Abstract: This paper presents reliability evaluation techniques
which are applied in distribution system planning studies and
operation. Reliability of distribution systems is an important issue in
power engineering for both utilities and customers. Reliability is a
key issue in the design and operation of electric power distribution
systems and load. Reliability evaluation of distribution systems has
been the subject of many recent papers and the modeling and
evaluation techniques have improved considerably.
Abstract: Fip-gts, an immunomodulatory protein purified from Ganoderma tsugae, has been reported to possess therapeutic effects in the treatment of cancer and autoimmune disease. For medicinal application, a recombinant Fip-gts was successfully expressed and purified in Sf21 insect cells by our previously work. It is important to evaluate the immunomodulatory activity of the rFip-gts. To assess the immunomodulatory potential of rFip-gts, the T lymphocytes of murine splenocytes were used in the present study. Results revealed that rFip-gts induced cellular aggregation formation. Additionally, the expression of IL-2 and IFN-r were up-regulated after the treatment of rFip-gts, and a corresponding increased production of IL-2 and IFN-r in a dose-dependent manner. The results showed that rFip-gts has an immunomodulatory activity in inducing Th1 lymphocytes from murine splenocytes released IL-2 and IFN-γ, thus suggest that rFip-gts may have therapeutic potential in vivo as an immune modulator.
Abstract: Machining through turning was carried out in a lathe
to study the chip formation of Multiphase Ferrite
(F-B-M) microalloyed steel. Taguchi orthogonal array was employed
to perform the machining. Continuous and discontinuous chips were
formed for different cutting parameters like speed, feed and depth of
cut. Optical and scanning electron microscope was employed to
identify the chip morphology.
Abstract: In quality control of freeze-dried durian, crispiness is
a key quality index of the product. Generally, crispy testing has to be
done by a destructive method. A nondestructive testing of the
crispiness is required because the samples can be reused for other
kinds of testing. This paper proposed a crispiness classification
method of freeze-dried durians using fuzzy logic for decision
making. The physical changes of a freeze-dried durian include the
pores appearing in the images. Three physical features including (1)
the diameters of pores, (2) the ratio of the pore area and the
remaining area, and (3) the distribution of the pores are considered to
contribute to the crispiness. The fuzzy logic is applied for making the
decision. The experimental results comparing with food expert
opinion showed that the accuracy of the proposed classification
method is 83.33 percent.
Abstract: Data mining is the process of sifting through large
volumes of data, analyzing data from different perspectives and
summarizing it into useful information. One of the widely used
desktop applications for data mining is the Weka tool which is
nothing but a collection of machine learning algorithms implemented
in Java and open sourced under the General Public License (GPL). A
web service is a software system designed to support interoperable
machine to machine interaction over a network using SOAP
messages. Unlike a desktop application, a web service is easy to
upgrade, deliver and access and does not occupy any memory on the
system. Keeping in mind the advantages of a web service over a
desktop application, in this paper we are demonstrating how this Java
based desktop data mining application can be implemented as a web
service to support data mining across the internet.
Abstract: This research aims to examine the key success factors
for the diffusion of mobile entertainment services in Malaysia. The
drivers and barriers observed in this research include perceived
benefit; concerns pertaining to pricing, product and technological
standardization, privacy and security; as well as influences from
peers and community. An analysis of a Malaysian survey of 384
respondents between 18 to 25 years shows that subscribers placed
greater importance on perceived benefit of mobile entertainment
services compared to other factors. Results of the survey also show
that there are strong positive correlations between all the factors,
with pricing issue–perceived benefit showing the strongest
relationship. This paper aims to provide an extensive study on the
drivers and barriers that could be used to derive architecture for
entertainment service provision to serve as a guide for telcos to
outline suitable approaches in order to encourage mass market
adoption of mobile entertainment services in Malaysia.
Abstract: This study was conducted Ismailoglu grape type (Vitis
vinifera L.) and its vine which was aged 15 was grown on its own
root in a vegetation period of 2013 in Nevşehir province in Turkey.
In this research, it was investigated whether the applications of
Control (C), 1/3 cluster tip reduction (1/3 CTR), shoot tip reduction
(STR), 1/3 CTR + STR, TKI-HUMAS (TKI-HM) (Soil) (S), TKIHM
(Foliar) (F), TKI-HM (S + F), 1/3 CTR + TKI-HM (S), 1/3 CTR
+ TKI-HM (F), 1/3 CTR + TKI-HM (S+F), STR + TKI-HM (S), STR
+ TKI-HM (F), STR + TKI-HM (S + F), 1/3 CTR + STR+TKI-HM
(S), 1/3 CTR + STR + TKI-HM (F), 1/3 CTR + STR + TKI-HM (S +
F) on yield and yield components of Ismailoglu grape type. The
results were obtained as the highest fresh grape yield (16.15 kg/vine)
with TKI-HM (S), as the highest cluster weight (652.39 g) with 1/3
CTR + STR, as the highest 100 berry weight (419.07 g) with 1/3
CTR + STR + TKI-HM (F), as the highest maturity index (44.06)
with 1/3 CTR, as the highest must yield (810.00 ml) with STR +
TKI-HM (F), as the highest intensity of L* color (42.04) with TKIHM
(S + F), as the highest intensity of a* color (2.60) with 1/3 CTR
+ TKI-HM (S), as the highest intensity of b* color (7.16) with 1/3
CTR + TKI-HM (S) applications. To increase the fresh grape yield of
Ismailoglu grape type can be recommended TKI-HM (S) application.
Abstract: Research on damage of gears and gear pairs using
vibration signals remains very attractive, because vibration signals
from a gear pair are complex in nature and not easy to interpret.
Predicting gear pair defects by analyzing changes in vibration signal
of gears pairs in operation is a very reliable method. Therefore, a
suitable vibration signal processing technique is necessary to extract
defect information generally obscured by the noise from dynamic
factors of other gear pairs.This article presents the value of cepstrum
analysis in vehicle gearbox fault diagnosis. Cepstrum represents the
overall power content of a whole family of harmonics and sidebands
when more than one family of sidebands is present at the same time.
The concept for the measurement and analysis involved in using the
technique are briefly outlined. Cepstrum analysis is used for detection
of an artificial pitting defect in a vehicle gearbox loaded with
different speeds and torques. The test stand is equipped with three
dynamometers; the input dynamometer serves asthe internal
combustion engine, the output dynamometers introduce the load on
the flanges of the output joint shafts. The pitting defect is
manufactured on the tooth side of a gear of the fifth speed on the
secondary shaft. Also, a method for fault diagnosis of gear faults is
presented based on order Cepstrum. The procedure is illustrated with
the experimental vibration data of the vehicle gearbox. The results
show the effectiveness of Cepstrum analysis in detection and
diagnosis of the gear condition.
Abstract: Project managers are the ultimate responsible for the
overall characteristics of a project, i.e. they should deliver the project
on time with minimum cost and with maximum quality. It is vital for
any manager to decide a trade-off between these conflicting
objectives and they will be benefited of any scientific decision
support tool. Our work will try to determine optimal solutions (rather
than a single optimal solution) from which the project manager will
select his desirable choice to run the project. In this paper, the
problem in project scheduling notated as
(1,T|cpm,disc,mu|curve:quality,time,cost) will be studied. The
problem is multi-objective and the purpose is finding the Pareto
optimal front of time, cost and quality of a project
(curve:quality,time,cost), whose activities belong to a start to finish
activity relationship network (cpm) and they can be done in different
possible modes (mu) which are non-continuous or discrete (disc), and
each mode has a different cost, time and quality . The project is
constrained to a non-renewable resource i.e. money (1,T). Because
the problem is NP-Hard, to solve the problem, a meta-heuristic is
developed based on a version of genetic algorithm specially adapted
to solve multi-objective problems namely FastPGA. A sample project
with 30 activities is generated and then solved by the proposed
method.
Abstract: In 3D-wavelet video coding framework temporal
filtering is done along the trajectory of motion using Motion
Compensated Temporal Filtering (MCTF). Hence computationally
efficient motion estimation technique is the need of MCTF. In this
paper a predictive technique is proposed in order to reduce the
computational complexity of the MCTF framework, by exploiting
the high correlation among the frames in a Group Of Picture (GOP).
The proposed technique applies coarse and fine searches of any fast
block based motion estimation, only to the first pair of frames in a
GOP. The generated motion vectors are supplied to the next
consecutive frames, even to subsequent temporal levels and only fine
search is carried out around those predicted motion vectors. Hence
coarse search is skipped for all the motion estimation in a GOP
except for the first pair of frames. The technique has been tested for
different fast block based motion estimation algorithms over different
standard test sequences using MC-EZBC, a state-of-the-art scalable
video coder. The simulation result reveals substantial reduction (i.e.
20.75% to 38.24%) in the number of search points during motion
estimation, without compromising the quality of the reconstructed
video compared to non-predictive techniques. Since the motion
vectors of all the pair of frames in a GOP except the first pair will
have value ±1 around the motion vectors of the previous pair of
frames, the number of bits required for motion vectors is also
reduced by 50%.
Abstract: This paper aims to develop an algorithm of finite
capacity material requirement planning (FCMRP) system for a multistage
assembly flow shop. The developed FCMRP system has two
main stages. The first stage is to allocate operations to the first and
second priority work centers and also determine the sequence of the
operations on each work center. The second stage is to determine the
optimal start time of each operation by using a linear programming
model. Real data from a factory is used to analyze and evaluate the
effectiveness of the proposed FCMRP system and also to guarantee a
practical solution to the user. There are five performance measures,
namely, the total tardiness, the number of tardy orders, the total
earliness, the number of early orders, and the average flow-time. The
proposed FCMRP system offers an adjustable solution which is a
compromised solution among the conflicting performance measures.
The user can adjust the weight of each performance measure to
obtain the desired performance. The result shows that the combination
of FCMRP NP3 and EDD outperforms other combinations
in term of overall performance index. The calculation time for the
proposed FCMRP system is about 10 minutes which is practical for
the planners of the factory.
Abstract: In the Top Right Access point Minimum Length Corridor (TRA-MLC) problem [1], a rectangular boundary partitioned into rectilinear polygons is given and the problem is to find a corridor of least total length and it must include the top right corner of the outer rectangular boundary. A corridor is a tree containing a set of line segments lying along the outer rectangular boundary and/or on the boundary of the rectilinear polygons. The corridor must contain at least one point from the boundaries of the outer rectangle and also the rectilinear polygons. Gutierrez and Gonzalez [1] proved that the MLC problem, along with some of its restricted versions and variants, are NP-complete. In this paper, we give a shorter proof of NP-Completeness of TRA-MLC by findig the reduction in the following way.
Abstract: One important objective in Precision Agriculture is to minimize the volume of herbicides that are applied to the fields through the use of site-specific weed management systems. In order to reach this goal, two major factors need to be considered: 1) the similar spectral signature, shape and texture between weeds and crops; 2) the irregular distribution of the weeds within the crop's field. This paper outlines an automatic computer vision system for the detection and differential spraying of Avena sterilis, a noxious weed growing in cereal crops. The proposed system involves two processes: image segmentation and decision making. Image segmentation combines basic suitable image processing techniques in order to extract cells from the image as the low level units. Each cell is described by two area-based attributes measuring the relations among the crops and the weeds. From these attributes, a hybrid decision making approach determines if a cell must be or not sprayed. The hybrid approach uses the Support Vector Machines and the Fuzzy k-Means methods, combined through the fuzzy aggregation theory. This makes the main finding of this paper. The method performance is compared against other available strategies.
Abstract: Negation is useful in the majority of the real world applications. However, its introduction leads to semantic and canonical problems. SEPN nets are well adapted extension of predicate nets for the definition and manipulation of stratified programs. This formalism is characterized by two main contributions. The first concerns the management of the whole class of stratified programs. The second contribution is related to usual operations optimization (maximal stratification, incremental updates ...). We propose, in this paper, useful algorithms for manipulating stratified programs using SEPN. These algorithms were implemented and validated with STRPRO tool.
Abstract: Superplastic deformation and high temperature load
relaxation behavior of coarse-grained iron aluminides with the
composition of Fe-28 at.% Al have been investigated. A series of load
relaxation and tensile tests were conducted at temperatures ranging
from 600 to 850oC. The flow curves obtained from load relaxation
tests were found to have a sigmoidal shape and to exhibit stress vs.
strain rate data in a very wide strain rate range from 10-7/s to 10-2/s.
Tensile tests have been conducted at various initial strain rates ranging
from 3×10-5/s to 1×10-2/s. Maximum elongation of ~500 % was
obtained at the initial strain rate of 3×10-5/s and the maximum strain
rate sensitivity was found to be 0.68 at 850oC in binary Fe-28Al alloy.
Microstructure observation through the optical microscopy (OM) and
the electron back-scattered diffraction (EBSD) technique has been
carried out on the deformed specimens and it has revealed the
evidences for grain boundary migration and grain refinement to occur
during superplastic deformation, suggesting the dynamic
recrystallization mechanism. The addition of Cr by the amount of 5
at.% appeared to deteriorate the superplasticity of the binary iron
aluminide. By applying the internal variable theory of structural
superplasticity, the addition of Cr has been revealed to lower the
contribution of the frictional resistance to dislocation glide during high
temperature deformation of the Fe3Al alloy.
Abstract: Self-directed learning (SDL) was developed initially
for adult learning. Guglielmino constructed a scale to measure SDL.
Recent researchers have applied this concept to children. Although
there are sufficient theoretical evidences to present the possibility of
applying this concept to children, empirical evidences were not
provided. This study aimed to examine the quality of SDL and
construct a scale to measure SDL among young children. A modified
scale of Guglielmino-s scale was constructed and piloted with 183
subjects of age 9. Findings suggest that the qualities of SDL in young
ages are apparently congruent with that of adults.
Abstract: Researches related to standard product model and
development of neutral manufacturing interfaces for numerical
control machines becomes a significant topic since the last 25 years.
In this paper, a detail description of STEP implementation on turnmill
manufacturing has been discussed. It shows requirements of
information contents from ISO14649 data model. It covers to
describe the design of STEP-NC framework applicable to turn-mill
manufacturing. In the framework, EXPRESS-G and UML modeling
tools are used to depict the information contents of the system and
established the bases of information model requirement. A product
and manufacturing data model applicable for STEP compliant
manufacturing. The next generation turn-mill operations
requirements have been represented by a UML diagram. An object
oriented classes of ISO1449 has been developed on Visual Basic dot
NET platform for binding the static information model represented
by the UML diagram. An architect of the proposed system
implementation has been given on the bases of the design and
manufacturing module of STEP-NC interface established. Finally, a
part 21 file process plan generated for an illustration of turn-mill
components.
Abstract: In this paper, a novel multi join algorithm to join
multiple relations will be introduced. The novel algorithm is based
on a hashed-based join algorithm of two relations to produce a double index. This is done by scanning the two relations once. But
instead of moving the records into buckets, a double index will be built. This will eliminate the collision that can happen from a complete hash algorithm. The double index will be divided into join
buckets of similar categories from the two relations. The algorithm then joins buckets with similar keys to produce joined buckets. This
will lead at the end to a complete join index of the two relations. without actually joining the actual relations. The time complexity
required to build the join index of two categories is Om log m where m is the size of each category. Totaling time complexity to O n log m
for all buckets. The join index will be used to materialize the joined relation if required. Otherwise, it will be used along with other join
indices of other relations to build a lattice to be used in multi-join operations with minimal I/O requirements. The lattice of the join indices can be fitted into the main memory to reduce time complexity of the multi join algorithm.
Abstract: The study was designed to develop a measurement of
the positive emotion regulation questionnaire (PERQ) that assesses
positive emotion regulation strategies through self-report. The 14
items developed for the surveying instrument of the study were based
upon literatures regarding elements of positive regulation strategies.
319 elementary students (age ranging from 12 to14) were recruited
among three public elementary schools to survey on their use of
positive emotion regulation strategies. Of 319 subjects, 20 invalid
questionnaire s yielded a response rate of 92%. The data collected
wasanalyzed through methods such as item analysis, factor analysis,
and structural equation models. In reference to the results from item
analysis, the formal survey instrument was reduced to 11 items. A
principal axis factor analysis with varimax was performed on
responses, resulting in a 2-factor equation (savoring strategy and
neutralizing strategy), which accounted for 55.5% of the total
variance. Then, the two-factor structure of scale was also identified by
structural equation models. Finally, the reliability coefficients of the
two factors were Cronbach-s α .92 and .74. Gender difference was
only found in savoring strategy. In conclusion, the positive emotion
regulation strategies questionnaire offers a brief, internally consistent,
and valid self-report measure for understanding the emotional
regulation strategies of children that may be useful to researchers and
applied professionals.
Abstract: with increasing circuits- complexity and demand to
use portable devices, power consumption is one of the most
important parameters these days. Full adders are the basic block of
many circuits. Therefore reducing power consumption in full adders
is very important in low power circuits. One of the most powerconsuming
modules in full adders is XOR/XNOR circuit. This paper
presents two new full adders based on two new logic approaches. The
proposed logic approaches use one XOR or XNOR gate to implement
a full adder cell. Therefore, delay and power will be decreased. Using
two new approaches and two XOR and XNOR gates, two new full
adders have been implemented in this paper. Simulations are carried
out by HSPICE in 0.18μm bulk technology with 1.8V supply voltage.
The results show that the ten-transistors proposed full adder has 12%
less power consumption and is 5% faster in comparison to MB12T
full adder. 9T is more efficient in area and is 24% better than similar
10T full adder in term of power consumption. The main drawback of
the proposed circuits is output threshold loss problem.