Abstract: The purpose of this study is to identify and evaluate
the scale of implementation of Just-In-Time (JIT) in the different industrial sectors in the Middle East. This study analyzes the empirical data collected by a questionnaire survey distributed to
companies in three main industrial sectors in the Middle East, which
are: food, chemicals and fabrics. The following main hypotheses is formulated and tested: (The requirements of JIT application differ
according to the type of industrial sector).Descriptive statistics and Box plot analysis were used to examine the hypotheses. This study indicates a reasonable evidence for accepting the main hypotheses. It
reveals that there is no standard way to adopt JIT as a production system. But each industrial sector should concentrate in the
investment on critical requirements that differ according to the nature
and strategy of production followed in that sector.
Abstract: Inconel718 has been widely used as a super alloy in aerospace application due to the high strength at elevated temperatures, satisfactory oxidation resistance and heat corrosion resistance. In this study, the Inconel718 has been fabricated using high technology of Metal Injection Molding (MIM) process due to the cost effective technique for producing small, complex and precision parts in high volume compared with conventional method through machining. Through MIM, the binder system is one of the most important criteria in order to successfully fabricate the Inconel718. Even though, the binder system is a temporary, but failure in the selection and removal of the binder system will affect on the final properties of the sintered parts. Therefore, the binder system based on palm oil derivative which is palm stearin has been formulated and developed to replace the conventional binder system. The rheological studies of the mixture between the powder and binders system have been determined properly in order to be successful during injection into injection molding machine. After molding, the binder holds the particles in place. The binder system has to be removed completely through debinding step. During debinding step, solvent debinding and thermal pyrolysis has been used to remove completely of the binder system. The debound part is then sintered to give the required physical and mechanical properties. The results show that the properties of the final sintered parts fulfill the Standard Metal Powder Industries Federation (MPIF) 35 for MIM parts.
Abstract: This study focuses on bureau management
technologies and information systems in developing countries.
Developing countries use such systems which facilitate executive and
organizational functions through the utilization of bureau
management technologies and provide the executive staff with
necessary information.
The concepts of data and information differ from each other in
developing countries, and thus the concepts of data processing and
information processing are different. Symbols represent ideas,
objects, figures, letters and numbers. Data processing system is an
integrated system which deals with the processing of the data related
to the internal and external environment of the organization in order
to make decisions, create plans and develop strategies; it goes
without saying that this system is composed of both human beings
and machines. Information is obtained through the acquisition and
the processing of data. On the other hand, data are raw
communicative messages. Within this framework, data processing
equals to producing plausible information out of raw data.
Organizations in developing countries need to obtain information
relevant to them because rapid changes in the organizational arena
require rapid access to accurate information. The most significant
role of the directors and managers who work in the organizational
arena is to make decisions. Making a correct decision is possible only
when the directors and managers are equipped with sound ideas and
appropriate information. Therefore, acquisition, organization and
distribution of information gain significance. Today-s organizations
make use of computer-assisted “Management Information Systems"
in order to obtain and distribute information.
Decision Support System which is closely related to practice is an
information system that facilitates the director-s task of making
decisions. Decision Support System integrates human intelligence,
information technology and software in order to solve the complex
problems. With the support of the computer technology and software
systems, Decision Support System produces information relevant to
the decision to be made by the director and provides the executive
staff with supportive ideas about the decision.
Artificial Intelligence programs which transfer the studies and
experiences of the people to the computer are called expert systems.
An expert system stores expert information in a limited area and can
solve problems by deriving rational consequences.
Bureau management technologies and information systems in
developing countries create a kind of information society and
information economy which make those countries have their places
in the global socio-economic structure and which enable them to play
a reasonable and fruitful role; therefore it is of crucial importance to
make use of information and management technologies in order to
work together with innovative and enterprising individuals and it is
also significant to create “scientific policies" based on information
and technology in the fields of economy, politics, law and culture.
Abstract: Sixteen female Holstein calves allocated in three
treatments including: 1: control, 2: fed raw fiber concentrate (RFC)
for 45 days and 3: fed RFC for 90 days. RFC supplement (Vitacel®
200) was added to milk immediately before feeding (10 g/L milk).
Withers height and body weights of calves were measured monthly.
Individual dry matter intake was recorded daily. Blood samples were
taken monthly. The result showed that calves consumed RFC had
significantly greater weaning and final body weight. Treatment effect
on dry matter intake was not significant (p>0.05). Calves fed RFC
had better feed efficiency. Withers height of calves fed RFC were
taller than the control group (p
Abstract: The objective of this paper is to present the
development of the frame of Chulalongkorn University team in TSAE
Auto Challenge Student Formula and Student Formula SAE
Competition of Japan. Chulalongkorn University's SAE team, has
established since year 2003, joined many competitions since year 2006
and became the leading team in Thailand. Through these 5 years, space
frame was the most selected and developed year by year through six
frame designs. In this paper, the discussions on the conceptual design
of these frames are introduced, focusing on the mass and torsional
stiffness improvement. The torsional stiffness test was performed on
the real used frames and the results are compared. It can be seen that
the 2010-2011 frame is firstly designed based on the analysis and
experiment that considered the required mass and torsional stiffness.
From the torsional stiffness results, it can be concluded that the frames
were developed including the decreasing of mass and the increasing
torsional stiffness by applying many techniques.
Abstract: Security has been an important issue and concern in the
smart home systems. Smart home networks consist of a wide range of
wired or wireless devices, there is possibility that illegal access to
some restricted data or devices may happen. Password-based
authentication is widely used to identify authorize users, because this
method is cheap, easy and quite accurate. In this paper, a neural
network is trained to store the passwords instead of using verification
table. This method is useful in solving security problems that
happened in some authentication system. The conventional way to
train the network using Backpropagation (BPN) requires a long
training time. Hence, a faster training algorithm, Resilient
Backpropagation (RPROP) is embedded to the MLPs Neural
Network to accelerate the training process. For the Data Part, 200
sets of UserID and Passwords were created and encoded into binary
as the input. The simulation had been carried out to evaluate the
performance for different number of hidden neurons and combination
of transfer functions. Mean Square Error (MSE), training time and
number of epochs are used to determine the network performance.
From the results obtained, using Tansig and Purelin in hidden and
output layer and 250 hidden neurons gave the better performance. As
a result, a password-based user authentication system for smart home
by using neural network had been developed successfully.
Abstract: Common acceptable cuisine usually discussed in the
multicultural/ethnic nation as it represents the process of sharing it
among the ethnic groups. The common acceptable cuisine is also
considered as a precursor in the process of constructing the national
food identity within ethnic groups in the multicultural countries. The
adaptation of certain ethnic cuisines through its types of food,
methods of cooking, ingredients and eating decorum by ethnic groups
is believed creating or enhancing the process of formation on
common acceptable cuisines in a multicultural country. Malaysia as
the multicultural country without doubt is continuing to experience
cross-culturing processes among the ethnic groups including cuisine.
This study empirically investigates the adaptation level of Malay,
Chinese and Indian chefs on each other ethnic cuisine attributes
toward the formation on common acceptable cuisines and national
food identity.
Abstract: This paper focuses on cost and profit analysis of
single-server Markovian queuing system with two priority classes. In
this paper, functions of total expected cost, revenue and profit of the
system are constructed and subjected to optimization with respect to
its service rates of lower and higher priority classes. A computing
algorithm has been developed on the basis of fast converging
numerical method to solve the system of non linear equations formed
out of the mathematical analysis. A novel performance measure of
cost and profit analysis in view of its economic interpretation for the
system with priority classes is attempted to discuss in this paper. On
the basis of computed tables observations are also drawn to enlighten
the variational-effect of the model on the parameters involved
therein.
Abstract: The frequency contents of the non-stationary
signals vary with time. For proper characterization of such
signals, a smart time-frequency representation is necessary.
Classically, the STFT (short-time Fourier transform) is
employed for this purpose. Its limitation is the fixed timefrequency
resolution. To overcome this drawback an enhanced
STFT version is devised. It is based on the signal driven
sampling scheme, which is named as the cross-level sampling.
It can adapt the sampling frequency and the window function
(length plus shape) by following the input signal local
variations. This adaptation results into the proposed technique
appealing features, which are the adaptive time-frequency
resolution and the computational efficiency.
Abstract: Mobile Ad hoc Network (MANET) is a wireless ad hoc self-configuring network of mobile routers (and associated hosts) connected by wireless links, the union of which forms an arbitrary topology, cause of the random mobility of the nodes. In this paper, an attempt has been made to compare these three protocols DSDV, AODV and DSR on the performance basis under different traffic protocols namely CBR and TCP in a large network. The simulation tool is NS2, the scenarios are made to see the effect of pause times. The results presented in this paper clearly indicate that the different protocols behave differently under different pause times. Also, the results show the main characteristics of different traffic protocols operating on MANETs and thus select the best protocol on each scenario.
Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to propose a framework for constructing correct parallel processing programs based on Equivalent Transformation Framework (ETF). ETF regards computation as In the framework, a problem-s domain knowledge and a query are described in definite clauses, and computation is regarded as transformation of the definite clauses. Its meaning is defined by a model of the set of definite clauses, and the transformation rules generated must preserve meaning. We have proposed a parallel processing method based on “specialization", a part of operation in the transformations, which resembles substitution in logic programming. The method requires “Memo-tree", a history of specialization to maintain correctness. In this paper we proposes the new method for the specialization-base parallel processing without Memo-tree.
Abstract: The effect of seed inoculation by VA- mycorrhiza and
different levels of phosphorus fertilizer on growth and yield of
sunflower (Azargol cultivar) was studied in experiment farm of
Islamic Azad University, Karaj Branch during 2008 growing season.
The experiment treatments were arranged in factorial based on a
complete randomized block design with three replications. Four
phosphorus fertilizer levels of 25%, 50% 75% and 100% P
recommended with two levels of Mycorrhiza: with and without
Mycorrhiza (control) were assigned in a factorial combination.
Results showed that head diameter, number of seeds in head, seed
yield and oil yield were significantly higher in inoculated plants than
in non-inoculated plants. Head diameter, number of seeds in head,
1000 seeds weight, biological yield, seed yield and oil yield increased
with increasing P level above 75% P recommended in non-inoculated
plants, whereas no significant difference was observed between 75%
and 100% P recommended. The positive effect of mycorrhizal
inoculation decreased with increasing P levels due to decreased
percent root colonization at higher P levels. According to the results
of this experiment, application of mycorrhiza in present of 50% P
recommended had an appropriate performance and could increase
seed yield and oil production to an acceptable level, so it could be
considered as a suitable substitute for chemical phosphorus fertilizer
in organic agricultural systems.
Abstract: Super-quadrics can represent a set of implicit surfaces,
which can be used furthermore as primitive surfaces to construct a
complex object via Boolean set operations in implicit surface
modeling. In fact, super-quadrics were developed to create a
parametric surface by performing spherical product on two parametric
curves and some of the resulting parametric surfaces were also
represented as implicit surfaces. However, because not every
parametric curve can be redefined implicitly, this causes only implicit
super-elliptic and super-hyperbolic curves are applied to perform
spherical product and so only implicit super-ellipsoids and
hyperboloids are developed in super-quadrics. To create implicit
surfaces with more diverse shapes than super-quadrics, this paper
proposes an implicit representation of spherical product, which
performs spherical product on two implicit curves like super-quadrics
do. By means of the implicit representation, many new implicit curves
such as polygonal, star-shaped and rose-shaped curves can be used to
develop new implicit surfaces with a greater variety of shapes than
super-quadrics, such as polyhedrons, hyper-ellipsoids, superhyperboloids
and hyper-toroids containing star-shaped and roseshaped
major and minor circles. Besides, the newly developed implicit
surfaces can also be used to define new primitive implicit surfaces for
constructing a more complex implicit surface in implicit surface
modeling.
Abstract: An adaptive software reliability prediction model
using evolutionary connectionist approach based on Recurrent Radial
Basis Function architecture is proposed. Based on the currently
available software failure time data, Fuzzy Min-Max algorithm is
used to globally optimize the number of the k Gaussian nodes. The
corresponding optimized neural network architecture is iteratively
and dynamically reconfigured in real-time as new actual failure time
data arrives. The performance of our proposed approach has been
tested using sixteen real-time software failure data. Numerical results
show that our proposed approach is robust across different software
projects, and has a better performance with respect to next-steppredictability
compared to existing neural network model for failure
time prediction.
Abstract: This paper maps the structure of the social network of
the 2011 class ofsixty graduate students of the Masters of Science
(Knowledge Management) programme at the Nanyang Technological
University, based on their friending relationships on Facebook. To
ensure anonymity, actual names were not used. Instead, they were
replaced with codes constructed from their gender, nationality, mode
of study, year of enrollment and a unique number. The relationships
between friends within the class, and among the seniors and alumni
of the programme wereplotted. UCINet and Pajek were used to plot
the sociogram, to compute the density, inclusivity, and degree,
global, betweenness, and Bonacich centralities, to partition the
students into two groups, namely, active and peripheral, and to
identify the cut-points. Homophily was investigated, and it was
observed for nationality and study mode. The groups students formed
on Facebook were also studied, and of fifteen groups, eight were
classified as dead, which we defined as those that have been inactive
for over two months.
Abstract: Recently the usefulness of Concept Abduction, a novel non-monotonic inference service for Description Logics (DLs), has been argued in the context of ontology-based applications such as semantic matchmaking and resource retrieval. Based on tableau calculus, a method has been proposed to realize this reasoning task in ALN, a description logic that supports simple cardinality restrictions as well as other basic constructors. However, in many ontology-based systems, the representation of ontology would require expressive formalisms for capturing domain-specific constraints, this language is not sufficient. In order to increase the applicability of the abductive reasoning method in such contexts, we would like to present in the scope of this paper an extension of the tableaux-based algorithm for dealing with concepts represented inALCQ, the description logic that extends ALN with full concept negation and quantified number restrictions.
Abstract: For the electrical metrics that describe photovoltaic
cell performance are inherently multivariate in nature, use of a
univariate, or one variable, statistical process control chart can have
important limitations. Development of a comprehensive process
control strategy is known to be significantly beneficial to reducing
process variability that ultimately drives up the manufacturing cost
photovoltaic cells. The multivariate moving average or MMA chart,
is applied to the electrical metrics of photovoltaic cells to illustrate
the improved sensitivity on process variability this method of control
charting offers. The result show the ability of the MMA chart to
expand to as any variables as needed, suggests an application
with multiple photovoltaic electrical metrics being used in
concert to determine the processes state of control.
Abstract: We consider a typical problem in the assembly of
printed circuit boards (PCBs) in a two-machine flow shop system to
simultaneously minimize the weighted sum of weighted tardiness and
weighted flow time. The investigated problem is a group scheduling
problem in which PCBs are assembled in groups and the interest is to
find the best sequence of groups as well as the boards within each
group to minimize the objective function value. The type of setup
operation between any two board groups is characterized as carryover
sequence-dependent setup time, which exactly matches with the real
application of this problem. As a technical constraint, all of the
boards must be kitted before the assembly operation starts (kitting
operation) and by kitting staff. The main idea developed in this paper
is to completely eliminate the role of kitting staff by assigning the
task of kitting to the machine operator during the time he is idle
which is referred to as integration of internal (machine) and external
(kitting) setup times. Performing the kitting operation, which is a
preparation process of the next set of boards while the other boards
are currently being assembled, results in the boards to continuously
enter the system or have dynamic arrival times. Consequently, a
dynamic PCB assembly system is introduced for the first time in the
assembly of PCBs, which also has characteristics similar to that of
just-in-time manufacturing. The problem investigated is
computationally very complex, meaning that finding the optimal
solutions especially when the problem size gets larger is impossible.
Thus, a heuristic based on Genetic Algorithm (GA) is employed. An
example problem on the application of the GA developed is
demonstrated and also numerical results of applying the GA on
solving several instances are provided.
Abstract: Many corporations are seriously concerned about
security of networks and therefore, their network supervisors are still
reluctant to install WLANs. In this regards, the IEEE802.11i standard
was developed to address the security problems, even though the
mistrust of the wireless LAN technology is still existing. The thought
was that the best security solutions could be found in open standards
based technologies that can be delivered by Virtual Private
Networking (VPN) being used for long time without addressing any
security holes for the past few years. This work, addresses this issue
and presents a simulated wireless LAN of IEEE802.11g protocol, and
analyzes impact of integrating Virtual Private Network technology to
secure the flow of traffic between the client and the server within the
LAN, using OPNET WLAN utility. Two Wireless LAN scenarios
have been introduced and simulated. These are based on normal
extension to a wired network and VPN over extension to a wired
network. The results of the two scenarios are compared and indicate
the impact of improving performance, measured by response time
and load, of Virtual Private Network over wireless LAN.
Abstract: These days wireless local area networks has become
very popular, when the initial IEEE802.11 is the standard for
providing wireless connectivity to automatic machinery, equipment
and stations that require rapid deployment, which may be portable,
handheld or which may be mounted on moving vehicles within a
local area. IEEE802.11 Wireless local area network is a sharedmedium
communication network that transmits information over
wireless links for all IEEE802.11 stations in its transmission range to
receive. When a user is moving from one location to another, how
the other user knows about the required station inside WLAN. For
that we designed and implemented a system to locate a mobile user
inside the wireless local area network based on RSSI with the help of
four specially designed architectures. These architectures are based
on statistical or we can say manual configuration of mapping and
radio map of indoor and outdoor location with the help of available
Sniffer based and cluster based techniques. We found a better
location of a mobile user in WLAN. We tested this work in indoor
and outdoor environments with different locations with the help of
Pamvotis, a simulator for WLAN.