Abstract
This review is an analysis of the literature on public transport and mobile ticketing systems and their gamification. The review is divided into three main topics: (i) Behavioral Change in relation to Public Transport, (ii) Gamification, and (iii) Gamification in Public Transport and Mobile Ticketing. This study shows the diversity of the theme of gamification applied to the transport sector and demonstrates its potential to attract and retain more customers for more sustainable means of transport.

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Abstract
Traditionally, scheduling literature has focused mainly on solving problems related to processing jobs with non- assembly operations. Despite the growing interest in the assembly literature in recent years, knowledge of the problem is still in its early stages in many aspects. In this regard, we are not aware of any previous contributions that address the assembly scheduling problem with just-in-time objectives. To fill this gap, this paper studies the 2-stage assembly scheduling problem minimising the sum of total earliness and total tardiness. We first analyse the relationship between the decision problem and the generation of the due dates of the jobs, and identify the equivalences with different related decision problems depending on the instances. The properties and conclusions obtained in the analysis are applied to design two constructive heuristics and a composite heuristic. To evaluate our proposals, different heuristics from the state-of-the-art of related scheduling problems are adapted, and a computational evaluation is carried out. The excellent behaviour of the proposed algorithms is demonstrated by an extensive computational evaluation.

Abstract
Industry 4.0 has brought innovative concepts and technologies that have greatly improved the development of more intelligent, flexible and reconfigurable systems. Two of these concepts, Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs) and Digital Twins (DTs), have gained significant attention from various stakeholders, e.g., researchers, industry practitioners, and governmental organizations. Both are vital to support the digitalisation of products, machines, and systems, and they focus on the integration of physical and cyber processes, where one affects the other through feedback loops. Having this in mind, this paper aims to better understand how CPS and DT are correlated, particularly exploring their similarities and differences, their positioning within the Industry 4.0 paradigm, and their convergence to develop Industry 4.0 solutions. Some research challenges to develop Industry 4.0 solutions by integrating these concepts are also discussed.

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Various relevant aspects of our lives relate to the places we visit and our daily activities. The movement of individuals between regular places, such as work, school, or other important personal locations is getting increasing attention due to the pervasiveness of geolocation devices and the amount of data they generate. This paper presents an approach for personal location prediction using a probabilistic model and data mining techniques over mobility data streams. We extract the individuals’ locations from relevant events in a data stream to build and maintain a Markov Chain over the important places. We evaluate the method over 3 real-world datasets. The results show the usefulness of the proposal in comparison with other well-known approaches. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2025.

Abstract
Aims. The goal of this work is to characterize the polarization effects of the beam path of the Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI) and the GRAVITY beam combiner instrument. This is useful for two reasons: to calibrate polarimetric observations with GRAVITY for instrumental effects and to understand the systematic error introduced to the astrometry due to birefringence when observing targets with a significant intrinsic polarization. Methods. By combining a model of the VLTI light path and its mirrors and dedicated experimental data, we constructed a full polarization model of the VLTI Unit Telescopes (UTs) and the GRAVITY instrument. We first characterized all telescopes together to construct a universal UT calibration model for polarized targets with the VLTI. We then expanded the model to include the differential birefringence between the UTs. With this, we were able to constrain the systematic errors and the contrast loss for highly polarized targets. Results. Along with this paper, we have published a standalone Python package that can be used to calibrate the instrumental effects on polarimetric observations. This enables the community to use GRAVITY with the UTs to observe targets in a polarimetric observing mode. We demonstrate the calibration model with the Galactic Center star IRS 16C. For this source, we were able to constrain the polarization degree to within 0.4% and the polarization angle to within 5 degrees while being consistent with the literature values. Furthermore, we show that there is no significant contrast loss, even if the science and fringe-tracker targets have significantly different polarization, and we determine that the phase error in such an observation is smaller than 1 degrees, corresponding to an astrometric error of 10 mu as. Conclusions. With this work, we enable the use by the community of the polarimetric mode with GRAVITY/UTs and outline the steps necessary to observe and calibrate polarized targets with GRAVITY. We demonstrate that it is possible to measure the intrinsic polarization of astrophysical sources with high precision and that polarization effects do not limit astrometric observations of polarized targets.