S. Fernández

SPANISH COORDINATION IN THE EUROPEAN UNION The Case of the Habitats Directive

Spain’s successful negotiation of the habitats directive can be explained by the political salience of this particular issue (the priority attached to the strategy whereby the EU had to be convinced of the need to link environmental protection to the provision of special funds) and by the nature of the domestic political system, characterized by its powerful and autonomous executive and by the noncooperative system of interest intermediation. Above all, the triumph of the Spanish strategy is due to the ability of successive heads of government to tightly control leading EU issues by not allowing a highly departmentalized state administration and the regional governments to be too closely involved in community negotiations. The absence of formal mechanisms that would allow contending interest groups to partake in the decision process, thereby reducing time-consuming procedures and administrative costs, must also be taken into account. As a result, Europeanization has scarcely made any progress in Spain.

Using random sampling trees for automated planning

Rapidly-exploring random trees (RRTs) are data structures and search algorithms designed to be used in continuous path planning problems. They are one of the most successful state-of-the-art techniques in motion planning, as they offer a great degree of flexibility and reliability. However, their use in other fields in which search is a commonly used approach has not been thoroughly analyzed. In this work we propose the use of RRTs as a search algorithm for automated planning. We analyze the advantages and disadvantages that this approach has over previously used search algorithms and the challenges of adapting RRTs for implicit and discrete search spaces.