Abstract: Many multimedia communication applications require a
source to transmit messages to multiple destinations subject to quality
of service (QoS) delay constraint. To support delay constrained
multicast communications, computer networks need to guarantee an
upper bound end-to-end delay from the source node to each of
the destination nodes. This is known as multicast delay problem.
On the other hand, if the same message fails to arrive at each
destination node at the same time, there may arise inconsistency and
unfairness problem among users. This is related to multicast delayvariation
problem. The problem to find a minimum cost multicast
tree with delay and delay-variation constraints has been proven to
be NP-Complete. In this paper, we propose an efficient heuristic
algorithm, namely, Economic Delay and Delay-Variation Bounded
Multicast (EDVBM) algorithm, based on a novel heuristic function,
to construct an economic delay and delay-variation bounded multicast
tree. A noteworthy feature of this algorithm is that it has very high
probability of finding the optimal solution in polynomial time with
low computational complexity.
Abstract: The objective of this work was to investigate flow
properties of powdered infant formula samples. Samples were
purchased at a local pharmacy and differed in composition. Lactose
free infant formula, gluten free infant formula and infant formulas
containing dietary fibers and probiotics were tested and compared
with a regular infant formula sample which did not contain any of
these supplements. Particle size and bulk density were determined
and their influence on flow properties was discussed. There were no
significant differences in bulk densities of the samples, therefore the
connection between flow properties and bulk density could not be
determined. Lactose free infant formula showed flow properties
different to standard supplement-free sample. Gluten free infant
formula with addition of probiotic microorganisms and dietary fiber
had the narrowest particle size distribution range and exhibited the
best flow properties. All the other samples exhibited the same
tendency of decreasing compaction coefficient with increasing flow
speed, which means they all become freer flowing with higher flow
speeds.
Abstract: Heavy rains are one of the features of arid and semi
arid climates which result in flood. This kind of rainfall originates
from environmental and synoptic conditions. Mediterranean cyclones
are the major factor in heavy rainfall in Iran, but these cyclones do
not happen in some parts of Iran such as Southern and Southeastern
areas. In this study, it has been tried to pinpoint the synoptic reasons
of heavy rainfall in Isfahan through the analysis of the relationship
between this rainfall in Isfahan and atmospheric system over Iran and
the areas around it. The findings of this study show that the major
factor have is the arrival of Sudanese low pressure system in this
region from the southwest, of course if the ascent local conditions
such as heat occur, the heaviest rains happen in Isfahan. In fact this
kind of rainfall in Isfahan has a Sudanese origin and if it is
accompanied by Mediterranean system, heavier rain falls.
Abstract: In this paper, multiobjective design of multi-machine Power System Stabilizers (PSSs) using Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) is presented. The stabilizers are tuned to simultaneously shift the lightly damped and undamped electro-mechanical modes of all machines to a prescribed zone in the s-plane. A multiobjective problem is formulated to optimize a composite set of objective functions comprising the damping factor, and the damping ratio of the lightly damped electromechanical modes. The PSSs parameters tuning problem is converted to an optimization problem which is solved by PSO with the eigenvalue-based multiobjective function. The proposed PSO based PSSs is tested on a multimachine power system under different operating conditions and disturbances through eigenvalue analysis and some performance indices to illustrate its robust performance.
Abstract: This work presents the first results from the long-term experiment, which is focused on the impact of intensive rainfall and long period of drought on microbial activities in soil. Fifteen lysimeters were prepared in the area of our interest. This area is a protection zone of underground source of drinking water. These lysimeters were filed with topsoil and subsoil collected in this area and divided into two groups. These groups differ in fertilization and amount of water received during the growing season. Amount of microbial biomass and leaching of mineral nitrogen and phosphates were chosen as main indicators of microbial activities in soil. Content of mineral nitrogen and phosphates was measured in soil solution, which was collected from each lysimeters. Amount of microbial biomass was determined in soil samples that were taken from the lysimeters before and after the long period of drought and intensive rainfall.
Abstract: The objective of this study was to determine the accuracy to estimation fetal weight by Johnson-s method and compares it with actual birth weight. The sample group was 126 infants delivered in Dan KhunThot hospital from January March 2012. Fetal weight was estimated by measuring fundal height according to Johnson-s method. The information was collected by studying historical delivery records and then analyzed by using the statistics of frequency, percentage, mean, and standard deviation. Finally, the difference was analyzed by a paired t-test.The results showed had an average birth weight was 3093.57 ± 391.03 g (mean ± SD) and 3,455 ± 454.55 g average estimated fetal weight by Johnson-s method higher than average actual birth weight was 384.09 grams. When classifying the infants according to birth weight found that low birth weight ( 4000 g) actual birth weight was more than estimated fetal weight. The difference was found between actual birth weight and estimation fetal weight of the minimum weight in high birth weight ( > 4000 g) , the appropriate birth weight (2500-3999g) and low birth weight (
Abstract: Functionalities and control behavior are both primary
requirements in design of a complex system. Automata theory plays
an important role in modeling behavior of a system. Z is an ideal
notation which is used for describing state space of a system and then
defining operations over it. Consequently, an integration of automata
and Z will be an effective tool for increasing modeling power for a
complex system. Further, nondeterministic finite automata (NFA)
may have different implementations and therefore it is needed to
verify the transformation from diagrams to a code. If we describe
formal specification of an NFA before implementing it, then
confidence over transformation can be increased. In this paper, we
have given a procedure for integrating NFA and Z. Complement of a
special type of NFA is defined. Then union of two NFAs is
formalized after defining their complements. Finally, formal
construction of intersection of NFAs is described. The specification
of this relationship is analyzed and validated using Z/EVES tool.
Abstract: Drought is one of the most damaging climate-related
hazards, it is generally considered as a prolonged absence of
precipitation. This normal and recurring climate phenomenon had
plagued civilization throughout history because of the negative
impacts on economical, environmental and social sectors. Drought
characteristics are thus recognized as important factors in water
resources planning and management. The purpose of this study is to
detect the changes in drought frequency, persistence and severity
in the Ruhr river basin. The frequency of drought events was
calculated using the Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI). Used
data are daily precipitation records from seven meteorological
stations covering the period 1961-2007. The main benefit of the
application of this index is its versatility, only rainfall data is required
to deliver five major dimensions of a drought : duration, intensity,
severity, magnitude, and frequency. Furthermore, drought can be
calculated in different time steps. In this study SPI was calculated for
1, 3, 6, 9, 12, and 24 months. Several drought events were detected
in the covered period, these events contain mild, moderate and severe
droughts. Also positive and negative trends in the SPI values were
observed.
Abstract: Extensive rainfall disaggregation approaches have been developed and applied in climate change impact studies such as flood risk assessment and urban storm water management.In this study, five rainfall models that were capable ofdisaggregating daily rainfall data into hourly one were investigated for the rainfall record in theChangi Airport, Singapore. The objectives of this study were (i) to study the temporal characteristics of hourly rainfall in Singapore, and (ii) to evaluate the performance of variousdisaggregation models. The used models included: (i) Rectangular pulse Poisson model (RPPM), (ii) Bartlett-Lewis Rectangular pulse model (BLRPM), (iii) Bartlett-Lewis model with 2 cell types (BL2C), (iv) Bartlett-Lewis Rectangular with cell depth distribution dependent on duration (BLRD), and (v) Neyman-Scott Rectangular pulse model (NSRPM). All of these models werefitted using hourly rainfall data ranging from 1980 to 2005 (which was obtained from Changimeteorological station).The study results indicated that the weight scheme of inversely proportional variance could deliver more accurateoutputs for fitting rainfall patterns in tropical areas, and BLRPM performedrelatively better than other disaggregation models.
Abstract: Mathematical models can be used to describe the
dynamics of the spread of infectious disease between susceptibles
and infectious populations. Dengue fever is a re-emerging disease in
the tropical and subtropical regions of the world. Its incidence has
increased fourfold since 1970 and outbreaks are now reported quite
frequently from many parts of the world. In dengue endemic regions,
more cases of dengue infection in pregnancy and infancy are being
found due to the increasing incidence. It has been reported that
dengue infection was vertically transmitted to the infants. Primary
dengue infection is associated with mild to high fever, headache,
muscle pain and skin rash. Immune response includes IgM antibodies
produced by the 5th day of symptoms and persist for 30-60 days. IgG
antibodies appear on the 14th day and persist for life. Secondary
infections often result in high fever and in many cases with
hemorrhagic events and circulatory failure. In the present paper, a
mathematical model is proposed to simulate the succession of dengue
disease transmission in pregnancy and infancy. Stability analysis of
the equilibrium points is carried out and a simulation is given for the
different sets of parameter. Moreover, the bifurcation diagrams of our
model are discussed. The controlling of this disease in infant cases is
introduced in the term of the threshold condition.
Abstract: We have applied new accelerated algorithm for linear
discriminate analysis (LDA) in face recognition with support vector
machine. The new algorithm has the advantage of optimal selection
of the step size. The gradient descent method and new algorithm has
been implemented in software and evaluated on the Yale face
database B. The eigenfaces of these approaches have been used to
training a KNN. Recognition rate with new algorithm is compared
with gradient.
Abstract: XML is becoming a de facto standard for online data exchange. Existing XML filtering techniques based on a publish/subscribe model are focused on the highly structured data marked up with XML tags. These techniques are efficient in filtering the documents of data-centric XML but are not effective in filtering the element contents of the document-centric XML. In this paper, we propose an extended XPath specification which includes a special matching character '%' used in the LIKE operation of SQL in order to solve the difficulty of writing some queries to adequately filter element contents using the previous XPath specification. We also present a novel technique for filtering a collection of document-centric XMLs, called Pfilter, which is able to exploit the extended XPath specification. We show several performance studies, efficiency and scalability using the multi-query processing time (MQPT).
Abstract: Fuzzy Cognitive Maps (FCMs) is a causal graph, which shows the relations between essential components in complex systems. Experts who are familiar with the system components and their relations can generate a related FCM. There is a big gap when human experts cannot produce FCM or even there is no expert to produce the related FCM. Therefore, a new mechanism must be used to bridge this gap. In this paper, a novel learning method is proposed to construct causal graph based on historical data and by using metaheuristic such Tabu Search (TS). The efficiency of the proposed method is shown via comparison of its results of some numerical examples with those of some other methods.
Abstract: In recent years, though, the concept of fit has been
now in widespread used in strategic management research, it is in its
infancy for applying fit concept to service innovation issue. Therefore,
drawing on the concept of fit, this present research proposed an
innovation service fit model within service innovation, market
orientation, marketing strategy, and IT adoption are coexisted. The
perspective of fit as covariation will be employed to test the hypothesis
and identify the effects of fit. We contend that the fit among these four
factors will contribution to business performance. Finally, according
to the empirical data collected from manufacturing, service, and
financial industry in Taiwan, meaningful findings and conclusions
will be proposed and discussed.
Abstract: The physiological effects of physical exercise on
human body are relatively well known in literature, which describes
in detail the changes that occur in the cardiovascular system, the
respiratory one, in bones and other systems, both during exercise
and after its delivery. However, the effects of exercise on mental
processes are less treated. From the literature reviews discussed in
this study, it can be detached the idea that we can not exactly say that
physical exercise has beneficial effects on mental processes, but
neither that it would have potentially negative effects. This
uncertainty, reflected in the inability to indicate precise and
unequivocal meaning, favorable-unfavorable physical effort in acting
on mental processes, is a prime reason to undertake a study of the
phenomenon influence effort administered physical education classes
on the dynamics of mental processes like attention and memory.
Abstract: Recently, Denial of Service(DoS) attacks and Distributed DoS(DDoS) attacks which are stronger form of DoS attacks from plural hosts have become security threats on the Internet. It is important to identify the attack source and to block attack traffic as one of the measures against these attacks. In general, it is difficult to identify them because information about the attack source is falsified. Therefore a method of identifying the attack source by tracing the route of the attack traffic is necessary. A traceback method which uses traffic patterns, using changes in the number of packets over time as criteria for the attack traceback has been proposed. The traceback method using the traffic patterns can trace the attack by matching the shapes of input traffic patterns and the shape of output traffic pattern observed at a network branch point such as a router. The traffic pattern is a shapes of traffic and unfalsifiable information. The proposed trace methods proposed till date cannot obtain enough tracing accuracy, because they directly use traffic patterns which are influenced by non-attack traffics. In this paper, a new traffic pattern matching method using Independent Component Analysis(ICA) is proposed.
Abstract: Fuzzy Cognitive Maps (FCMs) have successfully
been applied in numerous domains to show relations between
essential components. In some FCM, there are more nodes, which
related to each other and more nodes means more complex in system
behaviors and analysis. In this paper, a novel learning method used to
construct FCMs based on historical data and by using data mining
and DEMATEL method, a new method defined to reduce nodes
number. This method cluster nodes in FCM based on their cause and
effect behaviors.
Abstract: The interaction of tunneling or mining with
groundwater has become a very relevant problem not only due to the
need to guarantee the safety of workers and to assure the efficiency of
the tunnel drainage systems, but also to safeguard water resources
from impoverishment and pollution risk. Therefore it is very
important to forecast the drainage processes (i.e., the evaluation of
drained discharge and drawdown caused by the excavation). The aim
of this study was to know better the system and to quantify the flow
drained from the Fontane mines, located in Val Germanasca (Turin,
Italy). This allowed to understand the hydrogeological local changes
in time. The work has therefore been structured as follows: the
reconstruction of the conceptual model with the geological,
hydrogeological and geological-structural study; the calculation of
the tunnel inflows (through the use of structural methods) and the
comparison with the measured flow rates; the water balance at the
basin scale. In this way it was possible to understand what are the
relationships between rainfall, groundwater level variations and the
effect of the presence of tunnels as a means of draining water.
Subsequently, it the effects produced by the excavation of the mining
tunnels was quantified, through numerical modeling. In particular,
the modeling made it possible to observe the drawdown variation as a
function of number, excavation depth and different mines linings.
Abstract: In this paper a novel high output impedance, low input impedance, wide bandwidth, very simple current mirror with input and output voltage requirements less than that of a simple current mirror is presented. These features are achieved with very simple structure avoiding extra large node impedances to ensure high bandwidth operation. The circuit's principle of operation is discussed and compared to simple and low voltage cascode (LVC) current mirrors. Such outstanding features of this current mirror as high output impedance ~384K, low input impedance~6.4, wide bandwidth~178MHz, low input voltage ~ 362mV, low output voltage ~ 38mV and low current transfer error ~4% (all at 50μA) makes it an outstanding choice for high performance applications. Simulation results in BSIM 0.35μm CMOS technology with HSPICE are given in comparison with simple, and LVC current mirrors to verify and validate the performance of the proposed current mirror.
Abstract: This paper shows the results obtained in the analysis
of the impact of distributed generation (DG) on distribution losses
and presents a new algorithm to the optimal allocation of distributed
generation resources in distribution networks. The optimization is
based on a Hybrid Genetic Algorithm and Particle Swarm
Optimization (HGAPSO) aiming to optimal DG allocation in
distribution network. Through this algorithm a significant
improvement in the optimization goal is achieved. With a numerical
example the superiority of the proposed algorithm is demonstrated in
comparison with the simple genetic algorithm.