Abstract: The intense use of the web has made it a very changing environment, its content is in permanent evolution to adapt to the demands. The standards have accompanied this evolution by passing from standards that regroup data with their presentations without any structuring such as HTML, to standards that separate both and give more importance to the structural aspect of the content such as XML standard and its derivatives. Currently, with the appearance of the Semantic Web, ontologies become increasingly present on the web and standards that allow their representations as OWL and RDF/RDFS begin to gain momentum. This paper provided an automatic method that converts XML schema document to ontologies represented in OWL.
Abstract: In order to host the Football Euro in 2016, many French cities have launched architectural competitions in recent years to improve the quality of their stadiums. The winning project in Nice was designed by Wilmotte architects together with Elioth structural engineers. It has a capacity of 35,000 seats.Its roof structure consists of a complex 3D shape timber and steel lattice and is covered by 25,000m² of ETFE, 10,500m² of PES-PVC fabric and 8,500m² of photovoltaic panels.
This paper focuses on the ETFE part of the cover. The stadium is one of the first constructions to use flat single layer ETFE on such a big area. Due to its relatively recent appearance in France, ETFE structures are not yet covered by any regulations and the existing codes for fabric structures cannot be strictly applied. Rather, they are considered as cladding systems and therefore have to be approved by an “Appréciation Technique d’Expérimentation” (ATEx), during which experimental tests have to be performed. We explain the method that we developed to justify the ETFE, which eventually led to bi-axial tests to clarify the allowable stress in the film.
Abstract: X-ray diffraction is an effective mean for analyzing material properties. This paper developed a new computational software for determining the properties of crystalline materials such as elastic constants, residual stresses, surface hardness, phase components, and etc. The results computed from the X-ray diffraction method were compared to those from the traditional methods and they are in the 95% confidential limits, showing that the newly developed software has high reproducibility, opening a possibility of its commercialization.
Abstract: This paper proposes and analyzes an SIRS epidemic model incorporating the effects of the awareness programs driven by the media. Media and media driven awareness programs play a promising role in disseminating the information about outbreak of any disease across the globe. This motivates people to take precautionary measures and guides the infected individuals to get hospitalized. Timely hospitalization helps to reduce diagnostic delays and hence results in fast recovery of infected individuals. The aim of this study is to investigate the impact of the media on the spread and control of infectious diseases. This model is analyzed using stability theory of differential equations. The sensitivity of parameters has been discussed and it has been found that the awareness programs driven by the media have positive impact in reducing the infection prevalence of the infective population in the region under consideration.
Abstract: This paper studies the problem of stability criteria
for neural networks with two additive time-varying delays.A new
Lyapunov-Krasovskii function is constructed and some new delay
dependent stability criterias are derived in the terms of linear
matrix inequalities(LMI), zero equalities and reciprocally convex
approach.The several stability criterion proposed in this paper is
simpler and effective. Finally,numerical examples are provided to
demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of our results.
Abstract: Based on the theory of intuitionistic fuzzy sets, the concepts of intuitionistic fuzzy subalgebras with thresholds (λ, μ) and intuitionistic fuzzy ideals with thresholds (λ, μ) of BCI-algebras are introduced and some properties of them are discussed.
Abstract: This paper presents a set of artificial potential field functions that improves upon, in general, the motion planning and posture control, with theoretically guaranteed point and posture stabilities, convergence and collision avoidance properties of the general3-trailer system in a priori known environment. We basically design and inject two new concepts; ghost walls and the distance optimization technique (DOT) to strengthen point and posture stabilities, in the sense of Lyapunov, of our dynamical model. This new combination of techniques emerges as a convenient mechanism for obtaining feasible orientations at the target positions with an overall reduction in the complexity of the navigation laws. Simulations are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the controls laws.
Abstract: Microarray gene expression data play a vital in biological processes, gene regulation and disease mechanism. Biclustering in gene expression data is a subset of the genes indicating consistent patterns under the subset of the conditions. Finding a biclustering is an optimization problem. In recent years, swarm intelligence techniques are popular due to the fact that many real-world problems are increasingly large, complex and dynamic. By reasons of the size and complexity of the problems, it is necessary to find an optimization technique whose efficiency is measured by finding the near optimal solution within a reasonable amount of time. In this paper, the algorithmic concepts of the Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO), Shuffled Frog Leaping (SFL) and Cuckoo Search (CS) algorithms have been analyzed for the four benchmark gene expression dataset. The experiment results show that CS outperforms PSO and SFL for 3 datasets and SFL give better performance in one dataset. Also this work determines the biological relevance of the biclusters with Gene Ontology in terms of function, process and component.
Abstract: Soil contamination with radiocesium has a long-term radiological impact due to its long physical half-life (30.1 years for 137Cs and 2 years for 134Cs) and its high biological availability. 137Cs causes the largest concerns because of its deleterious effect on agriculture and stock farming, and, thus, human life for decades. One of the important aspects of the problem of contaminated soils remediation is understand of protective actions aimed at the reduction of biological migration of radionuclides in soil-plant system. The most effective way to bind radionuclides is the use of selective sorbents. The proposed research mainly aims to achieve control on transfer of 137Cs in a system growing media – plant due to counter ions variation in the polymeric sorbents. As research object Japanese basil - Perilla frutescens was chosen. Productivity of plants depending on the presence (control-without presence of polymer) and type of polymer material, as well as content of 137Cs in plant material has been determined. The character of different polymers influences on the 137Cs migration in growing media – plant system as well as accumulation in the plants has been cleared up.
Abstract: This paper presents a set of artificial potential field functions that improves upon, in general, the motion planning and posture control, with theoretically guaranteed point and posture stabilities, convergence and collision avoidance properties of 3-trailer systems in a priori known environment. We basically design and inject two new concepts; ghost walls and the distance optimization technique (DOT) to strengthen point and posture stabilities, in the sense of Lyapunov, of our dynamical model. This new combination of techniques emerges as a convenient mechanism for obtaining feasible orientations at the target positions with an overall reduction in the complexity of the navigation laws. The effectiveness of the proposed control laws were demonstrated via simulations of two traffic scenarios.
Abstract: This paper presents a method of sliding mode control (SMC) designing and developing for the servo system in a dual-stage actuator (DSA) hard disk drive. Mathematical modeling of hard disk drive actuators is obtained, extracted from measuring frequency response of the voice-coil motor (VCM) and PZT micro-actuator separately. Matlab software tools are used for mathematical model estimation and also for controller design and simulation. A model-reference approach for tracking requirement is selected as a proposed technique. The simulation results show that performance of a model-reference SMC controller design in DSA servo control can be satisfied in the tracking error, as well as keeping the positioning of the head within the boundary of +/-5% of track width under the presence of internal and external disturbance. The overall results of model-reference SMC design in DSA are met per requirement specifications and significant reduction in %off track is found when compared to the single-state actuator (SSA).
Abstract: Multichannel Analysis of Surface Wave (MASW) seismic method is widely used in geotechnical engineering for the measurement of shear wave velocity and evaluation of material property. This method was recently conducted at a Dam site located in Zaria, within the basement complex of northern Nigeria. The aim of this experiment was to make use of the MASW method in evaluating the strength of material properties of a section of the Dam embankment, which is vital to ascertain the safety of the Dam. The result revealed that, the material embankment showed general increase of shear wave velocity with depth. The range of shear wave velocities and the determined Poisson’s ratio falls within the normal range of consolidated rock material, indicating the Dam embankment is still consolidated. The range of shear modulus determined, also shows that the Dam embankment is rigid enough to withstand the shear stress imposed by the impounded water.
Abstract: The present study aimed to investigate the effect of two type of soil (clay and sandy soils) in the potential allelopathic effects of Artemisia herba-alba, Oudneya africana crude powder (0, 1, 3 and 6%) on some growth parameters of two weeds (Bromus tectorum and Melilotus indica) under laboratory conditions (pot experiment).
The experimental findings have reported that the donor species crude powder concentrations were suppressing to shoot length (SL), root length (RL) and the leaf number (LN)) in both soil types and caused a gradual reduction particularly when they are high. However, the reduction degree was varied and species, concentration dependent. The suppressive effect of the two donors on the two weedy species was in the following order Melilotus indica > Bromus tectorum. Generally, the growth parameters of two recipient species were significantly decreased with the increase of each of the donor species crude powder concentration levels. Concerning the type of soil stoical analyses indicated that significant difference between clay and sandy soils.
Abstract: This study aims at identifying the practices that should be taken into consideration by audit committees as a tool of corporate governance in Libyan commercial banks by investigating various perceptions on this topic. The study is based on a questionnaire submitted to audit committees ‘members at Libyan commercial banks, directors of internal audit departments as well as members of board of directors at these banks in addition to a number of external auditors and academic staff from Libyan universities. The study reveals that the role of audit committees has to be shifted from traditional areas of accounting to a broader role including functions related to financial reporting, audit planning, support the independence of internal and external auditors, acting as a channel of communication between external auditors and board of directors, reviewing external audit, and evaluating internal control systems. Although the study is a starting point in developing a framework of good audit committees’ practices in Libya, it is believed that the adoption of its results can result in enhancing the corporate governance practices not only in the banking sector but also in the entire corporate sector in Libya.
Abstract: In the competitive electricity market environment, the profit of the pumped-storage plant in the energy market can be maximized by operating it as a generator, when market clearing price is high and as a pump, to pump water from lower reservoir to upper reservoir, when the price is low. An optimal self-scheduling plan has been developed for a pumped-storage plant, carried out on weekly basis in order to maximize the profit of the plant, keeping into account of all the major uncertainties such as the sudden ancillary service delivery request and the price forecasting errors. For a pumped storage power plant to operate in a real time market successive self scheduling has to be done by considering the forecast of the day-ahead market and the modified reservoir storage due to the ancillary service request of the previous day. Sliding Window Technique has been used for successive self scheduling to ensure profit for the plant.
Abstract: This paper suggests a decision tree based approach for flexible job shop scheduling with multiple process plans, i.e. each job can be processed through alternative operations, each of which can be processed on alternative machines. The main decision variables are: (a) selecting operation/machine pair; and (b) sequencing the jobs assigned to each machine. As an extension of the priority scheduling approach that selects the best priority rule combination after many simulation runs, this study suggests a decision tree based approach in which a decision tree is used to select a priority rule combination adequate for a specific system state and hence the burdens required for developing simulation models and carrying out simulation runs can be eliminated. The decision tree based scheduling approach consists of construction and scheduling modules. In the construction module, a decision tree is constructed using a four-stage algorithm, and in the scheduling module, a priority rule combination is selected using the decision tree. To show the performance of the decision tree based approach suggested in this study, a case study was done on a flexible job shop with reconfigurable manufacturing cells and a conventional job shop, and the results are reported by comparing it with individual priority rule combinations for the objectives of minimizing total flow time and total tardiness.
Abstract: Cooperative communication provides transmit diversity, even when, due to size constraints, mobile units cannot accommodate multiple antennas. A versatile cooperation method called coded cooperation has been developed, in which cooperation is implemented through channel coding with a view to controlling the errors inherent in wireless communication. In this work we evaluate the performance of coded cooperation in flat Rayleigh fading environment using a concept known as the pair wise error probability (PEP). We derive the PEP for a flat fading scenario in coded cooperation and then compare with the signal-to-noise ratio of the users in the network. Results show that an increase in the SNR leads to a decrease in the PEP. We also carried out simulations to validate the result.
Abstract: The main purpose of this paper is to consider the t-best co-approximation and t-best simultaneous co-approximation in fuzzy normed spaces. We develop the theory of t-best co-approximation and t-best simultaneous co-approximation in quotient spaces. This new concept is employed us to improve various characterisations of t-co-proximinal and t-co-Chebyshev sets.
Abstract: In order to further understand the behavior of PEM fuel cell and optimize their performance, it is necessary to perform measurements in real time. The internal impedance measurement by electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) is of great importance. In this work, we present the impedance measurement method of a PEM fuel cell by electrochemical impedance spectroscopy method and the realization steps of electronic load for this measuring technique implementation. The theoretical results are obtained from the simulation of software PSPICE® and experimental tests are carried out using the Ballard Nexa™ PEM fuel cell system.
Abstract: Australia is a country of some 7,700 million square kilometers with a population of about 22.6 million. At present water security is a major challenge for Australia. In some areas the use of water resources is approaching and in some parts it is exceeding the limits of sustainability. A focal point of proposed national water conservation programs is the recycling of both urban stormwater and treated wastewater. But till now it is not widely practiced in Australia, and particularly stormwater is neglected. In Australia, only 4% of stormwater and rainwater is recycled, whereas less than 1% of reclaimed wastewater is reused within urban areas. Therefore, accurately monitoring, assessing and predicting the availability, quality and use of this precious resource are required for better management. As stormwater is usually of better quality than untreated sewage or industrial discharge, it has better public acceptance for recycling and reuse, particularly for non-potable use such as irrigation, watering lawns, gardens, etc. Existing stormwater recycling practice is far behind of research and no robust technologies developed for this purpose. Therefore, there is a clear need for using modern technologies for assessing feasibility of stormwater harvesting and reuse. Numerical modeling has, in recent times, become a popular tool for doing this job. It includes complex hydrological and hydraulic processes of the study area. The hydrologic model computes stormwater quantity to design the system components, and the hydraulic model helps to route the flow through stormwater infrastructures. Nowadays water quality module is incorporated with these models. Integration of Geographic Information System (GIS) with these models provides extra advantage of managing spatial information. However for the overall management of a stormwater harvesting project, Decision Support System (DSS) plays an important role incorporating database with model and GIS for the proper management of temporal information. Additionally DSS includes evaluation tools and Graphical user interface. This research aims to critically review and discuss all the aspects of stormwater harvesting and reuse such as available guidelines of stormwater harvesting and reuse, public acceptance of water reuse, the scopes and recommendation for future studies. In addition to these, this paper identifies, understand and address the importance of modern technologies capable of proper management of stormwater harvesting and reuse.