Abstract: Maize and Indian mustard are significant crops in
semi-arid climate zones of India. Improved water management
requires precise scheduling of irrigation, which in turn requires an
accurate computation of daily crop evapotranspiration (ETc). Daily
crop evapotranspiration comes as a product of reference
evapotranspiration (ET0) and the growth stage specific crop
coefficients modified for daily variation. The first objective of
present study is to develop crop coefficients Kc for Maize and Indian
mustard. The estimated values of Kc for maize at the four crop
growth stages (initial, development, mid-season, and late season) are
0.55, 1.08, 1.25, and 0.75, respectively, and for Indian mustard the Kc
values at the four growth stages are 0.3, 0.6, 1.12, and 0.35,
respectively. The second objective of the study is to compute daily
crop evapotranspiration from ET0 and crop coefficients. Average
daily ETc of maize varied from about 2.5 mm/d in the early growing
period to > 6.5 mm/d at mid season. The peak ETc of maize is 8.3
mm/d and it occurred 64 days after sowing at the reproductive growth
stage when leaf area index was 4.54. In the case of Indian mustard,
average ETc is 1 mm/d at the initial stage, >1.8 mm/d at mid season
and achieves a peak value of 2.12 mm/d on 56 days after sowing.
Improved schedules of irrigation have been simulated based on daily
crop evapo-transpiration and field measured data. Simulation shows a
close match between modeled and field moisture status prevalent
during crop season.
Abstract: This paper presents a multi-objective order allocation
planning problem with the consideration of various real-world
production features. A novel hybrid intelligent optimization model,
integrating a multi-objective memetic optimization process, a Monte
Carlo simulation technique and a heuristic pruning technique, is
proposed to handle this problem. Experiments based on industrial data
are conducted to validate the proposed model. Results show that (1)
the proposed model can effectively solve the investigated problem by
providing effective production decision-making solutions, which
outperformsan NSGA-II-based optimization process and an industrial
method.
Abstract: This paper describes a new measuring algorithm for
three-dimensional (3-D) braided composite material .Braided angle is
an important parameter of braided composites. The objective of this
paper is to present an automatic measuring system. In the paper, the
algorithm is performed by using vcµ6.0 language on PC. An
advanced filtered algorithm for image of 3-D braided composites
material performs has been developed. The procedure is completely
automatic and relies on the gray scale information content of the
images and their local wavelet transform modulus maxims.
Experimental results show that the proposed method is feasible.
The algorithm was tested on both carbon-fiber and glass-fiber
performs.
Abstract: The need to increase the efficiency of health care
systems is becoming an obligation, and one of area of improvement
is the discharge process. The objective of this work is to minimize
the patients discharge time (for insured patients) to be less than 50
minutes by using six sigma approach, this improvement will also:
lead to an increase in customer satisfaction, increase the number of
admissions and turnover on the rooms, increase hospital
profitability.Three different departments were considered in this
study: Female, Male, and Paediatrics. Six Sigma approach coupled
with simulation has been applied to reduce the patients discharge
time for pediatrics, female, and male departments at hospital. Upon
applying these recommendations at hospital: 60%, 80%, and 22% of
insured female, male, and pediatrics patients respectively will have
discharge time less than the upper specification time i.e. 50 min.
Abstract: ERP systems are often supposed to be implemented
and deployed in multi-national companies. On the other hand, an
ERP developer may plan to market and sale its product in various
countries. Therefore, an EPR system should have the ability to
communicate with its users, who usually have different languages
and cultures, in a suitable way. EPR support of Multilanguage
capability is a solution to achieve this objective. In this paper, an
agent oriented architecture including several independent but
cooperative agents has been suggested that helps to implement
Multilanguage EPR systems.
Abstract: As the Textile Industry is the second largest industry
in Egypt and as small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) make up
a great portion of this industry therein it is essential to apply the
concept of Cleaner Production for the purpose of reducing pollution.
In order to achieve this goal, a case study concerned with ecofriendly
stone-washing of jeans-garments was investigated. A raw
material-substitution option was adopted whereby the toxic
potassium permanganate and sodium sulfide were replaced by the
environmentally compatible hydrogen peroxide and glucose
respectively where the concentrations of both replaced chemicals
together with the operating time were optimized. In addition, a
process-rationalization option involving four additional processes
was investigated. By means of criteria such as product quality,
effluent analysis, mass and heat balance; and cost analysis with the
aid of a statistical model, a process optimization treatment revealed
that the superior process optima were 50%, 0.15% and 50min for
H2O2 concentration, glucose concentration and time, respectively.
With these values the superior process ought to reduce the annual
cost by about EGP 105 relative to the currently used conventional
method.
Abstract: Changes in stem diameter of orchid plants were
investigated in a control growing climate. Previous studies have
focused on stem diameter in relation to plant water on terrestrial
plants in order to schedule the irrigation. The objective of this work
was to evaluate the ability of the strain gauges to capture changes in
the epiphytes plant stem. Experiments were carried out by using the
sympodial orchid, Dendrobium Sonia in a stressed condition. From
the findings, the sensor can detect changes in the plant stem and the
result can easily be used as a reference for further studies for the
development of a proper watering system.
Abstract: Recently, distributed generation technologies have received much attention for the potential energy savings and reliability assurances that might be achieved as a result of their widespread adoption. Fueling the attention have been the possibilities of international agreements to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, electricity sector restructuring, high power reliability requirements for certain activities, and concern about easing transmission and distribution capacity bottlenecks and congestion. So it is necessary that impact of these kinds of generators on distribution feeder reconfiguration would be investigated. This paper presents an approach for distribution reconfiguration considering Distributed Generators (DGs). The objective function is summation of electrical power losses A Tabu search optimization is used to solve the optimal operation problem. The approach is tested on a real distribution feeder.
Abstract: In this paper a new method is suggested for
distributed data-mining by the probability patterns. These patterns
use decision trees and decision graphs. The patterns are cared to be
valid, novel, useful, and understandable. Considering a set of
functions, the system reaches to a good pattern or better objectives.
By using the suggested method we will be able to extract the useful
information from massive and multi-relational data bases.
Abstract: In this paper we present a new approach to deal with
image segmentation. The fact that a single segmentation result do not
generally allow a higher level process to take into account all the
elements included in the image has motivated the consideration of
image segmentation as a multiobjective optimization problem. The
proposed algorithm adopts a split/merge strategy that uses the result
of the k-means algorithm as input for a quantum evolutionary
algorithm to establish a set of non-dominated solutions. The
evaluation is made simultaneously according to two distinct features:
intra-region homogeneity and inter-region heterogeneity. The
experimentation of the new approach on natural images has proved
its efficiency and usefulness.
Abstract: The objective of the present investigation was to
evaluate the morphology of Escherchia coli bacteria in interaction
with SiO2 nanoparticles.
This study was made by atomic force microscopy and quartz
crystal microbalance using SiO2 nanoparticles with 10nm, 50nm and
100nm diameter and bacteria immobilized on polyelectrolyte
multilayer films obtained by spin coating or by “layer by layer”
(LbL) method.
Abstract: An adaptive spatial Gaussian mixture model is proposed for clustering based color image segmentation. A new clustering objective function which incorporates the spatial information is introduced in the Bayesian framework. The weighting parameter for controlling the importance of spatial information is made adaptive to the image content to augment the smoothness towards piecewisehomogeneous region and diminish the edge-blurring effect and hence the name adaptive spatial finite mixture model. The proposed approach is compared with the spatially variant finite mixture model for pixel labeling. The experimental results with synthetic and Berkeley dataset demonstrate that the proposed method is effective in improving the segmentation and it can be employed in different practical image content understanding applications.
Abstract: Vibration of thin cylindrical shells made of a
functionally gradient material composed of stainless steel and nickel
is presented. The effects of the FGM configuration are studied by
studying the frequencies of FG cylindrical shells. In this case FG
cylindrical shell has Nickel on its outer surface and stainless steel on
its inner surface. The study is carried out based on third order shear
deformation shell theory. The objective is to study the natural
frequencies, the influence of constituent volume fractions and the
effects of configurations of the constituent materials on the
frequencies. The properties are graded in the thickness direction
according to the volume fraction power-law distribution. Results are
presented on the frequency characteristics, the influence of the
constituent various volume fractions on the frequencies.
Abstract: This paper describes an automatic algorithm to restore
the shape of three-dimensional (3D) left ventricle (LV) models created
from magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) data using a geometry-driven
optimization approach. Our basic premise is to restore the LV shape
such that the LV epicardial surface is smooth after the restoration. A
geometrical measure known as the Minimum Principle Curvature (κ2)
is used to assess the smoothness of the LV. This measure is used to
construct the objective function of a two-step optimization process.
The objective of the optimization is to achieve a smooth epicardial
shape by iterative in-plane translation of the MRI slices.
Quantitatively, this yields a minimum sum in terms of the magnitude
of κ
2, when κ2 is negative. A limited memory quasi-Newton algorithm,
L-BFGS-B, is used to solve the optimization problem. We tested our
algorithm on an in vitro theoretical LV model and 10 in vivo
patient-specific models which contain significant motion artifacts. The
results show that our method is able to automatically restore the shape
of LV models back to smoothness without altering the general shape of
the model. The magnitudes of in-plane translations are also consistent
with existing registration techniques and experimental findings.
Abstract: In order to develop forest management strategies in
tropical forest in Malaysia, surveying the forest resources and
monitoring the forest area affected by logging activities is essential.
There are tremendous effort has been done in classification of land
cover related to forest resource management in this country as it is a
priority in all aspects of forest mapping using remote sensing and
related technology such as GIS. In fact classification process is a
compulsory step in any remote sensing research. Therefore, the main
objective of this paper is to assess classification accuracy of
classified forest map on Landsat TM data from difference number of
reference data (200 and 388 reference data). This comparison was
made through observation (200 reference data), and interpretation
and observation approaches (388 reference data). Five land cover
classes namely primary forest, logged over forest, water bodies, bare
land and agricultural crop/mixed horticultural can be identified by
the differences in spectral wavelength. Result showed that an overall
accuracy from 200 reference data was 83.5 % (kappa value
0.7502459; kappa variance 0.002871), which was considered
acceptable or good for optical data. However, when 200 reference
data was increased to 388 in the confusion matrix, the accuracy
slightly improved from 83.5% to 89.17%, with Kappa statistic
increased from 0.7502459 to 0.8026135, respectively. The accuracy
in this classification suggested that this strategy for the selection of
training area, interpretation approaches and number of reference data
used were importance to perform better classification result.
Abstract: Flow movement in unsaturated soil can be expressed
by a partial differential equation, named Richards equation. The
objective of this study is the finding of an appropriate implicit
numerical solution for head based Richards equation. Some of the
well known finite difference schemes (fully implicit, Crank Nicolson
and Runge-Kutta) have been utilized in this study. In addition, the
effects of different approximations of moisture capacity function,
convergence criteria and time stepping methods were evaluated. Two
different infiltration problems were solved to investigate the
performance of different schemes. These problems include of vertical
water flow in a wet and very dry soils. The numerical solutions of
two problems were compared using four evaluation criteria and the
results of comparisons showed that fully implicit scheme is better
than the other schemes. In addition, utilizing of standard chord slope
method for approximation of moisture capacity function, automatic
time stepping method and difference between two successive
iterations as convergence criterion in the fully implicit scheme can
lead to better and more reliable results for simulation of fluid
movement in different unsaturated soils.
Abstract: The unanticipated brittle fracture of connection of the
steel moment resisting frame (SMRF) occurred in 1994 the Northridge
earthquake. Since then, the researches for the vulnerability of
connection of the existing SMRF and for rehabilitation of those
buildings were conducted. This paper suggests performance-based
optimal seismic retrofit technique using connection upgrade. For
optimal design, a multi-objective genetic algorithm(NSGA-II) is used.
One of the two objective functions is to minimize initial cost and
another objective function is to minimize lifetime seismic damages
cost. The optimal algorithm proposed in this paper is performed
satisfying specified performance objective based on FEMA 356. The
nonlinear static analysis is performed for structural seismic
performance evaluation. A numerical example of SAC benchmark
SMRF is provided using the performance-based optimal seismic
retrofit technique proposed in this paper
Abstract: This research proposes a Preemptive Possibilistic
Linear Programming (PPLP) approach for solving multiobjective
Aggregate Production Planning (APP) problem with interval demand
and imprecise unit price and related operating costs. The proposed
approach attempts to maximize profit and minimize changes of
workforce. It transforms the total profit objective that has imprecise
information to three crisp objective functions, which are maximizing
the most possible value of profit, minimizing the risk of obtaining the
lower profit and maximizing the opportunity of obtaining the higher
profit. The change of workforce level objective is also converted.
Then, the problem is solved according to objective priorities. It is
easier than simultaneously solve the multiobjective problem as
performed in existing approach. Possible range of interval demand is
also used to increase flexibility of obtaining the better production
plan. A practical application of an electronic company is illustrated to
show the effectiveness of the proposed model.
Abstract: Every commercial bank optimises its asset portfolio
depending on the profitability of assets and chosen or imposed
constraints. This paper proposes and applies a stylized model for
optimising banks' asset and liability structure, reflecting profitability
of different asset categories and their risks as well as costs associated
with different liability categories and reserve requirements. The level
of detail for asset and liability categories is chosen to create a
suitably parsimonious model and to include the most important
categories in the model. It is shown that the most appropriate
optimisation criterion for the model is the maximisation of the ratio
of net interest income to assets. The maximisation of this ratio is
subject to several constraints. Some are accounting identities or
dictated by legislative requirements; others vary depending on the
market objectives for a particular bank. The model predicts variable
amount of assets allocated to loan provision.
Abstract: This paper presents a novel approach for tuning unified power flow controller (UPFC) based damping controller in order to enhance the damping of power system low frequency oscillations. The design problem of damping controller is formulated as an optimization problem according to the eigenvalue-based objective function which is solved using iteration particle swarm optimization (IPSO). The effectiveness of the proposed controller is demonstrated through eigenvalue analysis and nonlinear time-domain simulation studies under a wide range of loading conditions. The simulation study shows that the designed controller by IPSO performs better than CPSO in finding the solution. Moreover, the system performance analysis under different operating conditions show that the δE based controller is superior to the mB based controller.