Abstract: Nowadays there are lots of applications of power and
free conveyors in logistics. They are the most frequently used
conveyor systems worldwide. Overhead conveyor technologies like
power and free systems are used in the most intra-logistics
applications in trade and industry. The automotive, food, beverage
and textile industry as well as aeronautic catering or engineering are
among the applications. Power and free systems employ different
manufacturing intervals in manufacturing as well as in production as
temporary store and buffer. Depending on the application area, power
and free conveyors are equipped with target controls enabling
complex distribution-and sorting tasks. This article introduces a new
power and free conveyor design in intra-logistics and explains its
components. According to the explanation of the components, a
model is created by means of their technical characteristics. Through
the CAD software, the model is visualized. After that, the static
analysis is evaluated. This analysis helps the calculation of the
mandatory state of structures under force action. This powerful model
helps companies achieve lower development costs as well as quicker
market maturity.
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 stability of a software system is one of the most
important quality attributes affecting the maintenance effort. Many
techniques have been proposed to support the analysis of software
stability at the architecture, file, and class level of software systems,
but little effort has been made for that at the feature (i.e., method and
attribute) level. And the assumptions the existing techniques based
on always do not meet the practice to a certain degree. Considering
that, in this paper, we present a novel metric, Stability of Software
(SoS), to measure the stability of object-oriented software systems
by software change propagation analysis using a simulation way
in software dependency networks at feature level. The approach is
evaluated by case studies on eight open source Java programs using
different software structures (one employs design patterns versus one
does not) for the same object-oriented program. The results of the
case studies validate the effectiveness of the proposed metric. The
approach has been fully automated by a tool written in Java.
Abstract: In this paper, we discuss the egalitarianism solution (ES) and center-of-gravity of the imputation-set value (CIV) for bicooperative games, which can be seen as the extensions of the solutions for traditional games given by Dutta and Ray [1] and Driessen and Funaki [2]. Furthermore, axiomatic systems for the given values are proposed. Finally, a numerical example is offered to illustrate the player ES and CTV.
Abstract: Overhead conveyor systems satisfy by their simple
construction, wide application range and their full compatibility with
other manufacturing systems, which are designed according to
international standards. Ultra-light overhead conveyor systems are
rope-based conveying systems with individually driven vehicles. The
vehicles can move automatically on the rope and this can be realized
by energy and signals. Crossings are realized by switches. Overhead
conveyor systems are particularly used in the automotive industry but
also at post offices. Overhead conveyor systems always must be
integrated with a logistical process by finding the best way for a
cheaper material flow and in order to guarantee precise and fast
workflows. With their help, any transport can take place without
wasting ground and space, without excessive company capacity, lost
or damaged products, erroneous delivery, endless travels and without
wasting time. Ultra-light overhead conveyor systems provide optimal
material flow, which produces profit and saves time. This article
illustrates the advantages of the structure of the ultra-light overhead
conveyor systems in logistics applications and explains the steps of
their system design. After an illustration of the steps, currently
available systems on the market will be shown by means of their
technical characteristics. Due to their simple construction, demands
to an ultra-light overhead conveyor system will be illustrated.
Abstract: The Beshar River is one aquatic ecosystem,which is
affected by pollutants. This study was conducted to evaluate the
effects of human activities on the water quality of the Beshar river.
This river is approximately 190 km in length and situated at the
geographical positions of 51° 20' to 51° 48' E and 30° 18' to 30° 52'
N it is one of the most important aquatic ecosystems of Kohkiloye
and Boyerahmad province next to the city of Yasuj in southern Iran.
The Beshar river has been contaminated by industrial, agricultural
and other activities in this region such as factories, hospitals,
agricultural farms, urban surface runoff and effluent of wastewater
treatment plants. In order to evaluate the effects of these pollutants
on the quality of the Beshar river, five monitoring stations were
selected along its course. The first station is located upstream of
Yasuj near the Dehnow village; stations 2 to 4 are located east, south
and west of city; and the 5th station is located downstream of Yasuj.
Several water quality parameters were sampled. These include pH,
dissolved oxygen, biological oxygen demand (BOD), temperature,
conductivity, turbidity, total dissolved solids and discharge or flow
measurements. Water samples from the five stations were collected
and analysed to determine the following physicochemical
parameters: EC, pH, T.D.S, T.H, No2, DO, BOD5, COD during 2008
to 2009. The study shows that the BOD5 value of station 1 is at a
minimum (1.5 ppm) and increases downstream from stations 2 to 4 to
a maximum (7.2 ppm), and then decreases at station 5. The DO
values of station 1 is a maximum (9.55 ppm), decreases downstream
to stations 2 - 4 which are at a minimum (3.4 ppm), before increasing
at station 5. The amount of BOD and TDS are highest at the 4th
station and the amount of DO is lowest at this station, marking the
4th station as more highly polluted than the other stations. The
physicochemical parameters improve at the 5th station due to
pollutant degradation and dilution. Finally the point and nonpoint
pollutant sources of Beshar river were determined and compared to
the monitoring results.
Abstract: Since the 1940s, many promising telepresence
research results have been obtained. However, telepresence
technology still has not reached industrial usage. As human
intelligence is necessary for successful execution of most manual
assembly tasks, the ability of the human is hindered in some cases,
such as the assembly of heavy parts of small/medium lots or
prototypes. In such a case of manual assembly, the help of industrial
robots is mandatory. The telepresence technology can be considered
as a solution for performing assembly tasks, where the human
intelligence and haptic sense are needed to identify and minimize the
errors during an assembly process and a robot is needed to carry
heavy parts. In this paper, preliminary steps to integrate the
telepresence technology into industrial robot systems are introduced.
The system described here combines both, the human haptic sense
and the industrial robot capability to perform a manual assembly task
remotely using a force feedback joystick. Mapping between the
joystick-s Degrees of Freedom (DOF) and the robot-s ones are
introduced. Simulation and experimental results are shown and future
work is discussed.
Abstract: This paper considers the problem of scheduling maintenance actions for identical aircraft gas turbine engines. Each one of the turbines consists of parts which frequently require replacement. A finite inventory of spare parts is available and all parts are ready for replacement at any time. The inventory consists of both new and refurbished parts. Hence, these parts have different field lives. The goal is to find a replacement part sequencing that maximizes the time that the aircraft will keep functioning before the inventory is replenished. The problem is formulated as an identical parallel machine scheduling problem where the minimum completion time has to be maximized. Two models have been developed. The first one is an optimization model which is based on a 0-1 linear programming formulation, while the second one is an approximate procedure which consists in decomposing the problem into several two-machine subproblems. Each subproblem is optimally solved using the first model. Both models have been implemented using Lingo and have been tested on two sets of randomly generated data with up to 150 parts and 10 turbines. Experimental results show that the optimization model is able to solve only instances with no more than 4 turbines, while the decomposition procedure often provides near-optimal solutions within a maximum CPU time of 3 seconds.
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: The purpose of this research is to compare the original
intra-oral digital dental radiograph images with images that are
enhanced using a combination of image processing algorithms. Intraoral
digital dental radiograph images are often noisy, blur edges and
low in contrast. A combination of sharpening and enhancement
method are used to overcome these problems. Three types of
proposed compound algorithms used are Sharp Adaptive Histogram
Equalization (SAHE), Sharp Median Adaptive Histogram
Equalization (SMAHE) and Sharp Contrast adaptive histogram
equalization (SCLAHE). This paper presents an initial study of the
perception of six dentists on the details of abnormal pathologies and
improvement of image quality in ten intra-oral radiographs. The
research focus on the detection of only three types of pathology
which is periapical radiolucency, widen periodontal ligament space
and loss of lamina dura. The overall result shows that SCLAHE-s
slightly improve the appearance of dental abnormalities- over the
original image and also outperform the other two proposed
compound algorithms.
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: Taking into account the importance of Lake Sevan and
Lake Sevan basin-s rivers for Armenian economy, the main goals of
our investigations were the documentation of water quality and the
biodiversity of invertebrates developed in Lake Sevan basin-s rivers
and selected tributaries.
Moderately satisfied ecological condition for the biodiversity of
Lake Sevan basin-s rivers has been established, and the changes in
species- composition of zoobenthos in Lake Sevan were detected.
A growing tendency of antibiotic resistance among E. coli isolates
in water resources has been shown.
Abstract: Oral health is particular important to the hospitalized
patients with chronic schizophrenia for an extreme high potential of the respiratory infections. Due to the degeneration of physical capability, patients of this kind typically fall dependent in the activity of daily living (ADL). A very high percentage of patients had dental
problems of which mostly could be easily avoid by easy regular tooth brushing. Purpose of the project is to develop a mechanism in helping the schizophrenia patients in rebuilding a tooth-cleaning habit. The
project observed and evaluated the tooth-cleaning behavior of 100
male patients in a psychiatric hospital, and found the majority of them
ignored such an activity in a three-month period of time. In the meantime, the primary care-givers were not aware or not convinced
the importance of such a need of dental hygiene, and thus few if any
tooth cleaning training or knowledge on dental hygiene were given to
the patients. The project then developed a program based on the numerous observations and discussions. The improvement program
included patients- group education, care-givers- training, and a
tool-kit for tooth-brush holding was erected. The project launched
with some incentive package. The outcomes were encouraging with
87% of the patients had rebuilt their tooth-brushing habits against
previous 22%, and the tooth cleaning kits were 100% kept against 22%
in the past. This project had significantly improved the oral health of
the patients. The project, included the procedure and the tool-kit
holder specific for this purpose, was a good examples for psychiatric
hospitals.
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: This paper addresses the stabilization issues for a class of uncertain switched neutral systems with nonlinear perturbations. Based on new classes of piecewise Lyapunov functionals, the stability assumption on all the main operators or the convex combination of coefficient matrices is avoid, and a new switching rule is introduced to stabilize the neutral systems. The switching rule is designed from the solution of the so-called Lyapunov-Metzler linear matrix inequalities. Finally, three simulation examples are given to demonstrate the significant improvements over the existing results.
Abstract: Currently WWW is the first solution for scholars in
finding information. But, analyzing and interpreting this volume of
information will lead to researchers overload in pursuing their
research.
Trend detection in scientific publication retrieval systems helps
scholars to find relevant, new and popular special areas by
visualizing the trend of input topic.
However, there are few researches on trend detection in scientific
corpora while their proposed models do not appear to be suitable.
Previous works lack of an appropriate representation scheme for
research topics.
This paper describes a method that combines Semantic Web and
ontology to support advance search functions such as trend detection
in the context of scholarly Semantic Web system (SSWeb).
Abstract: This paper discusses the use of explorative data
mining tools that allow the educator to explore new relationships
between reported learning experiences and actual activities,
even if there are multiple dimensions with a large number
of measured items. The underlying technology is based on
the so-called Compendium Platform for Reproducible Computing
(http://www.freestatistics.org) which was built on top the computational
R Framework (http://www.wessa.net).
Abstract: Privacy issues commonly discussed among
researchers, practitioners, and end-users in pervasive healthcare.
Pervasive healthcare systems are applications that can support
patient-s need anytime and anywhere. However, pervasive healthcare
raises privacy concerns since it can lead to situations where patients
may not be aware that their private information is being shared and
becomes vulnerable to threat. We have systematically analyzed the
privacy issues and present a summary in tabular form to show the
relationship among the issues. The six issues identified are medical
information misuse, prescription leakage, medical information
eavesdropping, social implications for the patient, patient difficulties
in managing privacy settings, and lack of support in designing
privacy-sensitive applications. We narrow down the issues and chose
to focus on the issue of 'lack of support in designing privacysensitive
applications' by proposing a privacy-sensitive architecture
specifically designed for pervasive healthcare monitoring systems.
Abstract: Model Predictive Control (MPC) is an established control
technique in a wide range of process industries. The reason for
this success is its ability to handle multivariable systems and systems
having input, output or state constraints. Neverthless comparing to
PID controller, the implementation of the MPC in miniaturized
devices like Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA) and microcontrollers
has historically been very small scale due to its complexity in
implementation and its computation time requirement. At the same
time, such embedded technologies have become an enabler for future
manufacturing enterprisers as well as a transformer of organizations
and markets. In this work, we take advantage of these recent advances
in this area in the deployment of one of the most studied and applied
control technique in the industrial engineering. In this paper, we
propose an efficient firmware for the implementation of constrained
MPC in the performed STM32 microcontroller using interior point
method. Indeed, performances study shows good execution speed
and low computational burden. These results encourage to develop
predictive control algorithms to be programmed in industrial standard
processes. The PID anti windup controller was also implemented in
the STM32 in order to make a performance comparison with the
MPC. The main features of the proposed constrained MPC framework
are illustrated through two examples.
Abstract: Basel III (or the Third Basel Accord) is a global
regulatory standard on bank capital adequacy, stress testing and
market liquidity risk agreed upon by the members of the Basel
Committee on Banking Supervision in 2010-2011, and scheduled to
be introduced from 2013 until 2018. Basel III is a comprehensive set
of reform measures. These measures aim to; (1) improve the banking
sector-s ability to absorb shocks arising from financial and economic
stress, whatever the source, (2) improve risk management and
governance, (3) strengthen banks- transparency and disclosures.
Similarly the reform target; (1) bank level or micro-prudential,
regulation, which will help raise the resilience of individual banking
institutions to periods of stress. (2) Macro-prudential regulations,
system wide risk that can build up across the banking sector as well
as the pro-cyclical implication of these risks over time. These two
approaches to supervision are complementary as greater resilience at
the individual bank level reduces the risk system wide shocks.
Macroeconomic impact of Basel III; OECD estimates that the
medium-term impact of Basel III implementation on GDP growth is
in the range -0,05 percent to -0,15 percent per year. On the other hand
economic output is mainly affected by an increase in bank lending
spreads as banks pass a rise in banking funding costs, due to higher
capital requirements, to their customers. Consequently the estimated
effects on GDP growth assume no active response from monetary
policy. Basel III impact on economic output could be offset by a
reduction (or delayed increase) in monetary policy rates by about 30
to 80 basis points. The aim of this paper is to create a framework
based on the recent regulations in order to prevent financial crises.
Thus the need to overcome the global financial crisis will contribute
to financial crises that may occur in the future periods. In the first
part of the paper, the effects of the global crisis on the banking
system examine the concept of financial regulations. In the second
part; especially in the financial regulations and Basel III are analyzed.
The last section in this paper explored the possible consequences of
the macroeconomic impacts of Basel III.