The great demographic change leading to an ageing society demands technological solutions to satisfy the increasing varied elderly needs. This paper presents PHAROS, an interactive robot system that recommends and monitors physical exercises designed for the elderly. The aim of PHAROS is to be a friendly elderly companion that periodically suggests personalised physical activities, promoting healthy living and active ageing. Here, it is presented the PHAROS architecture, components and experimental results. The architecture has three main strands: a Pepper robot, that interacts with the users and records their exercises performance; the Human Exercise Recognition, that uses the Pepper recorded information to classify the exercise performed using Deep Leaning methods; and the Recommender, a smart-decision maker that schedules periodically personalised physical exercises in the users’ agenda. The experimental results show a high accuracy in terms of detecting and classifying the physical exercises (97.35%) done by 7 persons. Furthermore, we have implemented a novel procedure of rating exercises on the recommendation algorithm. It closely follows the users’ health status (poor performance may reveal health problems) and adapts the suggestions to it. The history may be used to access the physical condition of the user, revealing underlying problems that may be impossible to see otherwise.

This paper presents a multi-agent architecture that facilitates the development of real-time multi-agent systems based on the SIMBA approach. The approach allows the integration of unbounded deliberative processes with critical real-time tasks. CBP-BDI deliberative agents collaborate with ARTIS agents in order to solve real-time problems efficiently. The proposal has been successfully tested and evaluated in a case study based on the use of mobile robots for mail delivery.

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The high-speed train is a technological break-through in passenger transport which has allowed to increase railways share in modal split in medium range distances, competing with road and air transport. The first high-speed link in Spain was launched in April 1992, with high success according to occupancy rates and public opinion of its quality, safety and impact on regional development. The Madrid-Sevilla corridor includes several routes (commuting, long-distance and services provided using high-speed infrastructure but with Talgo technology). In this paper, an ex post cost-benefit analysis is carried out from demand and cost data available and under several assumptions about the life span of the project, growth hypothesis, time and accident values, and with a social discount rate of 6% in real terms. Economic evaluation of the project shows that the Spanish highspeed train project should have not been carried out in 1987 in that particular corridor.