Abstract: Support Vector Machine (SVM) is a statistical
learning tool developed to a more complex concept of
structural risk minimization (SRM). In this paper, SVM is
applied to signal detection in communication systems in the
presence of channel noise in various environments in the form
of Rayleigh fading, additive white Gaussian background noise
(AWGN), and interference noise generalized as additive color
Gaussian noise (ACGN). The structure and performance of
SVM in terms of the bit error rate (BER) metric is derived and
simulated for these advanced stochastic noise models and the
computational complexity of the implementation, in terms of
average computational time per bit, is also presented. The
performance of SVM is then compared to conventional binary
signaling optimal model-based detector driven by binary
phase shift keying (BPSK) modulation. We show that the
SVM performance is superior to that of conventional matched
filter-, innovation filter-, and Wiener filter-driven detectors,
even in the presence of random Doppler carrier deviation,
especially for low SNR (signal-to-noise ratio) ranges. For
large SNR, the performance of the SVM was similar to that of
the classical detectors. However, the convergence between
SVM and maximum likelihood detection occurred at a higher
SNR as the noise environment became more hostile.
Abstract: This research focus on developing a new segmentation method for improving forecasting model which is call trend based segmentation method (TBSM). Generally, the piece-wise linear representation (PLR) can finds some of pair of trading points is well for time series data, but in the complicated stock environment it is not well for stock forecasting because of the stock has more trends of trading. If we consider the trends of trading in stock price for the trading signal which it will improve the precision of forecasting model. Therefore, a TBSM with SVR model used to detect the trading points for various stocks of Taiwanese and America under different trend tendencies. The experimental results show our trading system is more profitable and can be implemented in real time of stock market
Abstract: Water recycling represents an important challenge for many countries, in particular in countries where this natural resource is rare. On the other hand, in many operations, water is used as a cooling medium, as a high proportion of water consumed in industry is used for cooling purposes. Generally this water is rejected directly to the nature. This reject will cause serious environment damages as well as an important waste of this precious element.. On way to solve these problems is to reuse and recycle this warm water, through the use of natural cooling medium, such as air in a heat exchanger unit, known as a cooling tower. A poor performance, design or reliability of cooling towers will result in lower flow rate of cooling water an increase in the evaporation of water, an hence losses of water and energy. This paper which presents an experimental investigate of thermal and hydraulic performances of a mechanical cooling tower, enables to show that the water evaporation rate, Mev, increases with an increase in the air and water flow rates, as well as inlet water temperature and for fixed air flow rates, the pressure drop (ΔPw/Z) increases with increasing , L, due to the hydrodynamic behavior of the air/water flow.
Abstract: CIM is the standard formalism for modeling management
information developed by the Distributed Management Task
Force (DMTF) in the context of its WBEM proposal, designed to
provide a conceptual view of the managed environment. In this
paper, we propose the inclusion of formal knowledge representation
techniques, based on Description Logics (DLs) and the Web Ontology
Language (OWL), in CIM-based conceptual modeling, and then we
examine the benefits of such a decision. The proposal is specified
as a CIM metamodel level mapping to a highly expressive subset
of DLs capable of capturing all the semantics of the models. The
paper shows how the proposed mapping provides CIM diagrams with
precise semantics and can be used for automatic reasoning about the
management information models, as a design aid, by means of newgeneration
CASE tools, thanks to the use of state-of-the-art automatic
reasoning systems that support the proposed logic and use algorithms
that are sound and complete with respect to the semantics. Such a
CASE tool framework has been developed by the authors and its
architecture is also introduced. The proposed formalization is not
only useful at design time, but also at run time through the use of
rational autonomous agents, in response to a need recently recognized
by the DMTF.
Abstract: The analysis of electromagnetic environment using
deterministic mathematical models is characterized by the
impossibility of analyzing a large number of interacting network
stations with a priori unknown parameters, and this is characteristic,
for example, of mobile wireless communication networks. One of the
tasks of the tools used in designing, planning and optimization of
mobile wireless network is to carry out simulation of electromagnetic
environment based on mathematical modelling methods, including
computer experiment, and to estimate its effect on radio
communication devices. This paper proposes the development of a
statistical model of electromagnetic environment of a mobile
wireless communication network by describing the parameters and
factors affecting it including the propagation channel and their
statistical models.
Abstract: Direction of Arrival estimation refers to defining a mathematical function called a pseudospectrum that gives an indication of the angle a signal is impinging on the antenna array. This estimation is an efficient method of improving the quality of service in a communication system by focusing the reception and transmission only in the estimated direction thereby increasing fidelity with a provision to suppress interferers. This improvement is largely dependent on the performance of the algorithm employed in the estimation. Many DOA algorithms exists amongst which are MUSIC, Root-MUSIC and ESPRIT. In this paper, performance of these three algorithms is analyzed in terms of complexity, accuracy as assessed and characterized by the CRLB and memory requirements in various environments and array sizes. It is found that the three algorithms are high resolution and dependent on the operating environment and the array size.
Abstract: The article presents findings from the study and
analysis of the results of an experimental programme focused on the
production of concrete and fibre reinforced concrete in which natural
aggregate has been substituted with brick or concrete recyclate. The
research results are analyzed to monitor the effect of mechanicalphysical
characteristics on the durability properties of tested
cementitious composites. The key parts of the fibre reinforced
concrete mix are the basic components: aggregates – recyclate,
cement, fly ash, water and fibres. Their specific ratios and the
properties of individual components principally affect the resulting
behaviour of fresh fibre reinforced concrete and the characteristics of
the final product. The article builds on the sources dealing with the
use of recycled aggregates from construction and demolition waste in
the production of fibre reinforced concrete. The implemented
procedure of testing the composite contributes to the building
sustainability in environmental engineering.
Abstract: As the disfunctions of the information society and
social development progress, intrusion problems such as malicious
replies, spam mail, private information leakage, phishing, and
pharming, and side effects such as the spread of unwholesome
information and privacy invasion are becoming serious social
problems. Illegal access to information is also becoming a problem as
the exchange and sharing of information increases on the basis of the
extension of the communication network. On the other hand, as the
communication network has been constructed as an international,
global system, the legal response against invasion and cyber-attack
from abroad is facing its limit. In addition, in an environment where
the important infrastructures are managed and controlled on the basis
of the information communication network, such problems pose a
threat to national security. Countermeasures to such threats are
developed and implemented on a yearly basis to protect the major
infrastructures of information communication. As a part of such
measures, we have developed a methodology for assessing the
information protection level which can be used to establish the
quantitative object setting method required for the improvement of the
information protection level.
Abstract: Environmental considerations have become an integral part of developmental thinking and decision making in many countries. It is growing rapidly in importance as a discipline of its own. Preventive approaches have been used at the evolutional process of environmental management as a broad and dynamic system for dealing with pollution and environmental degradation. In this regard, Environmental Assessment as an activity for identification and prediction of project’s impacts carried out in the world and its legal significance dates back to late 1960. In Iran, according to the Article 2 of Environmental Protection Act, Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) should be prepared for seven categories of project. This article has been actively implementing by Department of Environment at 1997. World Bank in 1989 attempted to introducing application of Environmental Assessment for making decision about projects which are required financial assistance in developing countries. So, preparing EIA for obtaining World Bank loan was obligated. Alborz Project is one of the World Bank Projects in Iran which is environmentally significant. Seven out of ten W.B safeguard policies were considered at this project. In this paper, Alborz project, objectives, safeguard policies and role of environmental management will be elaborated
Abstract: In the supply chain management customer is the most
significant component and mass customization is mostly related to
customers because it is the capability of any industry or organization
to deliver highly customized products and its services to the
respective customers with flexibility and integration, providing such
a variety of products that nearly everyone can find what they want.
Today all over the world many companies and markets are facing
varied situations that at one side customers are demanding that their
orders should be completed as quickly as possible while on other
hand it requires highly customized products and services. By
applying mass customization some companies face unwanted cost
and complexity. Now they are realizing that they should completely
examine what kind of customization would be best suited for their
companies. In this paper authors review some approaches and
principles which show effect in supply chain management that can be
adopted and used by companies for quickly meeting the customer
orders at reduced cost, with minimum amount of inventory and
maximum efficiency.
Abstract: Energy Efficiency Management is the heart of a
worldwide problem. The capability of a multi-agent system as a
technology to manage the micro-grid operation has already been
proved. This paper deals with the implementation of a decisional
pattern applied to a multi-agent system which provides intelligence to
a distributed local energy network considered at local consumer level.
Development of multi-agent application involves agent
specifications, analysis, design, and realization. Furthermore, it can
be implemented by following several decisional patterns. The
purpose of present article is to suggest a new approach for a
decisional pattern involving a multi-agent system to control a
distributed local energy network in a decentralized competitive
system. The proposed solution is the result of a dichotomous
approach based on environment observation. It uses an iterative
process to solve automatic learning problems and converges
monotonically very fast to system attracting operation point.
Abstract: For the communication between human and computer
in an interactive computing environment, the gesture recognition is
studied vigorously. Therefore, a lot of studies have proposed efficient
methods about the recognition algorithm using 2D camera captured
images. However, there is a limitation to these methods, such as the
extracted features cannot fully represent the object in real world.
Although many studies used 3D features instead of 2D features for
more accurate gesture recognition, the problem, such as the processing
time to generate 3D objects, is still unsolved in related researches.
Therefore we propose a method to extract the 3D features combined
with the 3D object reconstruction. This method uses the modified
GPU-based visual hull generation algorithm which disables unnecessary
processes, such as the texture calculation to generate three kinds
of 3D projection maps as the 3D feature: a nearest boundary, a farthest
boundary, and a thickness of the object projected on the base-plane. In
the section of experimental results, we present results of proposed
method on eight human postures: T shape, both hands up, right hand
up, left hand up, hands front, stand, sit and bend, and compare the
computational time of the proposed method with that of the previous
methods.
Abstract: Efficient handoff algorithms are a cost-effective way
of enhancing the capacity and QoS of cellular system. The higher
value of hysteresis effectively prevents unnecessary handoffs but
causes undesired cell dragging. This undesired cell dragging causes
interference or could lead to dropped calls in microcellular
environment. The problems are further exacerbated by the corner
effect phenomenon which causes the signal level to drop by 20-30 dB
in 10-20 meters. Thus, in order to maintain reliable communication
in a microcellular system new and better handoff algorithms must be
developed. A fuzzy based handoff algorithm is proposed in this paper
as a solution to this problem. Handoff on the basis of ratio of slopes
of normal signal loss to the actual signal loss is presented. The fuzzy
based solution is supported by comparing its results with the results
obtained in analytical solution.
Abstract: The aim of this study was to trace the effects of growth environment on the behaviour of fattening pigs in the farm and outside it. Behavioral manifestations of pigs reared in pens with enriched environment (A lot, n: 22) were different from those of pigs reared in pens with arid environment (B lot, n: 17) in shelter and when the movement to be loaded. Pigs of B lot spent more time on the move (31%) compared to group A pigs (13%), and manifested more aggressive behavior when they were loaded. Salivary cortisol levels also showed high values for pigs in B lot after being removed from their growth environment, as compared to its concentration for A lot pigs. The enriched environment for pigs may determine different responses of behavior. Pigs raised in arid environment, were easier to loaded than pigs reared in enriched environment, but they responded to mixing and loading stress, through increases in cortisol concentrations and impaired behavioral manifestations.
Abstract: In conventional reliability assessment, the reliability data of system components are treated as crisp values. The collected data have some uncertainties due to errors by human beings/machines or any other sources. These uncertainty factors will limit the understanding of system component failure due to the reason of incomplete data. In these situations, we need to generalize classical methods to fuzzy environment for studying and analyzing the systems of interest. Fuzzy set theory has been proposed to handle such vagueness by generalizing the notion of membership in a set. Essentially, in a Fuzzy Set (FS) each element is associated with a point-value selected from the unit interval [0, 1], which is termed as the grade of membership in the set. A Vague Set (VS), as well as an Intuitionistic Fuzzy Set (IFS), is a further generalization of an FS. Instead of using point-based membership as in FS, interval-based membership is used in VS. The interval-based membership in VS is more expressive in capturing vagueness of data. In the present paper, vague set theory coupled with conventional Lambda-Tau method is presented for reliability analysis of repairable systems. The methodology uses Petri nets (PN) to model the system instead of fault tree because it allows efficient simultaneous generation of minimal cuts and path sets. The presented method is illustrated with the press unit of the paper mill.
Abstract: At present, increased concerns about global
environmental problems have magnified the importance of
sustainability management. To move towards sustainability,
companies need to look at everything from a holistic perspective in
order to understand the interconnections between economic growth
and environmental and social sustainability. This paper aims to gain
an understanding of key determinants that drive sustainability
management and barriers that hinder its development. It employs
semi-structured interviews with key informants, site observation and
documentation. The informants are production, marketing and
environmental managers of the leading wine producer, which aims to
become an Asia-s leader in wine & wine based products. It is found
that corporate image and top management leadership are the primary
factors influencing the adoption of sustainability management. Lack
of environmental knowledge and inefficient communication are
identified as barriers.
Abstract: Zeolite A and MCM-41 have extensive applications in basic science, petrochemical science, energy conservation/storage, medicine, chemical sensor, air purification, environmentally benign composite structure and waste remediation. However, the use of zeolite A and MCM-41 in these areas, especially environmental remediation, are restricted due to prohibitive production cost. Efficient recycling of and resource recovery from coal fly ash has been a major topic of current international research interest, aimed at achieving sustainable development of human society from the viewpoints of energy, economy, and environmental strategy. This project reported an original, novel, green and fast methods to produce nano-porous zeolite A and MCM-41 materials from coal fly ash. For zeolite A, this novel production method allows a reduction by half of the total production time while maintaining a high degree of crystallinity of zeolite A which exists in a narrower particle size distribution. For MCM-41, this remarkably green approach, being an environmentally friendly process and reducing generation of toxic waste, can produce pure and long-range ordered MCM-41 materials from coal fly ash. This approach took 24 h at 25 oC to produce 9 g of MCM-41 materials from 30 g of the coal fly ash, which is the shortest time and lowest reaction temperature required to produce pure and ordered MCM-41 materials (having the largest internal surface area) compared to the values reported in the literature. Performance evaluation of the produced zeolite A and MCM-41 materials in wastewater treatment and air pollution control were reported. The residual fly ash was also converted to zeolite Na-P1 which showed good performance in removal of multi-metal ions in wastewater. In wastewater treatment, compared to commercial-grade zeolite A, adsorbents produced from coal fly ash were effective in removing multi heavy metal ions in water and could be an alternative material for treatment of wastewater. In methane emission abatement, the zeolite A (produced from coal fly ash) achieved similar methane removal efficiency compared to the zeolite A prepared from pure chemicals. This report provides the guidance for production of zeolite A and MCM-41 from coal fly ash by a cost-effective approach which opens potential applications of these materials in environmental industry. Finally, environmental and economic aspects of production of zeolite A and MCM-41 from coal fly ash were discussed.
Abstract: Formative usability evaluation aims at finding
usability problems during the development process. The earlier these
problems are identified, the less expensive to fix they are. This paper
presents some preliminary results from a formative usability testing
of the 1st prototype developed for the ARiSE (Augmented Reality in
School Environments) project.
Abstract: In this paper, a heuristic method for simultaneous
rescue robot path-planning and mission scheduling is introduced
based on project management techniques, multi criteria decision
making and artificial potential fields path-planning. Groups of
injured people are trapped in a disastrous situation. These people are
categorized into several groups based on the severity of their
situation. A rescue robot, whose ultimate objective is reaching
injured groups and providing preliminary aid for them through a path
with minimum risk, has to perform certain tasks on its way towards
targets before the arrival of rescue team. A decision value is assigned
to each target based on the whole degree of satisfaction of the criteria
and duties of the robot toward the target and the importance of
rescuing each target based on their category and the number of
injured people. The resulted decision value defines the strength of the
attractive potential field of each target. Dangerous environmental
parameters are defined as obstacles whose risk determines the
strength of the repulsive potential field of each obstacle. Moreover,
negative and positive energies are assigned to the targets and
obstacles, which are variable with respects to the factors involved.
The simulation results show that the generated path for two cases
studies with certain differences in environmental conditions and
other risk factors differ considerably.
Abstract: Environment today is featured with aging population,
increasing prevalence of chronic disease and complex of medical
treatment. Safe use of pharmaceutics relied very much on the efforts
made by both the health- related organizations and as well as the
government agencies. As far as the specialization concern in providing
health services to the patients, the government actively issued and
implemented the divisions of medical treatment and pharmaceutical to
improve the quality of care and to reduce medication errors and ensure
public health. Pharmaceutical sub-sector policy has been implemented
for 13 years. This study attempts to explore the factors that affect the
patients- behavior intention of refilling a prescription from a NHIB
pharmacy. Samples were those patients refilling their prescriptions
with the case NHIB pharmacies. A self-administered questionnaire
was used to collect respondents- information while the patients or
family members visit the pharmacy for the refilling. 1,200
questionnaires were dispatched in 37 pharmacies that randomly
selected from Pingtung City, Dongkang, Chaozhou, Hengchun areas.
732 responses were gained with 604 valid samples for further analyses.
Results of data analyses indicated that respondents- attitude,
subjective norm, perceived behavior control and behavior intentions
toward refilling behavior varied from some demographic variables to
another. This research also suggested adding actual behavior, either by
a self-report or observed, into the research.