-e-vem by João César Monteiro (2003), where the visual plan is preponderant.

I will conclude that vision brings with it the possibility to intersect the real and give time back to what it has been missing: its unity. On the other hand, the vision of death in the musical performance finds its moment of fruition in linear time – in the possibility of openness and positivity that time itself gives.

Currently, the European air transport system is experiencing an annual growth of 7%. With an increasing number of flights, airports are reaching their capacity limits and are becoming a bottleneck in the system. Mantea is a European Commission funded project dealing with this issue. This paper focuses on planning decision support tools for airport traffic controllers.

The objective of our planning tools is to achieve a better use of the available airport infrastructure (taxiways and runways). To generate a safe plan, many rules must be taken into account that restrict the usage of airport tarmac: international regulations, airport operational procedures, aircraft performance, weather conditions and sometimes even controller “usual practices”. To generate a realistic plan, extensive monitoring of the traffic situation as well as suitable timing must be achieved. In the life cycle of a flight, 11 out of 15 possible causes of delay occur in an interval of 10-20 minutes, between aircraft start-up request and push-back. This means that precise planning before the end of this period is highly improbable. On the other hand, planning after this period implies the need for fast responses from the system.

In the Mantea project, an architecture is proposed in which a co-operative approach is taken towards planning aircraft movements at the airport. Controllers will be supported by planning tools that help assigning routes and departure times to controlled vehicles, in planning runway allocation (departure sequence) and occupancies, and in monitoring plan progress during flight phases. The planning horizon relates to medium term operations, i.e. 2-20 minutes ahead. The Mantea planning tools implement the following functions: runway departure planning, routing, and plan conformance monitoring. The tools will reduce the controller's workload, increase the level of safety for airport surface movements, and reduce the number of delays and operating costs for the airliners.

In this paper, we will focus on the constraint satisfaction programming techniques used in Mantea for (1) runway departure planning, (2) itinerary search and taxi planning functions. The airport tarmac and runway vicinity air routes have been modelled as a graph. Real time constraints have brought us to develop an algorithm linear in complexity for the itinerary search problem. Operational pressure has led us to develop fast search strategies for scheduling (i.e. use of heuristics, hill climbing…).

Cognitive work analysis (CWA) is a method of understanding and documenting the constraints inherent in a work domain, irrespective of the actions undertaken within the work domain and the actors who undertake them. The keystone of CWA is the abstraction–decomposition space (ADS), which provides a constraint-based overview of the system. CWA has been successfully applied in a variety of settings to create tools that make the underlying goals and constraints of the system more apparent, and allow a worker the flexibility to perform his or her job in a manner appropriate to the current conditions, without being restricted to a particular task flow. In the current study, semistructured protocol analysis was conducted with six research librarians in order to create an ADS representing the information research work domain. The resulting ADS was reviewed with the participants, who confirmed its accuracy. Insight provided by the ADS regarding the work domain of research librarians is discussed, as are implications for tools to support information research.

This chapter uses stated tourist preferences as a proxy of visitor yield measures, in order to analyse and understand the yield potential of different markets’ preferences. A literature review revealed that there is much progress to be made in terms of discussion, consensus and stability of methodology for the measurement of visitor yield. The aim of the visitor yield analysis, in the current chapter, is also to bring another dimension into yield analysis and discussion, contributing with a new form of measuring yield potential. Since the objective is to identify yield patterns based on tourist preferences over a period of time, dynamics may be captured from the fluctuation patterns, or expressed as volatility of visitor yield and length of stay throughout the years. Destination management organisations and tourist companies may potentially adopt this visitor yield matrix in order to support future strategic decisions.