Abstract: A data warehouse (DW) is a system which has value and role for decision-making by querying. Queries to DW are critical regarding to their complexity and length. They often access millions of tuples, and involve joins between relations and aggregations. Materialized views are able to provide the better performance for DW queries. However, these views have maintenance cost, so materialization of all views is not possible. An important challenge of DW environment is materialized view selection because we have to realize the trade-off between performance and view maintenance cost. Therefore, in this paper, we introduce a new approach aimed at solve this challenge based on Two-Phase Optimization (2PO), which is a combination of Simulated Annealing (SA) and Iterative Improvement (II), with the use of Multiple View Processing Plan (MVPP). Our experiments show that our method provides a further improvement in term of query processing cost and view maintenance cost.
Abstract: Fisheries management all around the world is
hampered by the lack, or poor quality, of critical data on fish
resources and fishing operations. The main reasons for the chronic
inability to collect good quality data during fishing operations is the
culture of secrecy common among fishers and the lack of modern
data gathering technology onboard most fishing vessels. In response,
OLRAC-SPS, a South African company, developed fisheries datalogging
software (eLog in short) and named it Olrac. The Olrac eLog
solution is capable of collecting, analysing, plotting, mapping,
reporting, tracing and transmitting all data related to fishing
operations. Olrac can be used by skippers, fleet/company managers,
offshore mariculture farmers, scientists, observers, compliance
inspectors and fisheries management authorities. The authors believe
that using eLog onboard fishing vessels has the potential to
revolutionise the entire process of data collection and reporting
during fishing operations and, if properly deployed and utilised,
could transform the entire commercial fleet to a provider of good
quality data and forever change the way fish resources are managed.
In addition it will make it possible to trace catches back to the actual
individual fishing operation, to improve fishing efficiency and to
dramatically improve control of fishing operations and enforcement
of fishing regulations.
Abstract: Global Software Development (GSD) projects are
passing through different boundaries of a company, country and even
in other continents where time zone differs between both sites.
Beside many benefits of such development, research declared plenty
of negative impacts on these GSD projects. It is important to
understand problems which may lie during the execution of GSD
project with different time zones. This research project discussed and
provided different issues related to time delays in GSD projects. In
this paper, authors investigated some of the time delay factors which
usually lie in GSD projects with different time zones. This
investigation is done through systematic review of literature.
Furthermore, the practices to overcome these delay factors which
have already been reported in literature and GSD organizations are
also explored through literature survey and case studies.
Abstract: The main purpose of the dam is to control the surface
streams and rivers across the country. Dam construction and
formation of river and big water reservoirs and resources happen in
the glen is a big incident which would change its surrounding area
considerably. In fact, constructing a dam the glen width is close and
fishes don't migrate from upstream to downstream and ultimately it
would led to their death. To resolve this, it seems necessity to create a
passage for fishes during the construction of dam. It is provided
establishing a set of stepped pools overlooking each other as a fish
way or fish ladder a proper pathway for moving fishes. In this article
we first examine the surrounding environment and then Ghazal Ozon
River and preserving the aquatics.
Abstract: Faced with social and health system capacity
constraints and rising and changing demand for welfare services,
governments and welfare providers are increasingly relying on
innovation to help support and enhance services. However, the
evidence reported by several studies indicates that the realization of
that potential is not an easy task. Innovations can be deemed
inherently complex to implement and operate, because many of them
involve a combination of technological and organizational renewal
within an environment featuring a diversity of stakeholders. Many
public welfare service innovations are markedly systemic in their
nature, which means that they emerge from, and must address, the
complex interplay between political, administrative, technological,
institutional and legal issues. This paper suggests that stakeholders
dealing with systemic innovation in welfare services must deal with
ambiguous and incomplete information in circumstances of
uncertainty. Employing a literature review methodology and case
study, this paper identifies, categorizes and discusses different
aspects of the uncertainty of systemic innovation in public welfare
services, and argues that uncertainty can be classified into eight
categories: technological uncertainty, market uncertainty,
regulatory/institutional uncertainty, social/political uncertainty,
acceptance/legitimacy uncertainty, managerial uncertainty, timing
uncertainty and consequence uncertainty.
Abstract: Currently, the Malaysian construction industry is
focusing on transforming construction processes from conventional
building methods to the Industrialized Building System (IBS). Still,
research on the decision making of IBS technology adoption with the
influence of contextual factors is scarce. The purpose of this paper is
to explore how contextual factors influence the IBS decision making
in building projects which is perceived by those involved in
construction industry namely construction stakeholders and IBS
supply chain members. Theoretical background, theoretical
frameworks and literatures which identify possible contextual factors
that influence decision making towards IBS technology adoption are
presented. This paper also discusses the importance of contextual
factors in IBS decision making, highlighting some possible crossover
benefits and making some suggestions as to how these can be
utilized. Conclusions are drawn and recommendations are made with
respect to the perception of socio-economic, IBS policy and IBS
technology associated with building projects.
Abstract: Computer languages are usually lumped together
into broad -paradigms-, leaving us in want of a finer classification
of kinds of language. Theories distinguishing between -genuine
differences- in language has been called for, and we propose that
such differences can be observed through a notion of expressive mode.
We outline this concept, propose how it could be operationalized and
indicate a possible context for the development of a corresponding
theory. Finally we consider a possible application in connection
with evaluation of language revision. We illustrate this with a case,
investigating possible revisions of the relational algebra in order to
overcome weaknesses of the division operator in connection with
universal queries.
Abstract: This paper solves the environmental/ economic dispatch
power system problem using the Non-dominated Sorting Genetic
Algorithm-II (NSGA-II) and its hybrid with a Convergence Accelerator
Operator (CAO), called the NSGA-II/CAO. These multiobjective
evolutionary algorithms were applied to the standard IEEE 30-bus
six-generator test system. Several optimization runs were carried out
on different cases of problem complexity. Different quality measure
which compare the performance of the two solution techniques were
considered. The results demonstrated that the inclusion of the CAO
in the original NSGA-II improves its convergence while preserving
the diversity properties of the solution set.
Abstract: In this paper we have proposed a methodology to
develop an amperometric biosensor for the analysis of glucose
concentration using a simple microcontroller based data acquisition
system. The work involves the development of Detachable
Membrane Unit (enzyme based biomembrane) with immobilized
glucose oxidase on the membrane and interfacing the same to the
signal conditioning system. The current generated by the biosensor
for different glucose concentrations was signal conditioned, then
acquired and computed by a simple AT89C51-microcontroller. The
optimum operating parameters for the better performance were found
and reported. The detailed performance evaluation of the biosensor
has been carried out. The proposed microcontroller based biosensor
system has the sensitivity of 0.04V/g/dl, with a resolution of
50mg/dl. It has exhibited very good inter day stability observed up to
30 days. Comparing to the reference method such as HPLC, the
accuracy of the proposed biosensor system is well within ± 1.5%.
The system can be used for real time analysis of glucose
concentration in the field such as, food and fermentation and clinical
(In-Vitro) applications.
Abstract: Water hyacinth has been used in aquatic systems for
wastewater purification in many years worldwide. The role of water
hyacinth (Eichhornia crassipes) species in polishing nitrate and
phosphorus concentration from municipal wastewater treatment plant
effluent by phytoremediation method was evaluated. The objective
of this project is to determine the removal efficiency of water
hyacinth in polishing nitrate and phosphorus, as well as chemical
oxygen demand (COD) and ammonia. Water hyacinth is considered
as the most efficient aquatic plant used in removing vast range of
pollutants such as organic matters, nutrients and heavy metals. Water
hyacinth, also referred as macrophytes, were cultivated in the
treatment house in a reactor tank of approximately 90(L) x 40(W) x
25(H) in dimension and built with three compartments. Three water
hyacinths were placed in each compartments and water sample in
each compartment were collected in every two days. The plant
observation was conducted by weight measurement, plant uptake and
new young shoot development. Water hyacinth effectively removed
approximately 49% of COD, 81% of ammonia, 67% of phosphorus
and 92% of nitrate. It also showed significant growth rate at starting
from day 6 with 0.33 shoot/day and they kept developing up to 0.38
shoot/day at the end of day 24. From the studies conducted, it was
proved that water hyacinth is capable of polishing the effluent of
municipal wastewater which contains undesirable amount of nitrate
and phosphorus concentration.
Abstract: Based on the homotopy perturbation method (HPM)
and Padé approximants (PA), approximate and exact solutions are
obtained for cubic Boussinesq and modified Boussinesq equations.
The obtained solutions contain solitary waves, rational solutions.
HPM is used for analytic treatment to those equations and PA for
increasing the convergence region of the HPM analytical solution.
The results reveal that the HPM with the enhancement of PA is a
very effective, convenient and quite accurate to such types of partial
differential equations.
Abstract: Collaborative working environments for distance
education can be considered as a more generic form of contemporary
remote labs. At present, the majority of existing real laboratories are
not constructed to allow the involved participants to collaborate in
real time. To make this revolutionary learning environment possible
we must allow the different users to carry out an experiment
simultaneously. In recent times, multi-user environments are
successfully applied in many applications such as air traffic control
systems, team-oriented military systems, chat-text tools, multi-player
games etc. Thus, understanding the ideas and techniques behind these
systems could be of great importance in the contribution of ideas to
our e-learning environment for collaborative working. In this
investigation, collaborative working environments from theoretical
and practical perspectives are considered in order to build an
effective collaborative real laboratory, which allows two students or
more to conduct remote experiments at the same time as a team. In
order to achieve this goal, we have implemented distributed system
architecture, enabling students to obtain an automated help by either
a human tutor or a rule-based e-tutor.
Abstract: We present our ongoing work on the development
of a new quadrotor aerial vehicle which has a tilt-wing
mechanism. The vehicle is capable of take-off/landing in vertical flight mode (VTOL) and flying over long distances in horizontal flight mode. Full dynamic model of the vehicle is derived using
Newton-Euler formulation. Linear and nonlinear controllers for
the stabilization of attitude of the vehicle and control of its
altitude have been designed and implemented via simulations. In particular, an LQR controller has been shown to be quite
effective in the vertical flight mode for all possible yaw angles. A sliding mode controller (SMC) with recursive nature has also
been proposed to stabilize the vehicle-s attitude and altitude. Simulation results show that proposed controllers provide
satisfactory performance in achieving desired maneuvers.
Abstract: In this paper we discuss the effect of unbounded particle interaction operator on particle growth and we study how this can address the choice of appropriate time steps of the numerical simulation. We provide also rigorous mathematical proofs showing that large particles become dominating with increasing time while small particles contribute negligibly. Second, we discuss the efficiency of the algorithm by performing numerical simulations tests and by comparing the simulated solutions with some known analytic solutions to the Smoluchowski equation.
Abstract: As the Internet continues to grow at a rapid pace as
the primary medium for communications and commerce and as
telecommunication networks and systems continue to expand their
global reach, digital information has become the most popular and
important information resource and our dependence upon the
underlying cyber infrastructure has been increasing significantly.
Unfortunately, as our dependency has grown, so has the threat to the
cyber infrastructure from spammers, attackers and criminal
enterprises. In this paper, we propose a new machine learning based
network intrusion detection framework for cyber security. The
detection process of the framework consists of two stages: model
construction and intrusion detection. In the model construction stage,
a semi-supervised machine learning algorithm is applied to a
collected set of network audit data to generate a profile of normal
network behavior and in the intrusion detection stage, input network
events are analyzed and compared with the patterns gathered in the
profile, and some of them are then flagged as anomalies should these
events are sufficiently far from the expected normal behavior. The
proposed framework is particularly applicable to the situations where
there is only a small amount of labeled network training data
available, which is very typical in real world network environments.
Abstract: Quality of Service (QoS) Routing aims to find path between source and destination satisfying the QoS requirements which efficiently using the network resources and underlying routing algorithm and to fmd low-cost paths that satisfy given QoS constraints. One of the key issues in providing end-to-end QoS guarantees in packet networks is determining feasible path that satisfies a number of QoS constraints. We present a Optimized Multi- Constrained Routing (OMCR) algorithm for the computation of constrained paths for QoS routing in computer networks. OMCR applies distance vector to construct a shortest path for each destination with reference to a given optimization metric, from which a set of feasible paths are derived at each node. OMCR is able to fmd feasible paths as well as optimize the utilization of network resources. OMCR operates with the hop-by-hop, connectionless routing model in IP Internet and does not create any loops while fmding the feasible paths. Nodes running OMCR not necessarily maintaining global view of network state such as topology, resource information and routing updates are sent only to neighboring nodes whereas its counterpart link-state routing method depend on complete network state for constrained path computation and that incurs excessive communication overhead.
Abstract: In digital signal processing it is important to
approximate multi-dimensional data by the method called rank
reduction, in which we reduce the rank of multi-dimensional data from
higher to lower. For 2-dimennsional data, singular value
decomposition (SVD) is one of the most known rank reduction
techniques. Additional, outer product expansion expanded from SVD
was proposed and implemented for multi-dimensional data, which has
been widely applied to image processing and pattern recognition.
However, the multi-dimensional outer product expansion has behavior
of great computation complex and has not orthogonally between the
expansion terms. Therefore we have proposed an alterative method,
Third-order Orthogonal Tensor Product Expansion short for 3-OTPE.
3-OTPE uses the power method instead of nonlinear optimization
method for decreasing at computing time. At the same time the group
of B. D. Lathauwer proposed Higher-Order SVD (HOSVD) that is
also developed with SVD extensions for multi-dimensional data.
3-OTPE and HOSVD are similarly on the rank reduction of
multi-dimensional data. Using these two methods we can obtain
computation results respectively, some ones are the same while some
ones are slight different. In this paper, we compare 3-OTPE to
HOSVD in accuracy of calculation and computing time of resolution,
and clarify the difference between these two methods.
Abstract: Ontology is widely being used as a tool for organizing
information, creating the relation between the subjects within the
defined knowledge domain area. Various fields such as Civil,
Biology, and Management have successful integrated ontology in
decision support systems for managing domain knowledge and to
assist their decision makers. Gross pollutant traps (GPT) are devices
used in trapping and preventing large items or hazardous particles in
polluting and entering our waterways. However choosing and
determining GPT is a challenge in Malaysia as there are inadequate
GPT data repositories being captured and shared. Hence ontology is
needed to capture, organize and represent this knowledge into
meaningful information which can be contributed to the efficiency of
GPT selection in Malaysia urbanization. A GPT Ontology framework
is therefore built as the first step to capture GPT knowledge which
will then be integrated into the decision support system. This paper
will provide several examples of the GPT ontology, and explain how
it is constructed by using the Protégé tool.
Abstract: Circle grid space filling plate is a flow conditioner with a fractal pattern and used to eliminate turbulence originating from pipe fittings in experimental fluid flow applications. In this paper, steady state, incompressible, swirling turbulent flow through circle grid space filling plate has been studied. The solution and the analysis were carried out using finite volume CFD solver FLUENT 6.2. Three turbulence models were used in the numerical investigation and their results were compared with the pressure drop correlation of BS EN ISO 5167-2:2003. The turbulence models investigated here are the standard k-ε, realizable k-ε, and the Reynolds Stress Model (RSM). The results showed that the RSM model gave the best agreement with the ISO pressure drop correlation. The effects of circle grids space filling plate thickness and Reynolds number on the flow characteristics have been investigated as well.
Abstract: The creation of a sustainable future depends on the knowledge and involvement of the people, as well as an understanding of the consequences of individual actions. Construction industry has long been associated with the detrimental effects to our mother earth. In Malaysia, the government, professional bodies and private companies are beginning to take heed in the necessity to reduce this environmental problem without restraining the need for development. This paper focuses on the actions undertaken by the Malaysian government, non-government organizations and construction players in promoting sustainability in construction. To ensure that those concerted efforts are not only skin deep in its impact, a survey was conducted to investigate the awareness of the developers regarding this issue and whether those developers has absorb the concept of sustainable construction in their current practices. The survey revealed that although the developers are aware of the rising issues on sustainability, little efforts are generated from them in implementing it. More effort is necessary to boost this application and further stimulate actions and strategies towards a sustainable built environment.