Abstract: In Egypt, the concept of Asset Management (AM) is
new; however, the need for applying it has become crucial because
deteriorating or losing an asset is unaffordable in a developing
country like Egypt. Therefore the current study focuses on
educational buildings as one of the most important assets regarding
planning, building, operating and maintenance expenditures. The
main objective of this study is to develop a SAMF for educational
buildings in Egypt. The General Authority for Educational Buildings
(GAEB) was chosen as a case study of the current research as it
represents the biggest governmental organization responsible for
planning, operating and maintaining schools in Egypt. To achieve the
research objective, structured interviews were conducted with senior
managers of GAEB using a pre designed questionnaire to explore the
current practice of AM. Gab analysis technique was applied against
best practices compounded from a vast literature review to identify
gaps between current practices and the desired one. The previous
steps mainly revealed; limited knowledge about strategic asset
management, no clear goals, no training, no real risk plan and lack of
data, technical and financial resources. Based on the findings, a
SAMF for GAEB was introduced and Framework implementation
steps and assessment techniques were explained in detail.
Abstract: Finding suitable non-supersingular elliptic curves for
pairing-based cryptosystems becomes an important issue for the
modern public-key cryptography after the proposition of id-based
encryption scheme and short signature scheme. In previous work
different algorithms have been proposed for finding such elliptic
curves when embedding degree k ∈ {3, 4, 6} and cofactor h ∈ {1, 2, 3,
4, 5}. In this paper a new method is presented to find more
non-supersingular elliptic curves for pairing-based cryptosystems with
general embedding degree k and large values of cofactor h. In
addition, some effective parameters of these non-supersingular elliptic
curves are provided in this paper.
Abstract: Turbulence of the incoming wind field is of paramount
importance to the dynamic response of civil engineering structures. Hence reliable stochastic models of the turbulence should be available from which time series can be generated for dynamic response and
structural safety analysis. In the paper an empirical cross spectral
density function for the along-wind turbulence component over the wind field area is taken as the starting point. The spectrum is spatially
discretized in terms of a Hermitian cross-spectral density matrix for the turbulence state vector which turns out not to be positive
definite. Since the succeeding state space and ARMA modelling of
the turbulence rely on the positive definiteness of the cross-spectral
density matrix, the problem with the non-positive definiteness of such
matrices is at first addressed and suitable treatments regarding it are proposed. From the adjusted positive definite cross-spectral density
matrix a frequency response matrix is constructed which determines the turbulence vector as a linear filtration of Gaussian white noise.
Finally, an accurate state space modelling method is proposed which allows selection of an appropriate model order, and estimation of a state space model for the vector turbulence process incorporating its phase spectrum in one stage, and its results are compared with a conventional ARMA modelling method.
Abstract: Behavior of dams against the seismic loads has been
studied by many researchers. Most of them proposed new numerical
methods to investigate the dam safety. In this paper, to study the
effect of nonlinear parameters of concrete in gravity dams, a twodimensional
approach was used including the finite element method,
staggered method and smeared crack approach. Effective parameters
in the models are physical properties of concrete such as modulus of
elasticity, tensile strength and specific fracture energy. Two different
models were used in foundation (mass-less and massed) in order to
determine the seismic response of concrete gravity dams. Results
show that when the nonlinear analysis includes the dam- foundation
interaction, the foundation-s mass, flexibility and radiation damping
are important in gravity dam-s response.
Abstract: Fishing has always been an essential component of
the Polynesians- life. Fishhooks, mostly in pearl shell, found during
archaeological excavations are the artifacts related to this activity the
most numerous. Thanks to them, we try to reconstruct the ancient
techniques of resources exploitation, inside the lagoons and offshore.
They can also be used as chronological and cultural indicators. The
shapes and dimensions of these artifacts allow comparisons and
classifications used in both functional approach and chrono-cultural
perspective. Hence it is very important for the ethno-archaeologists
to dispose of reliable methods and standardized measurement of
these artifacts. Such a reliable objective and standardized method
have been previously proposed. But this method cannot be envisaged
manually because of the very important time required to measure
each fishhook manually and the quantity of fishhooks to measure
(many hundreds). We propose in this paper a detailed acquisition
protocol of fishhooks and an automation of every step of this method.
We also provide some experimental results obtained on the fishhooks
coming from three archaeological excavations sites.
Abstract: Success is a European project that will implement several clean transport offers in three European cities and evaluate the environmental impacts. The goal of these measures is to improve urban mobility or the displacement of residents inside cities. For e.g. park and ride, electric vehicles, hybrid bus and bike sharing etc. A list of 28 criteria and 60 measures has been established for evaluation of these transport projects. The evaluation criteria can be grouped into: Transport, environment, social, economic and fuel consumption. This article proposes a decision support system based that encapsulates a hybrid approach based on fuzzy logic, multicriteria analysis and belief theory for the evaluation of impacts of urban mobility solutions. A web-based tool called DeSSIA (Decision Support System for Impacts Assessment) has been developed that treats complex data. The tool has several functionalities starting from data integration (import of data), evaluation of projects and finishes by graphical display of results. The tool development is based on the concept of MVC (Model, View, and Controller). The MVC is a conception model adapted to the creation of software's which impose separation between data, their treatment and presentation. Effort is laid on the ergonomic aspects of the application. It has codes compatible with the latest norms (XHTML, CSS) and has been validated by W3C (World Wide Web Consortium). The main ergonomic aspect focuses on the usability of the application, ease of learning and adoption. By the usage of technologies such as AJAX (XML and Java Script asynchrones), the application is more rapid and convivial. The positive points of our approach are that it treats heterogeneous data (qualitative, quantitative) from various information sources (human experts, survey, sensors, model etc.).
Abstract: This paper used a fuzzy kohonen neural network for medical image segmentation. Image segmentation plays a important role in the many of medical imaging applications by automating or facilitating the diagnostic. The paper analyses the tumor by extraction of the features of (area, entropy, means and standard deviation).These measurements gives a description for a tumor.
Abstract: Higher education has an important role to play in
advocating environmentalism. Given this responsibility, the goal of
higher education should therefore be to develop graduates with the
knowledge, skills and values related to environmentalism. However,
research indicates that there is a lack of consciousness amongst
graduates on the need to be more environmentally aware, especially
when it comes to applying the appropriate knowledge and skills
related to environmentalism. Although institutions of higher learning
do include environmental parameters within their undergraduate and
postgraduate academic programme structures, the environmental
boundaries are usually confined to specific engineering majors within
an engineering programme. This makes environmental knowledge,
skills and values exclusive to certain quarters of the higher education
system. The incorporation of environmental literacy within higher
education institutions as a whole is of utmost pertinence if a nation-s
human capital is to be nurtured to become change agents for the
preservation of environment. This paper discusses approaches that
can be adapted by institutions of higher learning to include
environmental literacy within the graduate-s higher learning
experience.
Abstract: A trustworthy voting process in democratic is
important that each vote is recorded with accuracy and impartiality.
The accuracy and impartiality are tallied in high rate with biometric
system. One of the sign is a fingerprint. Fingerprint recognition is
still a challenging problem, because of the distortions among the
different impression of the same finger. Because of the trustworthy of
biometric voting technologies, it may give a great effect on numbers
of voter-s participation and outcomes of the democratic process.
Hence in this study, the authors are interested in designing and
analyzing the Electronic Voting System and the participation of the
users. The system is based on the fingerprint minutiae with the
addition of person ID number. This is in order to enhance the
accuracy and speed of the voting process. The new design is analyzed
by conducting pilot election among a class of students for selecting
their representative.
Abstract: Video streaming over lossy IP networks is very
important issues, due to the heterogeneous structure of networks.
Infrastructure of the Internet exhibits variable bandwidths, delays,
congestions and time-varying packet losses. Because of variable
attributes of the Internet, video streaming applications should not
only have a good end-to-end transport performance but also have a
robust rate control, furthermore multipath rate allocation mechanism.
So for providing the video streaming service quality, some other
components such as Bandwidth Estimation and Adaptive Rate
Controller should be taken into consideration. This paper gives an
overview of video streaming concept and bandwidth estimation tools
and then introduces special architectures for bandwidth adaptive
video streaming. A bandwidth estimation algorithm – pathChirp,
Optimized Rate Controllers and Multipath Rate Allocation Algorithm
are considered as all-in-one solution for video streaming problem.
This solution is directed and optimized by a decision center which is
designed for obtaining the maximum quality at the receiving side.
Abstract: Job stress is one of the most important concepts for
the today-s corporate as well as institutional world. The current study
is conducted to identify the causes of faculty stress at Higher
Education in Pakistan. For the purpose, Public & Private Business
Schools of Punjab is selected as representative of Pakistan. A sample
of 300 faculty members (214 males, 86 females) responded to the
survey. Regression analysis shows that the Workload, Student
Related issues and Role Conflicts are the major sources contributing
significantly towards producing stress. The study also revealed that
Private sector faculty members experienced more stress as compared
to faculty in Public sector Business Schools. Moreover, females,
younger ages, lower designation & low qualification faculty
members experience more stress as compared to males, older ages,
higher designation and high qualification. The study yield many
significant results for the policy makers of Business Institutions.
Abstract: This paper analysis the tourism development on the
Red Sea in Egypt (west bank) and the needed ongoing action toward
a sustainable approach. It addresses, at the first, the development's
evolution occurred in the coastal area, the environmental effects it
left, and how to minimize those impacts in the future. The second
main point is dealing with the most important issues that hinder the
achievement of sustainable tourism development on the Red Sea
coast and how we can overcome them in the future.
Abstract: Novel nitrogen removal technologies via nitrite
pathway attract increasing interest in recent years. In this study,
batch experiments were performed to investigate nitrite accumulation
characteristics and shifts in nitrifying community structure at
different growth environments including ammonia concentration, pH
and alkalinity. It was found that nitrite accumulation ratios were
maintained at around 95% at studied conditions, and the optimum pH
and Alk/N (ratio between alkalinity and nitrogen) for ammonium
oxidization were 8.5 and 8.33, respectively. Fluorescence in situ
hybridization analysis of nitrifying bacteria showed that high free
ammonia (from influent ammonium or caused by high pH)
significantly altered the structure of nitrifying community, leading to
abundance of ammonia-oxidizing bacteria (AOB), especially
Nitrososmonas, and inhibition of nitrite-oxidizing bacteria (NOB).
The results suggest that free ammonia plays more important role than
other studied conditions on nitrite accumulation.
Abstract: Because of the requirement for low sulfur content of
fuel oils, it is necessary to develop alternative methods for desulfurization of heavy fuel oil. Due to the disadvantages of HDS
technologies such as costs, safety and green environment, new
methods have been developed. Among these methods is ultrasoundassisted
oxidative desulfurization. Using ultrasound-assisted
oxidative desulfurization, compounds such as benzothiophene and
dibenzothiophene can be oxidized. As an alternative method is sulfur
elimination of heavy fuel oil by using of activated carbon in a packed column in batch condition. The removal of sulfur compounds in this
case to reach about 99%. The most important property of activated carbon is ability of it for adsorption, which is due to high surface area
and pore volume of it.
Abstract: Due to the constant increase in the volume of information available to applications in fields varying from medical diagnosis to web search engines, accurate support of similarity becomes an important task. This is also the case of spam filtering techniques where the similarities between the known and incoming messages are the fundaments of making the spam/not spam decision. We present a novel approach to filtering based solely on layout, whose goal is not only to correctly identify spam, but also warn about major emerging threats. We propose a mathematical formulation of the email message layout and based on it we elaborate an algorithm to separate different types of emails and find the new, numerically relevant spam types.
Abstract: When dealing with safety in structures, the connections between structural components play an important role. Robustness of a structure as a whole depends both on the load- bearing capacity of the structural component and on the structures capacity to resist total failure, even though a local failure occurs in a component or a connection between components. To avoid progressive collapse it is necessary to be able to carry out a design for connections. A connection may be executed with anchors to withstand local failure of the connection in structures built with prefabricated components. For the design of these anchors, a model is developed for connections in structures performed in prefabricated autoclaved aerated concrete components. The design model takes into account the effect of anchors placed close to the edge, which may result in splitting failure. Further the model is developed to consider the effect of reinforcement diameter and anchor depth. The model is analytical and theoretically derived assuming a static equilibrium stress distribution along the anchor. The theory is compared to laboratory test, including the relevant parameters and the model is refined and theoretically argued analyzing the observed test results. The method presented can be used to improve safety in structures or even optimize the design of the connections
Abstract: The management of the health-care wastes is one of
the most important problems in Istanbul, a city with more than 12
million inhabitants, as it is in most of the developing countries.
Negligence in appropriate treatment and final disposal of the healthcare
wastes can lead to adverse impacts to public health and to the
environment. This paper employs a fuzzy multi-criteria group
decision making approach, which is based on the principles of fusion
of fuzzy information, 2-tuple linguistic representation model, and
technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution
(TOPSIS), to evaluate health-care waste (HCW) treatment
alternatives for Istanbul. The evaluation criteria are determined
employing nominal group technique (NGT), which is a method of
systematically developing a consensus of group opinion. The
employed method is apt to manage information assessed using multigranularity
linguistic information in a decision making problem with
multiple information sources. The decision making framework
employs ordered weighted averaging (OWA) operator that
encompasses several operators as the aggregation operator since it
can implement different aggregation rules by changing the order
weights. The aggregation process is based on the unification of
information by means of fuzzy sets on a basic linguistic term set
(BLTS). Then, the unified information is transformed into linguistic
2-tuples in a way to rectify the problem of loss information of other
fuzzy linguistic approaches.
Abstract: Advances in processors architecture, such as multicore,
increase the size of complexity of parallel computer systems.
With multi-core architecture there are different parallel languages
that can be used to run parallel programs. One of these languages is
OpenMP which embedded in C/Cµ or FORTRAN. Because of this
new architecture and the complexity, it is very important to evaluate
the performance of OpenMP constructs, kernels, and application
program on multi-core systems. Performance is the activity of
collecting the information about the execution characteristics of a
program. Performance tools consists of at least three interfacing
software layers, including instrumentation, measurement, and
analysis. The instrumentation layer defines the measured
performance events. The measurement layer determines what
performance event is actually captured and how it is measured by the
tool. The analysis layer processes the performance data and
summarizes it into a form that can be displayed in performance tools.
In this paper, a number of OpenMP performance tools are surveyed,
explaining how each is used to collect, analyse, and display data
collection.
Abstract: There is a renewed interest in land use transport integration as a means of achieving sustainable accessibility. Such accessibility requires designing more than simply the transport network; it also requires attention to place (built form). Transitoriented development would appear to capture many of the criteria deemed important in land use transport integration. In Perth, Australia, there have been planning policies for the past 20 years requiring transit-oriented development around railway stations throughout the metropolitan area. While the policy intent, particularly at the State level, is clear the implementation of policy has been fairly ineffective. The first part of this paper provides an examination of state and local government planning and transport policies, evaluating them using a set of land use transport integration criteria considered all encompassing. This provides some insight into the extent of state and local government capacity to deliver land use transport integration. The second part of this paper examines the extent of implementation by examining existing and proposed land use around station precincts throughout metropolitan Perth. The findings of this research suggest that the capacity of state and local government to deliver land use transport integration is reasonable in a planning policy sense. Implementation, despite long policy lead times, has been lacking. It appears to be more effective where local planning controls have been suspended with new redevelopment authorities given powers to develop land around railway stations.
Abstract: Wireless Sensor and Actor Networks (WSANs) constitute an emerging and pervasive technology that is attracting increasing interest in the research community for a wide range of applications. WSANs have two important requirements: coordination interactions and real-time communication to perform correct and timely actions. This paper introduces a methodology to facilitate the task of the application programmer focusing on the coordination and real-time requirements of WSANs. The methodology proposed in this model uses a real-time component model, UM-RTCOM, which will help us to achieve the design and implementation of applications in WSAN by using the component oriented paradigm. This will help us to develop software components which offer some very interesting features, such as reusability and adaptability which are very suitable for WSANs as they are very dynamic environments with rapidly changing conditions. In addition, a high-level coordination model based on tuple channels (TC-WSAN) is integrated into the methodology by providing a component-based specification of this model in UM-RTCOM; this will allow us to satisfy both sensor-actor and actor-actor coordination requirements in WSANs. Finally, we present in this paper the design and implementation of an application which will help us to show how the methodology can be easily used in order to achieve the development of WSANs applications.