Abstract: In this paper the authors present the framework of a
system for assisting users through counseling on personal health, the
Personal Health Assistance Service Expert System (PHASES).
Personal health assistance systems need Personal Health Records
(PHR), which support wellness activities, improve the understanding
of personal health issues, enable access to data from providers of
health services, strengthen health promotion, and in the end improve
the health of the population. This is especially important in societies
where the health costs increase at a higher rate than the overall
economy. The most important elements of a healthy lifestyle are
related to food (such as balanced nutrition and diets), activities for
body fitness (such as walking, sports, fitness programs), and other
medical treatments (such as massage, prescriptions of drugs). The
PHASES framework uses an ontology of food, which includes
nutritional facts, an expert system keeping track of personal health
data that are matched with medical treatments, and a comprehensive
data transfer between patients and the system.
Abstract: In wireless and mobile communications, this progress
provides opportunities for introducing new standards and improving
existing services. Supporting multimedia traffic with wireless networks
quality of service (QoS). In this paper, a grey-fuzzy controller for radio
resource management (GF-RRM) is presented to maximize the number
of the served calls and QoS provision in wireless networks. In a
wireless network, the call arrival rate, the call duration and the
communication overhead between the base stations and the control
center are vague and uncertain. In this paper, we develop a method to
predict the cell load and to solve the RRM problem based on the
GF-RRM, and support the present facility has been built on the
application-level of the wireless networks. The GF-RRM exhibits the
better adaptability, fault-tolerant capability and performance than other
algorithms. Through simulations, we evaluate the blocking rate, update
overhead, and channel acquisition delay time of the proposed method.
The results demonstrate our algorithm has the lower blocking rate, less
updated overhead, and shorter channel acquisition delay.
Abstract: Increasing user comfort and reducing operation costs
have always been primary objectives of lighting control strategies in a
building. This paper proposes an architecture of the lighting control
system for a daylit office. The system consists of the lighting
controller, A/D & D/A converter, dimmable LED lights, and the
lighting management software. Verification tests are conducted using
the proposed system specialized for the interior lighting of a open-plan
office. The results showed the proposed architecture of the lighting
system would improve the overall system reliability, lower the system
cost, and provide ease of installation and maintenance.
Abstract: Objective: The objective of this paper is to assess the
hospitals preparedness for emergency using WHO standards.
Method: This is a cross-sectional study, consisted of site visit,
questionnaire survey, 16 health facilities were included. The WHO
standard for emergency preparedness of health facilities was used to
evaluate and assess the hospitals preparedness of health facilities.
Result: 13 hospitals were responded. They scored below average
in all measure >75%), while above average score was in 7 out 9 nine
measure with a range of 8%-25%. Un acceptable below average was
noted in two measures only.
Discussion: The biggest challenge facing the hospitals in their
emergency intervention is the lack of pre-emergency and emergency
preparedness plans as well as the coordination of the hospitals
response mechanisms.
Conclusion: The studied hospitals presently are far from
international disasters preparedness protocols. That necessitates
improvements in emergency preparedness, as well as in physician
skills for injury management.
Abstract: Reducing energy consumption of embedded systems requires careful memory management. It has been shown that Scratch- Pad Memories (SPMs) are low size, low cost, efficient (i.e. energy saving) data structures directly managed at the software level. In this paper, the focus is on heuristic methods for SPMs management. A method is efficient if the number of accesses to SPM is as large as possible and if all available space (i.e. bits) is used. A Tabu Search (TS) approach for memory management is proposed which is, to the best of our knowledge, a new original alternative to the best known existing heuristic (BEH). In fact, experimentations performed on benchmarks show that the Tabu Search method is as efficient as BEH (in terms of energy consumption) but BEH requires a sorting which can be computationally expensive for a large amount of data. TS is easy to implement and since no sorting is necessary, unlike BEH, the corresponding sorting time is saved. In addition to that, in a dynamic perspective where the maximum capacity of the SPM is not known in advance, the TS heuristic will perform better than BEH.
Abstract: This paper addresses the fundamental requirements for
starting an online business. It covers the process of ideation,
conceptualization, formulation, and implementation of new venture
ideas on the Web. Using Facebook as an illustrative example, we learn
how to turn an idea into a successful electronic business and to execute
a business plan with IT skills, management expertise, a good
entrepreneurial attitude, and an understanding of Internet culture. The
personality traits and characteristics of a successful e-commerce
entrepreneur are discussed with reference to Facebook-s founder,
Mark Zuckerberg. Facebook is a social and e-commerce success. It
provides a trusted environment of which participants can conduct
business with social experience. People are able to discuss products
before, during the after the sale within the Facebook environment. The
paper also highlights the challenges and opportunities for e-commerce
entrepreneurial startups to go public and of entering the China market.
Abstract: An overview of the important aspects of managing
and controlling industrial effluent discharges to public sewers namely
sampling, characterization, quantification and legislative controls has
been presented. The findings have been validated by means of a case
study covering three industrial sectors namely, tanning, textile
finishing and food processing industries. Industrial effluents
discharges were found to be best monitored by systematic and
automatic sampling and quantified using water meter readings
corrected for evaporative and consumptive losses. Based on the
treatment processes employed in the public owned treatment works
and the chemical oxygen demand and biochemical oxygen demand
levels obtained, the effluent from all the three industrial sectors
studied were found to lie in the toxic zone. Thus, physico-chemical
treatment of these effluents is required to bring them into the
biodegradable zone. KL values (quoted to base e) were greater than
0.50 day-1 compared to 0.39 day-1 for typical municipality
wastewater.
Abstract: In the highly competitive and rapidly changing global
marketplace, independent organizations and enterprises often come
together and form a temporary alignment of virtual enterprise in a
supply chain to better provide products or service. As firms adopt the
systems approach implicit in supply chain management, they must
manage the quality from both internal process control and external
control of supplier quality and customer requirements. How to
incorporate quality management of upstream and downstream supply
chain partners into their own quality management system has recently
received a great deal of attention from both academic and practice.
This paper investigate the collaborative feature and the entities-
relationship in a supply chain, and presents an ontology of
collaborative supply chain from an approach of aligning
service-oriented framework with service-dominant logic. This
perspective facilitates the segregation of material flow management
from manufacturing capability management, which provides a
foundation for the coordination and integration of the business process
to measure, analyze, and continually improve the quality of products,
services, and process. Further, this approach characterizes the different
interests of supply chain partners, providing an innovative approach to
analyze the collaborative features of supply chain. Furthermore, this
ontology is the foundation to develop quality management system
which internalizes the quality management in upstream and
downstream supply chain partners and manages the quality in supply
chain systematically.
Abstract: This paper aims to present a framework for the
organizational knowledge management, which seeks to deploy a
standardized structure for the integrated management of knowledge is
a common language based on domains, processes and global
indicators inspired by the COBIT framework 5 (ISACA, 2012),
which supports the integration of three technologies, enterprise
information architecture (EIA), the business process modeling (BPM)
and service-oriented architecture (SOA). The Gomak Framework is a
management platform that seeks to integrate the information
technology infrastructure, the structure of applications, information
infrastructure, and business logic and business model to support a
sound strategy of organizational knowledge management, low
process-based approach and concurrent engineering. Concurrent
engineering (CE) is a systematic approach to integrated product
development that respond to customer expectations, involving all
perspectives in parallel, from the beginning of the product life cycle.
(European Space Agency, 2000).
Abstract: The development of the power electronics has allowed
increasing the precision and reliability of the electrical trainings,
thanks to the adjustable inverters, as the Pulse Wide Modulation
(PWM) five level inverters, which is the object of study in this
article.The authors treat the relation between the law order adopted for
a given system and the oscillations of the electrical and mechanical
parameters of which the tolerance depends on the process with which
they are integrated (paper factory, lifting of the heavy loads,
etc.).Thus the best choice of the regulation indexes allows us to
achieve stability and safety training without investment (management
of existing equipment).
Abstract: The concepts of knowledge creation and innovation
have a strong relationship but this relationship has not been examined
systematically. This study examines the utilization of knowledge
creation processes of the Theory of Knowledge Creation in Higher
Education Institutions. These processes consist of socialization,
externalization, combination and internalization. This study suggests
that the utilization of these processes will give impacts on innovation
in academic performance. A cross-sectional study was conducted
using survey questionnaires to collect data of the utilization of
knowledge creation processes and classroom-s innovation. The
samples are Business Management students of a Malaysian Higher
Education Institution. The results of this study could help Higher
Education Institutions to enrich the learning process of students
through knowledge creation and innovation.
Abstract: Abovepresented work deals with the new scope of application of information and communication technologies for the improvement of the election process in the biased environment. We are introducing a new concept of construction of the information-communication system for the election participant. It consists of four main components: Software, Physical Infrastructure, Structured Information and the Trained Stuff. The Structured Information is the bases of the whole system and is the collection of all possible events (irregularities among them) at the polling stations, which are structured in special templates, forms and integrated in mobile devices.The software represents a package of analytic modules, which operates with the dynamic database. The application of modern communication technologies facilities the immediate exchange of information and of relevant documents between the polling stations and the Server of the participant. No less important is the training of the staff for the proper functioning of the system. The e-training system with various modules should be applied in this respect. The presented methodology is primarily focused on the election processes in the countries of emerging democracies.It can be regarded as the tool for the monitoring of elections process by the political organization(s) and as one of the instruments to foster the spread of democracy in these countries.
Abstract: Along with the progress of our information society,
various risks are becoming increasingly common, causing multiple social problems. For this reason, risk communications for
establishing consensus among stakeholders who have different
priorities have become important. However, it is not always easy for the decision makers to agree on measures to reduce risks based on
opposing concepts, such as security, privacy and cost. Therefore, we previously developed and proposed the “Multiple Risk Communicator" (MRC) with the following functions: (1) modeling
the support role of the risk specialist, (2) an optimization engine, and (3) displaying the computed results. In this paper, MRC program
version 1.0 is applied to the personal information leakage problem. The application process and validation of the results are discussed.
Abstract: Water level forecasting using records of past time series is of importance in water resources engineering and management. For example, water level affects groundwater tables in low-lying coastal areas, as well as hydrological regimes of some coastal rivers. Then, a reliable prediction of sea-level variations is required in coastal engineering and hydrologic studies. During the past two decades, the approaches based on the Genetic Programming (GP) and Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) were developed. In the present study, the GP is used to forecast daily water level variations for a set of time intervals using observed water levels. The measurements from a single tide gauge at Urmia Lake, Northwest Iran, were used to train and validate the GP approach for the period from January 1997 to July 2008. Statistics, the root mean square error and correlation coefficient, are used to verify model by comparing with a corresponding outputs from Artificial Neural Network model. The results show that both these artificial intelligence methodologies are satisfactory and can be considered as alternatives to the conventional harmonic analysis.
Abstract: The importance of supply chain and logistics
management has been widely recognised. Effective management of
the supply chain can reduce costs and lead times and improve
responsiveness to changing customer demands. This paper proposes a
multi-matrix real-coded Generic Algorithm (MRGA) based
optimisation tool that minimises total costs associated within supply
chain logistics. According to finite capacity constraints of all parties
within the chain, Genetic Algorithm (GA) often produces infeasible
chromosomes during initialisation and evolution processes. In the
proposed algorithm, chromosome initialisation procedure, crossover
and mutation operations that always guarantee feasible solutions
were embedded. The proposed algorithm was tested using three sizes
of benchmarking dataset of logistic chain network, which are typical
of those faced by most global manufacturing companies. A half
fractional factorial design was carried out to investigate the influence
of alternative crossover and mutation operators by varying GA
parameters. The analysis of experimental results suggested that the
quality of solutions obtained is sensitive to the ways in which the
genetic parameters and operators are set.
Abstract: A SCADA (Supervisory Control And Data
Acquisition) system is an industrial control and monitoring system for
national infrastructures. The SCADA systems were used in a closed
environment without considering about security functionality in the
past. As communication technology develops, they try to connect the
SCADA systems to an open network. Therefore, the security of the
SCADA systems has been an issue. The study of key management for
SCADA system also has been performed. However, existing key
management schemes for SCADA system such as SKE(Key
establishment for SCADA systems) and SKMA(Key management
scheme for SCADA systems) cannot support broadcasting
communication. To solve this problem, an Advanced Key
Management Architecture for Secure SCADA Communication has
been proposed by Choi et al.. Choi et al.-s scheme also has a problem
that it requires lots of computational cost for multicasting
communication. In this paper, we propose an enhanced scheme which
improving computational cost for multicasting communication with
considering the number of keys to be stored in a low power
communication device (RTU).
Abstract: This research was to study on background and social
and cultural context of Kamchanoad community for sustainable
tourism management. All data was collected through in-depth
interview with village headmen, community committees, teacher,
monks, Kamchanoad forest field officers and respected senior citizen
above 60 years old in the community who have lived there for more
than 40 years. Altogether there were 30 participants for this research.
After analyzing the data, content from interview and discussion,
Kamchanoad has both high land and low land in the region as well as
swamps that are very capable of freshwater animals’ conservation.
Kamchanoad is also good for agriculture and animal farming. 80% of
Kamchanoad’s land are forest, freshwater and rice farms.
Kamchanoad was officially set up as community in 1994 as “Baan
Nonmuang”. Inhabitants in Kamchanoad make a living by farming
based on sufficiency economy. They have rice farm, eucalyptus farm,
cassava farm and rubber tree farm. Local people in Kamchanoad still
believe in the myth of Srisutto Naga. They are still religious and love
to preserve their traditional way of life. In order to understand how to
create successful tourism business in Kamchanoad, we have to study
closely on local culture and traditions. Outstanding event in
Kamchanoad is the worship of Grand Srisutto, which is on the fullmoon
day of 6th month or Visakhabucha Day. Other big events are
also celebration at the end of Buddhist lent, Naga firework, New
Year celebration, Boon Mahachart, Songkran, Buddhist Lent, Boon
Katin and Loy Kratong. Buddhism is the main religion in
Kamchanoad. The promotion of tourism in Kamchanoad is expected
to help spreading more income for this region. More infrastructures
will be provided for local people as well as funding for youth support
and people activities.
Abstract: Strategic alliances generally mean the cooperation or
collaboration between firms which pursue for a synergy that each
member hopes the benefits from the alliances would be much more
than those from individual efforts. Past researches provide us
sufficient theories and considerations for alliance forming in liner
shipping market. This research reviews important academic journals
for the past decade regarding to the most important reasons to form the
alliances. We would explain the motive of alliances and details of
shipping cooperation in literature review.
The paper also empirically investigates the key service quality
requirements improved through alliances by using quality function
deployment (QFD). Moreover, the research investigates famous
shipping reports, shipping consultant websites and most recent
shipping publications to find out the executive-s viewpoint of several
leading carriers among top 20 to assess current shipping strategic
alliance on Asia/Europe route. These comments provide meaningful
managerial reasons to consider alliance formations and search if there
is any gap between the theories and industrial practice. Analysis of the
empirical investigation and top management-s perspective on current
market situation will contribute us some meaningful managerial
suggestions to evaluate these theories applied to current strategic
alliances.
Abstract: The future of Higher Education Institutions (HEI) depend on their ability to attract and retain students, increase recognition and prestige. In order to respond to the 'customers' increasingly demanding, HEI need to identify the key factors that influence the satisfaction of a 'customers', thereby creating competitive advantages. These determinants of satisfaction are important elements that guide the strategy of an institution and allow the successful achievement of strategic plans, both teaching and administrative, to offer their ‘costumers’ services and products with higher quality. Following this way of thinking, the purpose of this study was to evaluate the satisfaction with the service quality of the School of Technology and Management of Bragança (ESTiG), of the Polytechnic Institute of Bragança, identifying, thus, the dimensions related to the quality of services that might influence students' satisfaction. The results showed that, in general, the students are satisfied with the performance of ESTiG.
Abstract: Climate change causes severe effects on natural
habitats, especially wetlands. These challenges require the adaptation
of their management to probable effects of climate change. A
compilation of necessary changes in land management was collected
in a Hungarian area being both national park and Natura 2000 SAC
and SCI site in favor of increasing the resilience and reducing
vulnerability. Several factors, such as ecological aspects, nature
conservation and climatic adaptation should be combined with social
and economic factors during the process of developing climate
change adapted management on vulnerable wetlands. Planning
adaptive management should be determined by a priority order of
conservation aims and evaluation of factors at the determined
planning unit. Mowing techniques, frequency and exact date should
be observed as well as grazing species and their breed, due to
different grazing, group forming and trampling habits. Integrating
landscape history and historical land development into the planning
process is essential.