Search results for: Air quality prediction
3577 Elements of a Culture of Quality in the Implementation of Quality Assurance Systems of Countries in the European Higher Education Area
Authors: L. Mion
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The implementation of quality management systems in higher education in different countries is determined by national regulatory choices and supranational indications (such as the European Standard Guidelines for Quality Assurance). The effective functioning and transformative capacity of these quality management systems largely depend on the organizational context in which they are applied and, more specifically, on the culture of quality developed in single universities or in single countries. The University's concept of quality culture integrates the structural dimension of Quality Assurance (QA) (quality management manuals, process definitions, tools) with the value dimension of an organization (principles, skills, and attitudes). Within the EHEA (European Higher Education Area), countries such as Portugal, the Netherlands, the UK, Norway demonstrate a greater integration of QA principles in the various organizational levels and areas of competence of university institutions or have greater experience in implementation or scientific and political debate on the matter. Therefore, the study, through an integrative literature review, of the quality management systems of these countries, aimed at determining a framework of the culture of quality, helpful in defining the elements which, both in structural-organizational terms and in terms of values and skills and attitudes, have proved to be factors of success in the effective implementation of quality assurance systems in universities and in the countries considered in the research. In order for a QA system to effectively aim for continuous improvement in a complex and dynamic context such as the university one, it must embrace a holistic vision of quality from an integrative perspective, focusing on the objective of transforming the reality being evaluated.
Keywords: Higher Education, quality assurance, quality culture, Portugal, Norway, Netherlands, United Kingdom.
Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 233576 Modeling of Crude Oil Blending via Discrete-Time Neural Networks
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Crude oil blending is an important unit operation in petroleum refining industry. A good model for the blending system is beneficial for supervision operation, prediction of the export petroleum quality and realizing model-based optimal control. Since the blending cannot follow the ideal mixing rule in practice, we propose a static neural network to approximate the blending properties. By the dead-zone approach, we propose a new robust learning algorithm and give theoretical analysis. Real data of crude oil blending is applied to illustrate the neuro modeling approach.Keywords: Neural networks, modeling, stability, crude oil.
Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 22493575 A Robust Optimization Method for Service Quality Improvement in Health Care Systems under Budget Uncertainty
Authors: H. Ashrafi, S. Ebrahimi, H. Kamalzadeh
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With the development of business competition, it is important for healthcare providers to improve their service qualities. In order to improve service quality of a clinic, four important dimensions are defined: tangibles, responsiveness, empathy, and reliability. Moreover, there are several service stages in hospitals such as financial screening and examination. One of the most challenging limitations for improving service quality is budget which impressively affects the service quality. In this paper, we present an approach to address budget uncertainty and provide guidelines for service resource allocation. In this paper, a service quality improvement approach is proposed which can be adopted to multistage service processes to improve service quality, while controlling the costs. A multi-objective function based on the importance of each area and dimension is defined to link operational variables to service quality dimensions. The results demonstrate that our approach is not ultra-conservative and it shows the actual condition very well. Moreover, it is shown that different strategies can affect the number of employees in different stages.
Keywords: Service quality assessment, healthcare resource allocation, robust optimization, budget uncertainty.
Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 10913574 Evaluation of Context Information for Intermittent Networks
Authors: S. Balaji, E. Golden Julie, Y. Harold Robinson
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The context aware adaptive routing protocol is presented for unicast communication in intermittently connected mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). The selection of the node is done by the Kalman filter prediction theory and it also makes use of utility functions. The context aware adaptive routing is defined by spray and wait technique, but the time consumption in delivering the message is too high and also the resource wastage is more. In this paper, we describe the spray and focus routing scheme for avoiding the existing problems.
Keywords: Context aware adaptive routing, Kalman filter prediction, spray and wait, spray and focus, intermittent networks.
Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 8973573 Determinants of Conference Service Quality as Perceived by International Attendees
Authors: Shiva Hashemi, Azizan Marzuki, S. Kiumarsi
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In recent years, conference destinations have been highly competitive; therefore, it is necessary to know about the behaviours of conference participants such as the process of their decision-making and the assessment of perceived conference quality. A conceptual research framework based on the Theory of Planned Behaviour model is presented in this research to get better understanding factors that influence it. This research study highlights key factors presented in previous studies in which behaviour intentions of participants are affected by the quality of conference. Therefore, this study is believed to provide an idea that conference participants should be encouraged to contribute to the quality and behaviour intention of the conference.Keywords: Conference attendees, service quality, perceives value, trust, behaviour intention.
Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 15483572 Evaluation of Chiller Power Consumption Using Grey Prediction
Authors: Tien-Shun Chan, Yung-Chung Chang, Cheng-Yu Chu, Wen-Hui Chen, Yuan-Lin Chen, Shun-Chong Wang, Chang-Chun Wang
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98% of the energy needed in Taiwan has been imported. The prices of petroleum and electricity have been increasing. In addition, facility capacity, amount of electricity generation, amount of electricity consumption and number of Taiwan Power Company customers have continued to increase. For these reasons energy conservation has become an important topic. In the past linear regression was used to establish the power consumption models for chillers. In this study, grey prediction is used to evaluate the power consumption of a chiller so as to lower the total power consumption at peak-load (so that the relevant power providers do not need to keep on increasing their power generation capacity and facility capacity). In grey prediction, only several numerical values (at least four numerical values) are needed to establish the power consumption models for chillers. If PLR, the temperatures of supply chilled-water and return chilled-water, and the temperatures of supply cooling-water and return cooling-water are taken into consideration, quite accurate results (with the accuracy close to 99% for short-term predictions) may be obtained. Through such methods, we can predict whether the power consumption at peak-load will exceed the contract power capacity signed by the corresponding entity and Taiwan Power Company. If the power consumption at peak-load exceeds the power demand, the temperature of the supply chilled-water may be adjusted so as to reduce the PLR and hence lower the power consumption.Keywords: Gery system theory, grey prediction, chller.
Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 25633571 Investigation of Improved Chaotic Signal Tracking by Echo State Neural Networks and Multilayer Perceptron via Training of Extended Kalman Filter Approach
Authors: Farhad Asadi, S. Hossein Sadati
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This paper presents a prediction performance of feedforward Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) and Echo State Networks (ESN) trained with extended Kalman filter. Feedforward neural networks and ESN are powerful neural networks which can track and predict nonlinear signals. However, their tracking performance depends on the specific signals or data sets, having the risk of instability accompanied by large error. In this study we explore this process by applying different network size and leaking rate for prediction of nonlinear or chaotic signals in MLP neural networks. Major problems of ESN training such as the problem of initialization of the network and improvement in the prediction performance are tackled. The influence of coefficient of activation function in the hidden layer and other key parameters are investigated by simulation results. Extended Kalman filter is employed in order to improve the sequential and regulation learning rate of the feedforward neural networks. This training approach has vital features in the training of the network when signals have chaotic or non-stationary sequential pattern. Minimization of the variance in each step of the computation and hence smoothing of tracking were obtained by examining the results, indicating satisfactory tracking characteristics for certain conditions. In addition, simulation results confirmed satisfactory performance of both of the two neural networks with modified parameterization in tracking of the nonlinear signals.Keywords: Feedforward neural networks, nonlinear signal prediction, echo state neural networks approach, leaking rates, capacity of neural networks.
Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 7473570 A Grey-Fuzzy Controller for Optimization Technique in Wireless Networks
Authors: Yao-Tien Wang, Hsiang-Fu Yu, Dung Chen Chiou
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In wireless and mobile communications, this progress provides opportunities for introducing new standards and improving existing services. Supporting multimedia traffic with wireless networks quality of service (QoS). In this paper, a grey-fuzzy controller for radio resource management (GF-RRM) is presented to maximize the number of the served calls and QoS provision in wireless networks. In a wireless network, the call arrival rate, the call duration and the communication overhead between the base stations and the control center are vague and uncertain. In this paper, we develop a method to predict the cell load and to solve the RRM problem based on the GF-RRM, and support the present facility has been built on the application-level of the wireless networks. The GF-RRM exhibits the better adaptability, fault-tolerant capability and performance than other algorithms. Through simulations, we evaluate the blocking rate, update overhead, and channel acquisition delay time of the proposed method. The results demonstrate our algorithm has the lower blocking rate, less updated overhead, and shorter channel acquisition delay.Keywords: radio resource management, grey prediction, fuzzylogic control, wireless networks, quality of service.
Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 17093569 Meteorological Data Study and Forecasting Using Particle Swarm Optimization Algorithm
Authors: S. Esfandeh, M. Sedighizadeh
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Weather systems use enormously complex combinations of numerical tools for study and forecasting. Unfortunately, due to phenomena in the world climate, such as the greenhouse effect, classical models may become insufficient mostly because they lack adaptation. Therefore, the weather forecast problem is matched for heuristic approaches, such as Evolutionary Algorithms. Experimentation with heuristic methods like Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm can lead to the development of new insights or promising models that can be fine tuned with more focused techniques. This paper describes a PSO approach for analysis and prediction of data and provides experimental results of the aforementioned method on realworld meteorological time series.Keywords: Weather, Climate, PSO, Prediction, Meteorological
Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 20653568 Prediction of Natural Gas Viscosity using Artificial Neural Network Approach
Authors: E. Nemati Lay, M. Peymani, E. Sanjari
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Prediction of viscosity of natural gas is an important parameter in the energy industries such as natural gas storage and transportation. In this study viscosity of different compositions of natural gas is modeled by using an artificial neural network (ANN) based on back-propagation method. A reliable database including more than 3841 experimental data of viscosity for testing and training of ANN is used. The designed neural network can predict the natural gas viscosity using pseudo-reduced pressure and pseudo-reduced temperature with AARD% of 0.221. The accuracy of designed ANN has been compared to other published empirical models. The comparison indicates that the proposed method can provide accurate results.
Keywords: Artificial neural network, Empirical correlation, Natural gas, Viscosity
Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 32263567 Prediction of Saturated Hydraulic Conductivity Dynamics in an Iowan Agriculture Watershed
Authors: Mohamed Elhakeem, A. N. Thanos Papanicolaou, Christopher Wilson, Yi-Jia Chang
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In this study, a physically-based, modeling framework was developed to predict saturated hydraulic conductivity (Ksat) dynamics in the Clear Creek Watershed (CCW), Iowa. The modeling framework integrated selected pedotransfer functions and watershed models with geospatial tools. A number of pedotransfer functions and agricultural watershed models were examined to select the appropriate models that represent the study site conditions. Models selection was based on statistical measures of the models’ errors compared to the Ksat field measurements conducted in the CCW under different soil, climate and land use conditions. The study has shown that the predictions of the combined pedotransfer function of Rosetta and the Water Erosion Prediction Project (WEPP) provided the best agreement to the measured Ksat values in the CCW compared to the other tested models. Therefore, Rosetta and WEPP were integrated with the Geographic Information System (GIS) tools for visualization of the data in forms of geospatial maps and prediction of Ksat variability in CCW due to the seasonal changes in climate and land use activities.
Keywords: Saturated hydraulic conductivity, pedotransfer functions, watershed models, geospatial tools.
Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 25273566 Determining the Width and Depths of Cut in Milling on the Basis of a Multi-Dexel Model
Authors: Jens Friedrich, Matthias A. Gebele, Armin Lechler, Alexander Verl
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Chatter vibrations and process instabilities are the most important factors limiting the productivity of the milling process. Chatter can leads to damage of the tool, the part or the machine tool. Therefore, the estimation and prediction of the process stability is very important. The process stability depends on the spindle speed, the depth of cut and the width of cut. In milling, the process conditions are defined in the NC-program. While the spindle speed is directly coded in the NC-program, the depth and width of cut are unknown. This paper presents a new simulation based approach for the prediction of the depth and width of cut of a milling process. The prediction is based on a material removal simulation with an analytically represented tool shape and a multi-dexel approach for the workpiece. The new calculation method allows the direct estimation of the depth and width of cut, which are the influencing parameters of the process stability, instead of the removed volume as existing approaches do. The knowledge can be used to predict the stability of new, unknown parts. Moreover with an additional vibration sensor, the stability lobe diagram of a milling process can be estimated and improved based on the estimated depth and width of cut.Keywords: Dexel, process stability, material removal, milling.
Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 22533565 Quality of Life of the Beneficiaries of the Government’s Bolsa Família Program: A Case Study in Mateiros/TO/Brazil
Authors: Mary L. G. S. Senna, Afonso R. Aquino, Veruska C. Dutra, Carlos H. C. Tolentino
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The quality of life index, despite elucidating many discussions, the conceptual subjectivity of the term does not show precision, and consequently, many researchers seek to develop methods aiming to measure this concept, bringing it to a more concrete approach. In this study, the quality of life index method was used to analyze the population of Mateiros, Tocantins, Brazil for quality of life. After data collection, it was compared the quality of life index between the population and the group of beneficiaries of the Brazilian government assistance program Bolsa Família (Family Allowance). Some of the people interviewed receive financial aid from the federal government program Bolsa Família (22%). Comparisons were made among the final score of the quality of life index of the Mateiros population and the following factors: Gender, age, education, those working or not with tourism and those who receive or do not receive the Bolsa Família. It was observed that only the factor, Bolsa Família (p-score 0.0138), shows an association with quality of life improvement, noticing that those who have financial aid had a higher quality of life improvement than the rest of the population. It was concluded that, government assistance has shown a decisive element on the enhancement of Mateiros population quality of life, indicating that similar actions should be maintained.Keywords: Quality of life index, government aid to families, sustainable tourism, Bolsa Familia.
Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 17843564 Investigation of Some Technical Indexes inStock Forecasting Using Neural Networks
Authors: Myungsook Klassen
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Training neural networks to capture an intrinsic property of a large volume of high dimensional data is a difficult task, as the training process is computationally expensive. Input attributes should be carefully selected to keep the dimensionality of input vectors relatively small. Technical indexes commonly used for stock market prediction using neural networks are investigated to determine its effectiveness as inputs. The feed forward neural network of Levenberg-Marquardt algorithm is applied to perform one step ahead forecasting of NASDAQ and Dow stock prices.Keywords: Stock Market Prediction, Neural Networks, Levenberg-Marquadt Algorithm, Technical Indexes
Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 19363563 An Investigation of Quality Practices in Libyan Industrial Companies
Authors: Mostafa A. Shokshok, Omran Ali Abu Krais
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This paper describes the collection and analysis of data obtained from face-to-face interviews conducted in selected Libyan industrial companies. The objectives of the interviews are to enhance understanding, and generate explanations of current issues in culture and quality management systems in Libyan companies. The method used in analyzing the questions, as well as the main finding of each question are explained. The interviews probed areas identify national and organizational culture, quality management systems, current methods, effects, barriers and other factors affecting the success of quality management implementation. Eleven questions are prepared and been discussed with the interviewees.Keywords: Interviews, quality, culture, Libyan industrial companies.
Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 19393562 Enhancing the Performance of H.264/AVC in Adaptive Group of Pictures Mode Using Octagon and Square Search Pattern
Authors: S. Sowmyayani, P. Arockia Jansi Rani
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This paper integrates Octagon and Square Search pattern (OCTSS) motion estimation algorithm into H.264/AVC (Advanced Video Coding) video codec in Adaptive Group of Pictures (AGOP) mode. AGOP structure is computed based on scene change in the video sequence. Octagon and square search pattern block-based motion estimation method is implemented in inter-prediction process of H.264/AVC. Both these methods reduce bit rate and computational complexity while maintaining the quality of the video sequence respectively. Experiments are conducted for different types of video sequence. The results substantially proved that the bit rate, computation time and PSNR gain achieved by the proposed method is better than the existing H.264/AVC with fixed GOP and AGOP. With a marginal gain in quality of 0.28dB and average gain in bitrate of 132.87kbps, the proposed method reduces the average computation time by 27.31 minutes when compared to the existing state-of-art H.264/AVC video codec.Keywords: Block Distortion Measure, Block Matching Algorithms, H.264/AVC, Motion estimation, Search patterns, Shot cut detection.
Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 17163561 Impact of Safety and Quality Considerations of Housing Clients on the Construction Firms’ Intention to Adopt Quality Function Deployment: A Case of Construction Sector
Authors: Saif Ul Haq
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The current study intends to examine the safety and quality considerations of clients of housing projects and their impact on the adoption of Quality Function Deployment (QFD) by the construction firm. Mixed method research technique has been used to collect and analyze the data wherein a survey was conducted to collect the data from 220 clients of housing projects in Saudi Arabia. Then, the telephonic and Skype interviews were conducted to collect data of 15 professionals working in the top ten real estate companies of Saudi Arabia. Data were analyzed by using partial least square (PLS) and thematic analysis techniques. Findings reveal that today’s customer prioritizes the safety and quality requirements of their houses and as a result, construction firms adopt QFD to address the needs of customers. The findings are of great importance for the clients of housing projects as well as for the construction firms as they could apply QFD in housing projects to address the safety and quality concerns of their clients.Keywords: Construction industry, quality considerations, quality function deployment, safety considerations.
Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 8833560 Three-Stage Mining Metals Supply Chain Coordination and Product Quality Improvement with Revenue Sharing Contract
Authors: Hamed Homaei, Iraj Mahdavi, Ali Tajdin
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One of the main concerns of miners is to increase the quality level of their products because the mining metals price depends on their quality level; however, increasing the quality level of these products has different costs at different levels of the supply chain. These costs usually increase after extractor level. This paper studies the coordination issue of a decentralized three-level supply chain with one supplier (extractor), one mineral processor and one manufacturer in which the increasing product quality level cost at the processor level is higher than the supplier and at the level of the manufacturer is more than the processor. We identify the optimal product quality level for each supply chain member by designing a revenue sharing contract. Finally, numerical examples show that the designed contract not only increases the final product quality level but also provides a win-win condition for all supply chain members and increases the whole supply chain profit.
Keywords: Three-stage supply chain, product quality improvement, channel coordination, revenue sharing.
Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 10943559 Effects of Temperature and Enzyme Concentration on Quality of Pineapple and Pawpaw Blended Juice
Authors: Ndidi F. Amulu, Calistus N. Ude, Patrick E. Amulu, Nneka N. Uchegbu
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The effects of temperature and enzyme concentration on the quality of mixed pineapple and pawpaw blended fruits juice were studied. Extracts of the two fruit juices were separately treated at 70 for 15 min each so as to inactivate micro-organisms. They were analyzed and blended in different proportions of 70% pawpaw and 30% pineapple, 60% pawpaw and 40% pineapple, 50% pineapple and 50% pawpaw, 40% pawpaw and 60% pineapple. The characterization of the fresh pawpaw and pineapple juice before blending showed that the juices have good quality. The high water content of the product may have affected the viscosity, vitamin C content and total soluble solid of the blended juice to be low. The effects of the process parameters on the quality showed that better quality of the blended juice can be obtained within the optimum temperature range of (50-70 °C) and enzyme concentration range (0.12-0.18 w/v). The ratio of mix 60% pineapple juice: 40% pawpaw juice has better quality. This showed that pawpaw and pineapple juices can blend effectively to produce a quality juice.Keywords: Clarification, pawpaw, pineapple, viscosity, vitamin C.
Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 18113558 An Integrative Bayesian Approach to Supporting the Prediction of Protein-Protein Interactions: A Case Study in Human Heart Failure
Authors: Fiona Browne, Huiru Zheng, Haiying Wang, Francisco Azuaje
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Recent years have seen a growing trend towards the integration of multiple information sources to support large-scale prediction of protein-protein interaction (PPI) networks in model organisms. Despite advances in computational approaches, the combination of multiple “omic" datasets representing the same type of data, e.g. different gene expression datasets, has not been rigorously studied. Furthermore, there is a need to further investigate the inference capability of powerful approaches, such as fullyconnected Bayesian networks, in the context of the prediction of PPI networks. This paper addresses these limitations by proposing a Bayesian approach to integrate multiple datasets, some of which encode the same type of “omic" data to support the identification of PPI networks. The case study reported involved the combination of three gene expression datasets relevant to human heart failure (HF). In comparison with two traditional methods, Naive Bayesian and maximum likelihood ratio approaches, the proposed technique can accurately identify known PPI and can be applied to infer potentially novel interactions.Keywords: Bayesian network, Classification, Data integration, Protein interaction networks.
Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 16073557 The Impact of Occupational Stress on Quality of Work Life among the Staff of e-Workspace
Authors: Alireza Bolhari, Ali Rezaeean, Jafar Bolhari, Fatemeh Zare
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With the advent of new technologies, factors related to mental health in e-workspaces are taken into consideration more than ever. Studies have revealed that one of the factors affecting the productivity of employees in an organization is occupational stress. Another influential factor is quality of work life which is important in the improvement of work environment conditions and organizational efficiency. In order to uncover the quality of work life level and to investigate the impact of occupational stress on quality of work life among information technology employees in Iran, a cross-sectional study design was applied and data were gathered using a questionnaire validated by a group of experts. The results of the study showed that information technology staffs have average level of both occupational stress and quality of work life. Furthermore, it was found that occupational stress has a negative impact on quality of work life. In addition, the same results were observed for role ambiguity, role conflict, role under-load, work-pace, work repetitiveness and tension toward quality of work life. No significant relation was found between role overload and quality of work life. Finally, directions for future research are proposed and discussed.Keywords: Information Technology, e-Workspace, Healthcare, IT Staff, Occupational Stress, Quality of Work Life
Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 57353556 Quantitative Ranking Evaluation of Wine Quality
Authors: A. Brunel, A. Kernevez, F. Leclere, J. Trenteseaux
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Today, wine quality is only evaluated by wine experts with their own different personal tastes, even if they may agree on some common features. So producers do not have any unbiased way to independently assess the quality of their products. A tool is here proposed to evaluate wine quality by an objective ranking based upon the variables entering wine elaboration, and analysed through principal component analysis (PCA) method. Actual climatic data are compared by measuring the relative distance between each considered wine, out of which the general ranking is performed.Keywords: Wine, grape, vine, weather conditions, rating, climate, principal component analysis, metric analysis.
Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 21183555 Development of Maximum Entropy Method for Prediction of Droplet-size Distribution in Primary Breakup Region of Spray
Authors: E. Movahednejad, F. Ommi
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Droplet size distributions in the cold spray of a fuel are important in observed combustion behavior. Specification of droplet size and velocity distributions in the immediate downstream of injectors is also essential as boundary conditions for advanced computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and two-phase spray transport calculations. This paper describes the development of a new model to be incorporated into maximum entropy principle (MEP) formalism for prediction of droplet size distribution in droplet formation region. The MEP approach can predict the most likely droplet size and velocity distributions under a set of constraints expressing the available information related to the distribution. In this article, by considering the mechanisms of turbulence generation inside the nozzle and wave growth on jet surface, it is attempted to provide a logical framework coupling the flow inside the nozzle to the resulting atomization process. The purpose of this paper is to describe the formulation of this new model and to incorporate it into the maximum entropy principle (MEP) by coupling sub-models together using source terms of momentum and energy. Comparison between the model prediction and experimental data for a gas turbine swirling nozzle and an annular spray indicate good agreement between model and experiment.Keywords: Droplet, instability, Size Distribution, Turbulence, Maximum Entropy
Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 25663554 Quality as an Approach to Organizational Change and Its Role in the Reorganization of Enterprises: Case of Four Moroccan Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises
Authors: A. Boudiaf
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The purpose of this paper is to analyze and apprehend, through four case studies, the interest of the project of the implementation of the quality management system (QMS) at four Moroccan small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). This project could generate significant organizational change to improve the functioning of the organization. In fact, quality is becoming a necessity in the current business world. It is considered to be a major component in companies’ competitive strategies. It should be noted that quality management is characterized by a set of methods and techniques that can be used to solve malfunctions and reorganize companies. It is useful to point out that the choice of the adoption of the quality approach could be influenced by the circumstances of the business context, it could also be derived from its strategic vision; this means that this choice can be characterized as either a strategic aspect or a reactive aspect. This would probably have a major impact on the functioning of the QMS and also on the perception of the quality issue by company managers and their employees.
Keywords: Business context, organizational change, quality, reorganization.
Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 7963553 Corporate Governance Practices and Audit Quality: An Empirical Study of the Listed Companies in Egypt
Authors: Mohamed Moustafa Soliman, Mohamed Abd Elsalam
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Recent financial international scandals around the world have led to a number of investigations into the effectiveness of corporate governance practices and audit quality. Although evidence of corporate governance practices and audit quality exists from developed economies, very scanty studies have been conducted in Egypt where corporate governance is just evolving. Therefore, this study provides evidence on the effectiveness of corporate governance practices and audit quality from a developing country. The data for analysis are gathered from the top 50 most active companies in the Egyptian Stock Exchange, covering the three year period 2007-2009. Logistic regression was used in investigating the questions that were raised in the study. Findings from the study show that board independence; CEO duality and audit committees significantly have relationship with audit quality. The results also, indicate that institutional investor and managerial ownership have no significantly relationship with audit quality. Evidence also exist that size of the company; complexity and business leverage are important factors in audit quality for companies quoted on the Egypt Stock Exchange.
Keywords: Corporate governance, Boards of directors, corporate ownership, Audit Committees, Audit quality, and Egypt.
Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 39063552 Quality of Non-Point Source Pollutant Identification using Digital Image and Remote Sensing Image
Authors: Riki Mukhaiyar
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The integration between technology of remote sensing, information from the data of digital image, and modeling technology for the simulation of water quality will provide easiness during the observation on the quality of water changes on the river surface. For example, Ciliwung River which is contaminated with non-point source pollutant from household wastes, particularly on its downstream. This fact informed that the quality of water in this river is getting worse. The land use for settlements and housing ranges between 62.84% - 81.26% on the downstream of Ciliwung River, give a significant picture in seeing factors that affected the water quality of Ciliwung River.Keywords: Digital Image, Digitize, Landuse, Non-Point SourcePollutant, Qual2e Simulation
Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 16963551 An Improved Model for Prediction of the Effective Thermal Conductivity of Nanofluids
Authors: K. Abbaspoursani, M. Allahyari, M. Rahmani
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Thermal conductivity is an important characteristic of a nanofluid in laminar flow heat transfer. This paper presents an improved model for the prediction of the effective thermal conductivity of nanofluids based on dimensionless groups. The model expresses the thermal conductivity of a nanofluid as a function of the thermal conductivity of the solid and liquid, their volume fractions and particle size. The proposed model includes a parameter which accounts for the interfacial shell, brownian motion, and aggregation of particle. The validation of the model is verified by applying the results obtained by the experiments of Tio2-water and Al2o3-water nanofluids.Keywords: Critical particle size, nanofluid, model, and thermal conductivity.
Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 20343550 Comparison of S-transform and Wavelet Transform in Power Quality Analysis
Authors: Mohammad Javad Dehghani
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In the power quality analysis non-stationary nature of voltage distortions require some precise and powerful analytical techniques. The time-frequency representation (TFR) provides a powerful method for identification of the non-stationary of the signals. This paper investigates a comparative study on two techniques for analysis and visualization of voltage distortions with time-varying amplitudes. The techniques include the Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT), and the S-Transform. Several power quality problems are analyzed using both the discrete wavelet transform and S–transform, showing clearly the advantage of the S– transform in detecting, localizing, and classifying the power quality problems.Keywords: Power quality, S-Transform, Short Time FourierTransform , Wavelet Transform, instantaneous sag, swell.
Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 28003549 Predicting the Impact of the Defect on the Overall Environment in Function Based Systems
Authors: Parvinder S. Sandhu, Urvashi Malhotra, E. Ardil
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There is lot of work done in prediction of the fault proneness of the software systems. But, it is the severity of the faults that is more important than number of faults existing in the developed system as the major faults matters most for a developer and those major faults needs immediate attention. In this paper, we tried to predict the level of impact of the existing faults in software systems. Neuro-Fuzzy based predictor models is applied NASA-s public domain defect dataset coded in C programming language. As Correlation-based Feature Selection (CFS) evaluates the worth of a subset of attributes by considering the individual predictive ability of each feature along with the degree of redundancy between them. So, CFS is used for the selecting the best metrics that have highly correlated with level of severity of faults. The results are compared with the prediction results of Logistic Models (LMT) that was earlier quoted as the best technique in [17]. The results are recorded in terms of Accuracy, Mean Absolute Error (MAE) and Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE). The results show that Neuro-fuzzy based model provide a relatively better prediction accuracy as compared to other models and hence, can be used for the modeling of the level of impact of faults in function based systems.Keywords: Software Metrics, Fuzzy, Neuro-Fuzzy, Software Faults, Accuracy, MAE, RMSE.
Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 13483548 Applications of Prediction and Identification Using Adaptive DCMAC Neural Networks
Authors: Yu-Lin Liao, Ya-Fu Peng
Abstract:
An adaptive dynamic cerebellar model articulation controller (DCMAC) neural network used for solving the prediction and identification problem is proposed in this paper. The proposed DCMAC has superior capability to the conventional cerebellar model articulation controller (CMAC) neural network in efficient learning mechanism, guaranteed system stability and dynamic response. The recurrent network is embedded in the DCMAC by adding feedback connections in the association memory space so that the DCMAC captures the dynamic response, where the feedback units act as memory elements. The dynamic gradient descent method is adopted to adjust DCMAC parameters on-line. Moreover, the analytical method based on a Lyapunov function is proposed to determine the learning-rates of DCMAC so that the variable optimal learning-rates are derived to achieve most rapid convergence of identifying error. Finally, the adaptive DCMAC is applied in two computer simulations. Simulation results show that accurate identifying response and superior dynamic performance can be obtained because of the powerful on-line learning capability of the proposed DCMAC.Keywords: adaptive, cerebellar model articulation controller, CMAC, prediction, identification
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