Abstract: Environmental investments, including ecological
projects, relating to the protection of atmosphere are today a need.
However, investing in the environment should be based on rational
management rules. This comes across a problem of selecting a
method to assess substances reduced during projects. Therefore, a
method allowing for the assessment of decision rationality has to be
found.
The purpose of this article is to present and systematise pollution
reduction assessment methods and illustrate theoretical analyses with
empirical data.
Empirical results confirm theoretical considerations, which proved
that the only method for judging pollution reduction, free of apparent
disadvantages, is the Eco 99-ratio method. To make decisions on
environmental projects, financing institutions should take into
account a rationality rule. Therefore the Eco 99-ratio method could
be applied to make decisions relating to environmental investments in
the area of air protection.
Abstract: The aim of this research is to develop the
understanding of corporate social responsibility (CSR) from
consumers- perspective toward Thai mobile service providers.
Based on the survey from 400 mobile customers, the result
shows that four dimensions of CSR of Thai mobile service
providers consist of economic, legal, ethical and philanthropic
responsibility. These four CSR factors have positive impacts
on enhancing customer satisfaction except one item of
economic responsibility - profitability to shareholders. Ethical
dimension has the strongest impact on customer satisfaction.
Economic, legal, ethical, philanthropic responsibility and
customer satisfaction have major impact on loyalty, whilst
philanthropic component mostly affects loyalty.
Abstract: As the performance of the filtering system depends
upon the accuracy of the noise detection scheme, in this paper, we
present a new scheme for impulse noise detection based on two
levels of decision. In this scheme in the first stage we coarsely
identify the corrupted pixels and in the second stage we finally
decide whether the pixel under consideration is really corrupt or not.
The efficacy of the proposed filter has been confirmed by extensive
simulations.
Abstract: One of the common problems encountered in software
engineering is addressing and responding to the changing nature of
requirements. While several approaches have been devised to address
this issue, ranging from instilling resistance to changing requirements
in order to mitigate impact to project schedules, to developing an
agile mindset towards requirements, the approach discussed in this
paper is one of conceptualizing the delta in requirement and
modeling it, in order to plan a response to it. To provide some
context here, change is first formally identified and categorized as
either formal change or informal change. While agile methodology
facilitates informal change, the approach discussed in this paper
seeks to develop the idea of facilitating formal change. To collect,
document meta-requirements that represent the phenomena of change
would be a pro-active measure towards building a realistic cognition
of the requirements entity that can further be harnessed in the
software engineering process.
Abstract: The aim of this study was to develop a storm water quality improvement strategy plan (WQISP) which assists managers and decision makers of local city councils in enhancing their activities to improve regional water quality. City of Gosnells in Western Australia has been considered as a case study. The procedure on developing the WQISP consists of reviewing existing water quality data, identifying water quality issues in the study areas and developing a decision making tool for the officers, managers and decision makers. It was found that land use type is the main factor affecting the water quality. Therefore, activities, sources and pollutants related to different land use types including residential, industrial, agricultural and commercial are given high importance during the study. Semi-structured interviews were carried out with coordinators of different management sections of the regional councils in order to understand the associated management framework and issues. The issues identified from these interviews were used in preparing the decision making tool. Variables associated with the defined “value versus threat" decision making tool are obtained from the intensive literature review. The main recommendations provided for improvement of water quality in local city councils, include non-structural, structural and management controls and potential impacts of climate change.
Abstract: Location-aware computing is a type of pervasive
computing that utilizes user-s location as a dominant factor for
providing urban services and application-related usages. One of the
important urban services is navigation instruction for wayfinders in a
city especially when the user is a tourist. The services which are
presented to the tourists should provide adapted location aware
instructions. In order to achieve this goal, the main challenge is to
find spatial relevant objects and location-dependent information. The
aim of this paper is the development of a reusable location-aware
model to handle spatial relevancy parameters in urban location-aware
systems. In this way we utilized ontology as an approach which could
manage spatial relevancy by defining a generic model. Our
contribution is the introduction of an ontological model based on the
directed interval algebra principles. Indeed, it is assumed that the
basic elements of our ontology are the spatial intervals for the user
and his/her related contexts. The relationships between them would
model the spatial relevancy parameters. The implementation language
for the model is OWLs, a web ontology language. The achieved
results show that our proposed location-aware model and the
application adaptation strategies provide appropriate services for the
user.
Abstract: In order to accelerate the similarity search in highdimensional database, we propose a new hierarchical indexing method. It is composed of offline and online phases. Our contribution concerns both phases. In the offline phase, after gathering the whole of the data in clusters and constructing a hierarchical index, the main originality of our contribution consists to develop a method to construct bounding forms of clusters to avoid overlapping. For the online phase, our idea improves considerably performances of similarity search. However, for this second phase, we have also developed an adapted search algorithm. Our method baptized NOHIS (Non-Overlapping Hierarchical Index Structure) use the Principal Direction Divisive Partitioning (PDDP) as algorithm of clustering. The principle of the PDDP is to divide data recursively into two sub-clusters; division is done by using the hyper-plane orthogonal to the principal direction derived from the covariance matrix and passing through the centroid of the cluster to divide. Data of each two sub-clusters obtained are including by a minimum bounding rectangle (MBR). The two MBRs are directed according to the principal direction. Consequently, the nonoverlapping between the two forms is assured. Experiments use databases containing image descriptors. Results show that the proposed method outperforms sequential scan and SRtree in processing k-nearest neighbors.
Abstract: Land surface temperature (LST) is an important
parameter to study in urban climate. The understanding of the
influence of biophysical factors could improve the establishment of
modeling urban thermal landscape. It is well established that climate
hold a great influence on the urban landscape. However, it has been
recognize that climate has a low priority in urban planning process,
due to the complex nature of its influence. This study will focus on
the relatively cloud free Landsat Thematic Mapper image of the study
area, acquired on the 2nd March 2006. Correlation analyses were
conducted to identify the relationship of LST to the biophysical
factors; vegetation indices, impervious surface, and albedo to
investigate the variation of LST. We suggest that the results can be
considered by the stackholders during decision-making process to
create a cooler and comfortable environment in the urban landscape
for city dwellers.
Abstract: In this paper, Land Marks for Unique Addressing( LMUA) algorithm is develped to generate unique ID for each and every node which leads to the formation of overlapping/Non overlapping clusters based on unique ID. To overcome the draw back of the developed LMUA algorithm, the concept of clustering is introduced. Based on the clustering concept a Land Marks for Unique Addressing and Clustering(LMUAC) Algorithm is developed to construct strictly non-overlapping clusters and classify those nodes in to Cluster Heads, Member Nodes, Gate way nodes and generating the Hierarchical code for the cluster heads to operate in the level one hierarchy for wireless communication switching. The expansion of the existing network can be performed or not without modifying the cost of adding the clusterhead is shown. The developed algorithm shows one way of efficiently constructing the
Abstract: The purpose of this research is to study the concepts
of multiple Cartesian product, variety of multiple algebras and to
present some examples. In the theory of multiple algebras, like other
theories, deriving new things and concepts from the things and
concepts available in the context is important. For example, the first
were obtained from the quotient of a group modulo the equivalence
relation defined by a subgroup of it. Gratzer showed that every
multiple algebra can be obtained from the quotient of a universal
algebra modulo a given equivalence relation.
The purpose of this study is examination of multiple algebras and
basic relations defined on them as well as introduction to some
algebraic structures derived from multiple algebras. Among the
structures obtained from multiple algebras, this article studies submultiple
algebras, quotients of multiple algebras and the Cartesian
product of multiple algebras.
Abstract: Through the course of this paper we define Locationbased
Intelligence (LBI) which is outgrowing from process of
amalgamation of geolocation and Business Intelligence.
Amalgamating geolocation with traditional Business Intelligence (BI)
results in a new dimension of BI named Location-based Intelligence.
LBI is defined as leveraging unified location information for business
intelligence. Collectively, enterprises can transform location data into
business intelligence applications that will benefit all aspects of the
enterprise. Expectations from this new dimension of business
intelligence are great and its future is obviously bright.
Abstract: To determine the presence and location of faults in a transmission by the adaptation of protective distance relay based on the measurement of fixed settings as line impedance is achieved by several different techniques. Moreover, a fast, accurate and robust technique for real-time purposes is required for the modern power systems. The appliance of radial basis function neural network in transmission line protection is demonstrated in this paper. The method applies the power system via voltage and current signals to learn the hidden relationship presented in the input patterns. It is experiential that the proposed technique is competent to identify the particular fault direction more speedily. System simulations studied show that the proposed approach is able to distinguish the direction of a fault on a transmission line swiftly and correctly, therefore suitable for the real-time purposes.
Abstract: The identification and classification of weeds are of
major technical and economical importance in the agricultural
industry. To automate these activities, like in shape, color and
texture, weed control system is feasible. The goal of this paper is to
build a real-time, machine vision weed control system that can detect
weed locations. In order to accomplish this objective, a real-time
robotic system is developed to identify and locate outdoor plants
using machine vision technology and pattern recognition. The
algorithm is developed to classify images into broad and narrow class
for real-time selective herbicide application. The developed
algorithm has been tested on weeds at various locations, which have
shown that the algorithm to be very effectiveness in weed
identification. Further the results show a very reliable performance
on weeds under varying field conditions. The analysis of the results
shows over 90 percent classification accuracy over 140 sample
images (broad and narrow) with 70 samples from each category of
weeds.
Abstract: This paper presents a microstrip meandered open
circuited stub with bandstop characteristic. The proposed structure is
designed on a high frequency laminate with dielectric constant of 4.0
and board thickness of 0.508 millimeters. The scattering parameters
and electromagnetic field distributions at various frequencies are
investigated by modeling the structure with three dimensional
electromagnetic simulation tool. In order to describe the resonant
and bandstop characteristic of the meandered open circuited stub, a
Smith chart as well as electric field at various frequencies and phases
is illustrated accordingly. The structure can be an alternative method
in suppressing the harmonic response of a bandpass filter.
Abstract: In this paper, a new time discontinuous expanded mixed finite element method is proposed and analyzed for two-order convection-dominated diffusion problem. The proofs of the stability of the proposed scheme and the uniqueness of the discrete solution are given. Moreover, the error estimates of the scalar unknown, its gradient and its flux in the L1( ¯ J,L2( )-norm are obtained.
Abstract: Fatigue life prediction and evaluation are the key
technologies to assure the safety and reliability of automotive rubber
components. The objective of this study is to develop the fatigue
analysis process for vulcanized rubber components, which is
applicable to predict fatigue life at initial product design step. Fatigue
life prediction methodology of vulcanized natural rubber was
proposed by incorporating the finite element analysis and fatigue
damage parameter of maximum strain appearing at the critical location
determined from fatigue test. In order to develop an appropriate
fatigue damage parameter of the rubber material, a series of
displacement controlled fatigue test was conducted using threedimensional
dumbbell specimen with different levels of mean
displacement. It was shown that the maximum strain was a proper
damage parameter, taking the mean displacement effects into account.
Nonlinear finite element analyses of three-dimensional dumbbell
specimens were performed based on a hyper-elastic material model
determined from the uni-axial tension, equi-biaxial tension and planar
test. Fatigue analysis procedure employed in this study could be used
approximately for the fatigue design.
Abstract: This paper investigates the performance of Multiple- Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) feedback system combined with Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM). Two types of codebook based channel feedback techniques are used in this work. The first feedback technique uses a combination of both the long-term and short-term channel state information (CSI) at the transmitter, whereas the second technique uses only the short term CSI. The long-term and short-term CSI at the transmitter is used for efficient channel utilization. OFDM is a powerful technique employed in communication systems suffering from frequency selectivity. Combined with multiple antennas at the transmitter and receiver, OFDM proves to be robust against delay spread. Moreover, it leads to significant data rates with improved bit error performance over links having only a single antenna at both the transmitter and receiver. The effectiveness of these techniques has been demonstrated through the simulation of a MIMO-OFDM feedback system. The results have been evaluated for 4x4 MIMO channels. Simulation results indicate the benefits of the MIMO-OFDM channel feedback system over the one without incorporating OFDM. Performance gain of about 3 dB is observed for MIMO-OFDM feedback system as compared to the one without employing OFDM. Hence MIMO-OFDM becomes an attractive approach for future high speed wireless communication systems.
Abstract: The development of the power electronics has allowed
increasing the precision and reliability of the electrical devices, thanks
to the adjustable inverters, as the Pulse Wide Modulation (PWM)
applied to the three level inverters, which is the object of this study.
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). The optimal behavior of any electric device
can be achieved by the minimization of the stored electrical and
mechanical energy.
Abstract: In this paper, the optimum weight and cost of a laminated composite plate is seeked, while it undergoes the heaviest load prior to a complete failure. Various failure criteria are defined for such structures in the literature. In this work, the Tsai-Hill theory is used as the failure criterion. The theory of analysis was based on the Classical Lamination Theory (CLT). A newly type of Genetic Algorithm (GA) as an optimization technique with a direct use of real variables was employed. Yet, since the optimization via GAs is a long process, and the major time is consumed through the analysis, Radial Basis Function Neural Networks (RBFNN) was employed in predicting the output from the analysis. Thus, the process of optimization will be carried out through a hybrid neuro-GA environment, and the procedure will be carried out until a predicted optimum solution is achieved.
Abstract: This paper determines most common model of in-pipe
robots to derive its degree of freedom in order to compare with the
necessary degree of freedom required for a system to move inside
pipelines freely in order to derive analytical reason for losing control
of in-pipe robots at branched pipe. DOF of most common mechanism
in in-pipe robots can be calculated by considering the robot as a
parallel manipulator. A new design based on previously researched
in-pipe robot PAROYS has been suggested, and its possibility to
overcome branched section has been simulated.