Abstract: Generally, administrative systems in an academic
environment are disjoint and support independent queries. The
objective in this work is to semantically connect these independent
systems to provide support to queries run on the integrated platform.
The proposed framework, by enriching educational material in the
legacy systems, provides a value-added semantics layer where
activities such as annotation, query and reasoning can be carried out
to support management requirements. We discuss the development of
this ontology framework with a case study of UAE University
program administration to show how semantic web technologies can
be used by administration to develop student profiles for better
academic program management.
Abstract: PT XYZ is a bottled drinking water company. To preserve production resources owned by the company so that the resources could be utilized well, it has implemented maintenance management system, which has important role in company's profitability, and is one of the factors influenced overall company's performance. Yet, up to now the company has never measured maintenance activities' contribution to company's performance. Performance evaluation is done according to adapted Balanced Scorecard model fitted to maintenance function context. This model includes six perspectives: innovation and growth, production, maintenance, environment, costumer, and finance. Actual performance measurement is done through Analytic Hierarchy Process and Objective Matrix. From the research done, we can conclude that the company's maintenance function is categorized in moderate performance. But, there are some indicators which has high priority but low performance, which are: costumers' complain rate, work lateness rate, and Return on Investment.
Abstract: In today-s era of plasma and laser cutting, machines using oxy-acetylene flame are also meritorious due to their simplicity and cost effectiveness. The objective to devise a Computer controlled Oxy-Fuel profile cutting machine arose from the increasing demand for metal cutting with respect to edge quality, circularity and lesser formation of redeposit material. The System has an 8 bit micro controller based embedded system, which assures stipulated time response. A new window based Application software was devised which takes a standard CAD file .DXF as input and converts it into numerical data required for the controller. It uses VB6 as a front end whereas MS-ACCESS and AutoCAD as back end. The system is designed around AT89C51RD2, powerful 8 bit, ISP micro controller from Atmel and is optimized to achieve cost effectiveness and also maintains the required accuracy and reliability for complex shapes. The backbone of the system is a cleverly designed mechanical assembly along with the embedded system resulting in an accuracy of about 10 microns while maintaining perfect linearity in the cut. This results in substantial increase in productivity. The observed results also indicate reduced inter laminar spacing of pearlite with an increase in the hardness of the edge region.
Abstract: The Prediction of aerodynamic characteristics and
shape optimization of airfoil under the ground effect have been carried
out by integration of computational fluid dynamics and the multiobjective
Pareto-based genetic algorithm. The main flow
characteristics around an airfoil of WIG craft are lift force, lift-to-drag
ratio and static height stability (H.S). However, they show a strong
trade-off phenomenon so that it is not easy to satisfy the design
requirements simultaneously. This difficulty can be resolved by the
optimal design. The above mentioned three characteristics are chosen
as the objective functions and NACA0015 airfoil is considered as a
baseline model in the present study. The profile of airfoil is
constructed by Bezier curves with fourteen control points and these
control points are adopted as the design variables. For multi-objective
optimization problems, the optimal solutions are not unique but a set
of non-dominated optima and they are called Pareto frontiers or Pareto
sets. As the results of optimization, forty numbers of non- dominated
Pareto optima can be obtained at thirty evolutions.
Abstract: The production of ethyl tert-butyl ether (ETBE) was
simulated through Aspen Plus. The objective of this work was to use
the simulation results to be an alternative platform for ETBE
production from naphtha cracking wastes for the industry to develop.
ETBE is produced from isobutylene which is one of the wastes in
naphtha cracking process. The content of isobutylene in the waste is
less than 30% weight. The main part of this work was to propose a
process to save the environment and to increase the product value by
converting a great majority of the wastes into ETBE. Various
processes were considered to determine the optimal production of
ETBE. The proposed process increased ETBE production yield by
100% from conventional process with the purity of 96% weight. The
results showed a great promise for developing this proposed process
in an industrial scale.
Abstract: This research deals with a flexible flowshop
scheduling problem with arrival and delivery of jobs in groups and
processing them individually. Due to the special characteristics of
each job, only a subset of machines in each stage is eligible to
process that job. The objective function deals with minimization of
sum of the completion time of groups on one hand and minimization
of sum of the differences between completion time of jobs and
delivery time of the group containing that job (waiting period) on the
other hand. The problem can be stated as FFc / rj , Mj / irreg which
has many applications in production and service industries. A
mathematical model is proposed, the problem is proved to be NPcomplete,
and an effective heuristic method is presented to schedule
the jobs efficiently. This algorithm can then be used within the body
of any metaheuristic algorithm for solving the problem.
Abstract: The objective of the presented work is to implement the Kalman Filter into an application that reduces the influence of the environmental changes over the robot expected to navigate over a terrain of varying friction properties. The Discrete Kalman Filter is used to estimate the robot position, project the estimated current state ahead at time through time update and adjust the projected estimated state by an actual measurement at that time via the measurement update using the data coming from the infrared sensors, ultrasonic sensors and the visual sensor respectively. The navigation test has been performed in a real world environment and has been found to be robust.
Abstract: This article explores the sociological perspectives on
social problems and the role of the media which has a delicate role to
tread in balancing its duty to the public and the victim Whilst social
problems have objective conditions, it is the subjective definition of
such problems that ensure which social problem comes to the fore
and which doesn-t. Further it explores the roles and functions of
policymakers when addressing social problems and the impact of the
inception of media profiling as well as the advantages and
disadvantages of media profiling towards social problems. It focuses
on the inception of media profiling due to its length and a follow up
article will explore how current media profiling towards social
problems have evolved since its inception.
Abstract: Decrease in hardware costs and advances in computer
networking technologies have led to increased interest in the use of
large-scale parallel and distributed computing systems. One of the
biggest issues in such systems is the development of effective
techniques/algorithms for the distribution of the processes/load of a
parallel program on multiple hosts to achieve goal(s) such as
minimizing execution time, minimizing communication delays,
maximizing resource utilization and maximizing throughput.
Substantive research using queuing analysis and assuming job
arrivals following a Poisson pattern, have shown that in a multi-host
system the probability of one of the hosts being idle while other host
has multiple jobs queued up can be very high. Such imbalances in
system load suggest that performance can be improved by either
transferring jobs from the currently heavily loaded hosts to the lightly
loaded ones or distributing load evenly/fairly among the hosts .The
algorithms known as load balancing algorithms, helps to achieve the
above said goal(s). These algorithms come into two basic categories -
static and dynamic. Whereas static load balancing algorithms (SLB)
take decisions regarding assignment of tasks to processors based on
the average estimated values of process execution times and
communication delays at compile time, Dynamic load balancing
algorithms (DLB) are adaptive to changing situations and take
decisions at run time.
The objective of this paper work is to identify qualitative
parameters for the comparison of above said algorithms. In future this
work can be extended to develop an experimental environment to
study these Load balancing algorithms based on comparative
parameters quantitatively.
Abstract: The element of justice or al-‘adl in the context of
Islamic critical thinking deals with the notion of justice in a thinking
process which critically rationalizes the truth in a fair and objective
manner with no irrelevant interference that can jeopardize a sound
judgment. This Islamic axiological element is vital in technological
decision making as it addresses the issues of religious values and
ethics that are primarily set to fulfill the purpose of human life on
earth. The main objective of this study was to examine and analyze
the perception of Muslim engineering students in Malaysian higher
education institutions towards the concept of al-‘adl as an essential
element of Islamic critical thinking. The study employed mixed
methods approach that comprises data collection from the
questionnaire survey and the interview responses. A total of 557
Muslim engineering undergraduates from six Malaysian universities
participated in the study. The study generally indicated that Muslim
engineering undergraduates in the higher institutions have rather
good comprehension and consciousness for al-‘adl with a slight
awareness on the importance of objective thinking. Nonetheless there
were a few items on the concept that have implied a comparatively
low perception on the rational justice in Islam as the means to grasp
the ultimate truth.
Abstract: In our modern world, more physical transactions are being substituted by electronic transactions (i.e. banking, shopping, and payments), many businesses and companies are performing most of their operations through the internet. Instead of having a physical commerce, internet visitors are now adapting to electronic commerce (e-Commerce). The ability of web users to reach products worldwide can be greatly benefited by creating friendly and personalized online business portals. Internet visitors will return to a particular website when they can find the information they need or want easily. Dealing with this human conceptualization brings the incorporation of Artificial/Computational Intelligence techniques in the creation of customized portals. From these techniques, Fuzzy-Set technologies can make many useful contributions to the development of such a human-centered endeavor as e-Commerce. The main objective of this paper is the implementation of a Paradigm for the Intelligent Design and Operation of Human-Computer interfaces. In particular, the paradigm is quite appropriate for the intelligent design and operation of software modules that display information (such Web Pages, graphic user interfaces GUIs, Multimedia modules) on a computer screen. The human conceptualization of the user personal information is analyzed throughout a Cascaded Fuzzy Inference (decision-making) System to generate the User Ascribe Qualities, which identify the user and that can be used to customize portals with proper Web links.
Abstract: Diagnosis can be achieved by building a model of a
certain organ under surveillance and comparing it with the real time
physiological measurements taken from the patient. This paper deals
with the presentation of the benefits of using Data Mining techniques
in the computer-aided diagnosis (CAD), focusing on the cancer
detection, in order to help doctors to make optimal decisions quickly
and accurately. In the field of the noninvasive diagnosis techniques,
the endoscopic ultrasound elastography (EUSE) is a recent elasticity
imaging technique, allowing characterizing the difference between
malignant and benign tumors. Digitalizing and summarizing the main
EUSE sample movies features in a vector form concern with the use
of the exploratory data analysis (EDA). Neural networks are then
trained on the corresponding EUSE sample movies vector input in
such a way that these intelligent systems are able to offer a very
precise and objective diagnosis, discriminating between benign and
malignant tumors. A concrete application of these Data Mining
techniques illustrates the suitability and the reliability of this
methodology in CAD.
Abstract: In this paper, a new efficient method for load balancing in low voltage distribution systems is presented. The proposed method introduces an improved Leap-frog method for optimization. The proposed objective function includes the difference between three phase currents, as well as two other terms to provide the integer property of the variables; where the latter are the status of the connection of loads to different phases. Afterwards, a new algorithm is supplemented to undertake the integer values for the load connection status. Finally, the method is applied to different parts of Tabriz low voltage network, where the results have shown the good performance of the proposed method.
Abstract: This paper presents an optimization technique to economic load dispatch (ELD) problems with considering the daily load patterns and generator constraints using a particle swarm optimization (PSO). The objective is to minimize the fuel cost. The optimization problem is subject to system constraints consisting of power balance and generation output of each units. The application of a constriction factor into PSO is a useful strategy to ensure convergence of the particle swarm algorithm. The proposed method is able to determine, the output power generation for all of the power generation units, so that the total constraint cost function is minimized. The performance of the developed methodology is demonstrated by case studies in test system of fifteen-generation units. The results show that the proposed algorithm scan give the minimum total cost of generation while satisfying all the constraints and benefiting greatly from saving in power loss reduction
Abstract: Bioprocesses are appreciated as difficult to control because their dynamic behavior is highly nonlinear and time varying, in particular, when they are operating in fed batch mode. The research objective of this study was to develop an appropriate control method for a complex bioprocess and to implement it on a laboratory plant. Hence, an intelligent control structure has been designed in order to produce biomass and to maximize the specific growth rate.
Abstract: In recent years the large scale use of the power electronic equipment has led to an increase of harmonics in the power system. The harmonics results into a poor power quality and have great adverse economical impact on the utilities and customers. Current harmonics are one of the most common power quality problems and are usually resolved by using shunt active filter (SHAF). The main objective of this work is to develop PI and Fuzzy logic controllers (FLC) to analyze the performance of Shunt Active Filter for mitigating current harmonics under balanced and unbalanced sinusoidal source voltage conditions for normal load and increased load. When the supply voltages are ideal (balanced), both PI and FLC are converging to the same compensation characteristics. However, the supply voltages are non-ideal (unbalanced), FLC offers outstanding results. Simulation results validate the superiority of FLC with triangular membership function over the PI controller.
Abstract: Experiments with pumpkin-rowanberry marmalade
candies were carried out at the Faculty of Food Technology of the
Latvia University of Agriculture. The objective of this investigation
was to evaluate the quality changes of pumpkin-rowanberry
marmalade candies packed in different packaging materials during
the storage of 15 weeks, and to find the most suitable packaging
material for prolongation of low sugar marmalade candies shelf-life.
An active packaging in combination with modified atmosphere
(MAP, CO2 100%) was examined and compared with traditional
packaging in air ambiance. Polymer Multibarrier 60 and paper bags
were used. Influence of iron based oxygen absorber in sachets of 500
cc obtained from Mitsubishi Gas Chemical Europe Ageless® on the
marmalade candies’ quality was tested during shelf life. Samples of
80±5 g were packaged in polymer pouches (110 mm x 110 mm),
hermetically sealed by MULTIVAC C300 vacuum chamber machine,
and stored in a room temperature +21±0.5 °C. The physiochemical
properties –moisture content, hardness, aw, pH, changes of
atmosphere content (CO2 and O2), ascorbic acid, total carotenoids,
total phenols in headspace of packs, and microbial conditions were
analysed before packaging and in the 1st, 3rd , 5th, 8th, 11th and 15th
weeks of storage.
Abstract: Nowadays, access to sustainable development in cities is assumed as one of the most important goals of urban managers. In the meanwhile, neighborhood as the smallest unit of urban spatial organization has a substantial effect on urban sustainability. Hence, attention to and focus on this subject is highly important in urban development plans. The objective of this study is evaluation of the status of Jahanshahr Neighborhood in Karaj city based on sustainable neighborhood development indicators. This research has been applied based on documentary method and field surveys. Also, evaluating of Jahanshahr Neighborhood of Karaj shows that it has a high level in sustainability in physical and economical dimension while a low level in cultural and social dimension. For this purpose, this neighborhood as a semi-sustainable neighborhood must take measures for development of collective spaces and efficiency of utilizing the public neighborhood spaces via collaboration of citizens and officials.
Abstract: This paper presents the results of an analytical study
on the seismic response of a Multi-Span-Simply-Supported precast
bridge in Washington State. The bridge was built in the early 1960's
along Interstate 5 and was widened the first time in 1979 and the
second time in 2001. The primary objective of this research project
is to determine the seismic vulnerability of the bridge in order to
develop the required retrofit measure. The seismic vulnerability of
the bridge is evaluated using two seismic evaluation methods
presented in the FHWA Seismic Retrofitting Manual for Highway
Bridges, Method C and Method D2. The results of the seismic
analyses demonstrate that Method C and Method D2 vary markedly
in terms of the information they provide to the bridge designer
regarding the vulnerability of the bridge columns.
Abstract: Communication is an important factor and a prop in
directing corporate activities efficiently, in ensuring the flow of
knowledge which is necessary for the continuity of the institution, in
creating a common language in the institution, in transferring
corporate culture and ultimately in corporate success. The idea of
transmitting the knowledge among the workers in a healthy manner
has revived knowledge communication. Knowledge communication
can be defined as the act of mutual creation and communication of
intuitions, assessments, experiences and capabilities, as long as
maintained effectively, can provide advantages such as corporate
continuity, access to corporate objectives and making true
administrative decisions. Although the benefits of the knowledge
communication to corporations are known, and the necessary worth
and care is given, some hardships may arise which makes it difficult
or even block it. In this article, difficulties that prevent knowledge
communication will be discussed and solutions will be proposed.