Abstract: Municipal solid waste (MSW) comprises of a wide
range of heterogeneous materials generated by individual, household
or organization and may include food waste, garden wastes, papers,
textiles, rubbers, plastics, glass, ceramics, metals, wood wastes,
construction wastes but it is not limited to the above mentioned
fractions. The most common Municipal Solid Waste pretreatment
method in use is thermal pretreatment (incineration) and Mechanical
Biological pretreatment. This paper presents an overview of these
two pretreatment methods describing their benefits and laboratory
scale reactors that simulate landfill conditions were constructed in
order to compare emissions in terms of biogas production and
leachate contamination between untreated Municipal Solid Waste and
Mechanical Biological Pretreated waste. The findings of this study
showed that Mechanical Biological pretreatment of waste reduces the
emission level of waste and the benefit over the landfilling of
untreated waste is significant.
Abstract: The paper presents new results of a recent industry
supported research and development study in which an efficient
framework for evaluating practical and meaningful power system
reliability and quality indices was applied. The system-wide
integrated performance indices are capable of addressing and
revealing areas of deficiencies and bottlenecks as well as
redundancies in the composite generation-transmission-demand
structure of large-scale power grids. The technique utilizes a linear
programming formulation, which simulates practical operating
actions and offers a general and comprehensive framework to assess
the harmony and compatibility of generation, transmission and
demand in a power system. Practical applications to a reduced
system model as well as a portion of the Saudi power grid are also
presented in the paper for demonstration purposes.
Abstract: This paper presents a new method which applies an
artificial bee colony algorithm (ABC) for capacitor placement in
distribution systems with an objective of improving the voltage profile
and reduction of power loss. The ABC algorithm is a new population
based meta heuristic approach inspired by intelligent foraging behavior
of honeybee swarm. The advantage of ABC algorithm is that
it does not require external parameters such as cross over rate and
mutation rate as in case of genetic algorithm and differential evolution
and it is hard to determine these parameters in prior. The other
advantage is that the global search ability in the algorithm is implemented
by introducing neighborhood source production mechanism
which is a similar to mutation process. To demonstrate the validity
of the proposed algorithm, computer simulations are carried out on
69-bus system and compared the results with the other approach
available in the literature. The proposed method has outperformed the
other methods in terms of the quality of solution and computational
efficiency.
Abstract: Direct numerical simulation (DNS) is used to study the evolution of a boundary layer that was laminar initially followed by separation and then reattachment owing to generation of turbulence. This creates a closed region of recirculation, known as the laminar-separation bubble. The present simulation emulates the flow environment encountered in a modern LP turbine blade, where a laminar separation bubble may occur on the suction surface. The unsteady, incompressible three-dimensional (3-D) Navier-Stokes (NS) equations have been solved over a flat plate in the Cartesian coordinates. The adverse pressure gradient, which causes the flow to separate, is created by a boundary condition. The separated shear layer undergoes transition through appearance of ╬ø vortices, stretching of these create longitudinal streaks. Breakdown of the streaks into small and irregular structures makes the flow turbulent downstream.
Abstract: In this paper, we proposed a novel receiver algorithm
for coherent underwater acoustic communications. The proposed
receiver is composed of three parts: (1) Doppler tracking and
correction, (2) Time reversal channel estimation and combining, and
(3) Joint iterative equalization and decoding (JIED). To reduce
computational complexity and optimize the equalization algorithm,
Time reversal (TR) channel estimation and combining is adopted to
simplify multi-channel adaptive decision feedback equalizer (ADFE)
into single channel ADFE without reducing the system performance.
Simultaneously, the turbo theory is adopted to form joint iterative
ADFE and convolutional decoder (JIED). In JIED scheme, the ADFE
and decoder exchange soft information in an iterative manner, which
can enhance the equalizer performance using decoding gain. The
simulation results show that the proposed algorithm can reduce
computational complexity and improve the performance of equalizer.
Therefore, the performance of coherent underwater acoustic
communications can be improved greatly.
Abstract: The equivalence class subset algorithm is a powerful
tool for solving a wide variety of constraint satisfaction problems and
is based on the use of a decision function which has a very high but
not perfect accuracy. Perfect accuracy is not required in the decision
function as even a suboptimal solution contains valuable information
that can be used to help find an optimal solution. In the hardest
problems, the decision function can break down leading to a
suboptimal solution where there are more equivalence classes than
are necessary and which can be viewed as a mixture of good decision
and bad decisions. By choosing a subset of the decisions made in
reaching a suboptimal solution an iterative technique can lead to an
optimal solution, using series of steadily improved suboptimal
solutions. The goal is to reach an optimal solution as quickly as
possible. Various techniques for choosing the decision subset are
evaluated.
Abstract: In this paper, multi-processors job shop scheduling problems are solved by a heuristic algorithm based on the hybrid of priority dispatching rules according to an ant colony optimization algorithm. The objective function is to minimize the makespan, i.e. total completion time, in which a simultanous presence of various kinds of ferons is allowed. By using the suitable hybrid of priority dispatching rules, the process of finding the best solution will be improved. Ant colony optimization algorithm, not only promote the ability of this proposed algorithm, but also decreases the total working time because of decreasing in setup times and modifying the working production line. Thus, the similar work has the same production lines. Other advantage of this algorithm is that the similar machines (not the same) can be considered. So, these machines are able to process a job with different processing and setup times. According to this capability and from this algorithm evaluation point of view, a number of test problems are solved and the associated results are analyzed. The results show a significant decrease in throughput time. It also shows that, this algorithm is able to recognize the bottleneck machine and to schedule jobs in an efficient way.
Abstract: In this paper we discuss on the security module for the
car appliances to prevent stealing and illegal use on other cars. We
proposed an open structure including authentication and encryption by
embed a security module in each to protect car appliances. Illegal
moving and use a car appliance with the security module without
permission will lead the appliance to useless. This paper also presents
the component identification and deal with relevant procedures. It is at
low cost to recover from destroys by the burglar. Expect this paper to
offer the new business opportunity to the automotive and technology
industry.
Abstract: A spatial classification technique incorporating a State of Art Feature Extraction algorithm is proposed in this paper for classifying a heterogeneous classes present in hyper spectral images. The classification accuracy can be improved if and only if both the feature extraction and classifier selection are proper. As the classes in the hyper spectral images are assumed to have different textures, textural classification is entertained. Run Length feature extraction is entailed along with the Principal Components and Independent Components. A Hyperspectral Image of Indiana Site taken by AVIRIS is inducted for the experiment. Among the original 220 bands, a subset of 120 bands is selected. Gray Level Run Length Matrix (GLRLM) is calculated for the selected forty bands. From GLRLMs the Run Length features for individual pixels are calculated. The Principle Components are calculated for other forty bands. Independent Components are calculated for next forty bands. As Principal & Independent Components have the ability to represent the textural content of pixels, they are treated as features. The summation of Run Length features, Principal Components, and Independent Components forms the Combined Features which are used for classification. SVM with Binary Hierarchical Tree is used to classify the hyper spectral image. Results are validated with ground truth and accuracies are calculated.
Abstract: Economic Load Dispatch (ELD) is a method of determining
the most efficient, low-cost and reliable operation of a power
system by dispatching available electricity generation resources to
supply load on the system. The primary objective of economic
dispatch is to minimize total cost of generation while honoring
operational constraints of available generation resources. In this paper
an intelligent water drop (IWD) algorithm has been proposed to
solve ELD problem with an objective of minimizing the total cost of
generation. Intelligent water drop algorithm is a swarm-based natureinspired
optimization algorithm, which has been inspired from natural
rivers. A natural river often finds good paths among lots of possible
paths in its ways from source to destination and finally find almost
optimal path to their destination. These ideas are embedded into
the proposed algorithm for solving economic load dispatch problem.
The main advantage of the proposed technique is easy is implement
and capable of finding feasible near global optimal solution with
less computational effort. In order to illustrate the effectiveness of
the proposed method, it has been tested on 6-unit and 20-unit test
systems with incremental fuel cost functions taking into account the
valve point-point loading effects. Numerical results shows that the
proposed method has good convergence property and better in quality
of solution than other algorithms reported in recent literature.
Abstract: We have developed an analytic model for the radial pn-junction in a nanowire (NW) core-shell structure utilizing as a new
building block in different semiconductor devices. The potential distribution through the p-n-junction is calculated and the analytical expressions are derived to compute the depletion region widths. We
show that the widths of space charge layers, surrounding the core, are
the functions of core radius, which is the manifestation of so called classical size effect. The relationship between the depletion layer width and the built-in potential in the asymptotes of infinitely large
core radius transforms to square-root dependence specific for conventional planar p-n-junctions. The explicit equation is derived to
compute the capacitance of radial p-n-junction. The current-voltage behavior is also carefully determined taking into account the “short
base" effects.
Abstract: Modern highly automated production systems faces
problems of reliability. Machine function reliability results in
changes of productivity rate and efficiency use of expensive
industrial facilities. Predicting of reliability has become an important
research and involves complex mathematical methods and
calculation. The reliability of high productivity technological
automatic machines that consists of complex mechanical, electrical
and electronic components is important. The failure of these units
results in major economic losses of production systems. The
reliability of transport and feeding systems for automatic
technological machines is also important, because failure of transport
leads to stops of technological machines. This paper presents
reliability engineering on the feeding system and its components for
transporting a complex shape parts to automatic machines. It also
discusses about the calculation of the reliability parameters of the
feeding unit by applying the probability theory. Equations produced
for calculating the limits of the geometrical sizes of feeders and the
probability of sticking the transported parts into the chute represents
the reliability of feeders as a function of its geometrical parameters.
Abstract: The acoustic and articulatory properties of fricative speech sounds are being studied using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and acoustic recordings from a single subject. Area functions were derived from a complete set of axial and coronal MR slices using two different methods: the Mermelstein technique and the Blum transform. Area functions derived from the two techniques were shown to differ significantly in some cases. Such differences will lead to different acoustic predictions and it is important to know which is the more accurate. The vocal tract acoustic transfer function (VTTF) was derived from these area functions for each fricative and compared with measured speech signals for the same fricative and same subject. The VTTFs for /f/ in two vowel contexts and the corresponding acoustic spectra are derived here; the Blum transform appears to show a better match between prediction and measurement than the Mermelstein technique.
Abstract: Unsteady boundary layer flow of an incompressible
micropolar fluid over a stretching sheet when the sheet is stretched in
its own plane is studied in this paper. The stretching velocity is
assumed to vary linearly with the distance along the sheet. Two equal
and opposite forces are impulsively applied along the x-axis so that the
sheet is stretched, keeping the origin fixed in a micropolar fluid. The
transformed unsteady boundary layer equations are solved
numerically using the Keller-box method for the whole transient from
the initial state to final steady-state flow. Numerical results are
obtained for the velocity and microrotation distributions as well as the
skin friction coefficient for various values of the material parameter K.
It is found that there is a smooth transition from the small-time
solution to the large-time solution.
Abstract: This paper studies the effect of different compression
constraints and schemes presented in a new and flexible paradigm to
achieve high compression ratios and acceptable signal to noise ratios
of Arabic speech signals. Compression parameters are computed for
variable frame sizes of a level 5 to 7 Discrete Wavelet Transform
(DWT) representation of the signals for different analyzing mother
wavelet functions. Results are obtained and compared for Global
threshold and level dependent threshold techniques. The results
obtained also include comparisons with Signal to Noise Ratios, Peak
Signal to Noise Ratios and Normalized Root Mean Square Error.
Abstract: Natural outdoor scene classification is active and
promising research area around the globe. In this study, the
classification is carried out in two phases. In the first phase, the
features are extracted from the images by wavelet decomposition
method and stored in a database as feature vectors. In the second
phase, the neural classifiers such as back-propagation neural network
(BPNN) and resilient back-propagation neural network (RPNN) are
employed for the classification of scenes. Four hundred color images
are considered from MIT database of two classes as forest and street.
A comparative study has been carried out on the performance of the
two neural classifiers BPNN and RPNN on the increasing number of
test samples. RPNN showed better classification results compared to
BPNN on the large test samples.
Abstract: The construction industry is the pillar industry in
China, accounting for about 6% of the gross domestic product. Along
with changes in the external environment of the construction industry
in China, the construction firm faces fierce competition. The paper
aims to investigate the relationship between diversified types of
construction firm and its performance in China. Based on generalist
and specialist strategy in organizational ecology, we think a generalist
organization can be applied to an enterprise with diversified
developments, while specialist groups are extended to professional
enterprises .This study takes advantage of annual financial data of
listed construction firm to empirically verify the relationship between
diversification and corporation performance establishing a regression
equation to econometric analysis. We find that: 1) Specialization can
significantly improve the level of profitability of listed construction
firms, and there is a significant positive relationship with corporate
performance; 2) The level of operating performance of listed
construction enterprises which engage in unrelated diversification is
higher than those with related diversification; 3) The relationship
between state-owned construction firms and corporate performance is
negative. The more the year of foundation is, the higher performance
will be; however, the more the year of being listed, the lower
performance will be.
Abstract: This study proposes and tests a rescapturing elements of perceived gain and loss that, by perceived value of medical tourism products, influencintention of potential customers. Data from 301 usable qwere tested against the research model using the structmodeling approach. The results indicated that perceivedkey predictor of customer intentions. As for benefimedical quality, service quality and enjoyment wcomponents that significantly influenced the perceptiRegarding sacrifice, the effects of perceived risk on pewere significant. The findings can provide insights intohow destination countries can make medical tourism a wfor themselves and international patients.KeywordsMedical tourism, perceived valueintention.
Abstract: Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) emerged in the pursuit to improve our standard of living, and hence can manifest complex human behaviors such as communication, decision making, negotiation and self-organization. The Social Network Services (SNSs) have attracted millions of users, many of whom have integrated these sites into their daily practices. The domains of MAS and SNS have lots of similarities such as architecture, features and functions. Exploring social network users- behavior through multiagent model is therefore our research focus, in order to generate more accurate and meaningful information to SNS users. An application of MAS is the e-Auction and e-Rental services of the Universiti Cyber AgenT(UniCAT), a Social Network for students in Universiti Tunku Abdul Rahman (UTAR), Kampar, Malaysia, built around the Belief- Desire-Intention (BDI) model. However, in spite of the various advantages of the BDI model, it has also been discovered to have some shortcomings. This paper therefore proposes a multi-agent framework utilizing a modified BDI model- Belief-Desire-Intention in Dynamic and Uncertain Situations (BDIDUS), using UniCAT system as a case study.
Abstract: Key management is a vital component in any modern security protocol. Due to scalability and practical implementation considerations automatic key management seems a natural choice in significantly large virtual private networks (VPNs). In this context IETF Internet Key Exchange (IKE) is the most promising protocol under permanent review. We have made a humble effort to pinpoint IKEv2 net gain over IKEv1 due to recent modifications in its original structure, along with a brief overview of salient improvements between the two versions. We have used US National Institute of Technology NIIST VPN simulator to get some comparisons of important performance metrics.