Search results for: real time data analysis

Authors: Zhengnan Shi

Abstract:

In the self-stabilizing algorithmic paradigm, each node has a local view of the system, in a finite amount of time the system converges to a global state with desired property. In a graph G = (V, E), a subset S C V is a 2-packing if Vi c V: IN[i] n SI <1. In this paper, an ID-based, constant space, self-stabilizing algorithm that stabilizes to a maximal 2-packing in an arbitrary graph is proposed. It is shown that the algorithm stabilizes in 0(n3) moves under any scheduler (daemon). Specifically, it is shown that the algorithm stabilizes in linear time-steps under a synchronous daemon where every privileged node moves at each time-step.

Keywords: self-stabilization, 2-packing, distributed computing, fault tolerance, graph algorithms

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Authors: F. S. Al-Anzi, M. Sarfraz, A. Elmi, A. R. Khan

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Researchers are responding to the environmental challenges of Kuwait in localized, innovative, effective and economic ways. One of the vital and significant examples of the natural challenges is lack or water and desertification. In this research, the project team focuses on redesigning a prototype, using Value Engineering Methodology, which would provide similar functionalities to the well-known technology of Waterboxx kits while reducing the capital and operational costs and simplifying the process of manufacturing and usability by regular farmers. The design employs used tires and recycled plastic sheets as raw materials. Hence, this approach is going to help not just fighting desertification but also helping in getting rid of ever growing huge tire dumpsters in Kuwait, as well as helping in avoiding hazards of tire fires yielding in a safer and friendlier environment. Several alternatives for implementing the prototype have been considered. The best alternative in terms of value has been selected after thorough Function Analysis System Technique (FAST) exercise has been developed. A prototype has been fabricated and tested in a controlled simulated lab environment that is being followed by real environment field testing. Water and soil analysis conducted on the site of the experiment to cross compare between the composition of the soil before and after the experiment to insure that the prototype being tested is actually going to be environment safe. Experimentation shows that the design was equally as effective as, and may exceed, the original design with significant savings in cost. An estimated total cost reduction using the VE approach of 43.84% over the original design. This cost reduction does not consider the intangible costs of environmental issue of waste recycling which many further intensify the total savings of using the alternative VE design. This case study shows that Value Engineering Methodology can be an important tool in innovating new designs for reducing costs.

Keywords: Desertification, functional analysis, scrap tires, value engineering, waste recycling, water irrigation rationing.

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Authors: Francisco Bulnes

Abstract:

Through the Fukaya conjecture and the wrapped Floer cohomology, the correspondences between paths in a loop space and states of a wrapping space of states in a Hamiltonian space (the ramification of field in this case is the connection to the operator that goes from TM to T*M) are demonstrated where these last states are corresponding to bosonic extensions of a spectrum of the space-time or direct image of the functor Spec, on space-time. This establishes a distinguished diffeomorphism defined by the mapping from the corresponding loops space to wrapping category of the Floer cohomology complex which furthermore relates in certain proportion D-branes (certain D-modules) with strings. This also gives to place to certain conjecture that establishes equivalences between moduli spaces that can be consigned in a moduli identity taking as space-time the Hitchin moduli space on G, whose dual can be expressed by a factor of a bosonic moduli spaces.

Keywords: Floer cohomology, Fukaya conjecture, Lagrangian submanifolds, spectrum of ring, topological quantum diffeomorphisms.

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Authors: M. Aslam, Farrukh, A. R. Gardezi, Nasir Hayat

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Automated material handling is given prime importance in the semi automated and automated facilities since it provides solution to the gigantic problems related to inventory and also support the latest philosophies like just in time production JIT and lean production. Automated storage and retrieval system is an antidote (if designed properly) to the facility sufferings like getting the right material , materials getting perished, long cycle times or many other similar kind of problems. A working model of automated storage and retrieval system (AS/RS) is designed and developed under the design parameters specified by Material Handling Industry of America (MHIA). Later on analysis was carried out to calculate the throughput and size of the machine. The possible implementation of this technology in local scenario is also discussed in this paper.

Keywords: Automated storage and retrieval system (AS/RS), Material handling, Computer integrated manufacturing (CIM), Lightdependent resistor (LDR)

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Authors: S. Amirhassan Monadjemi, Narges Zarrabi, Naser Neamatbakhsh

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As days go by, we hear more and more about HIV, Ebola, Bird Flu and other dreadful viruses which were unknown a few decades ago. In both detecting and fighting viral diseases ordinary methods have come across some basic and important difficulties. Vaccination is by a sense introduction of the virus to the immune system before the occurrence of the real case infection. It is very successful against some viruses (e.g. Poliomyelitis), while totally ineffective against some others (e.g. HIV or Hepatitis-C). On the other hand, Anti-virus drugs are mostly some tools to control and not to cure a viral disease. This could be a good motivation to try alternative treatments. In this study, some key features of possible physical-based alternative treatments for viral diseases are presented. Electrification of body parts or fluids (especially blood) with micro electric signals with adjusted current or frequency is also studied. The main approach of this study is to find a suitable energy field, with appropriate parameters that are able to kill or deactivate viruses. This would be a lengthy, multi-disciplinary research which needs the contribution of virology, physics, and signal processing experts. It should be mentioned that all the claims made by alternative cures researchers must be tested carefully and are not advisable at the time being.

Keywords: Alternative Cure, Viral disease, HIV, signals, energy filed.

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Authors: Supriya Arya, Sunita Dhingra

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Multiprocessor task scheduling problem for dependent and independent tasks is computationally complex problem. Many methods are proposed to achieve optimal running time. As the multiprocessor task scheduling is NP hard in nature, therefore, many heuristics are proposed which have improved the makespan of the problem. But due to problem specific nature, the heuristic method which provide best results for one problem, might not provide good results for another problem. So, Simulated Annealing which is meta heuristic approach is considered. It can be applied on all types of problems. However, due to many runs, meta heuristic approach takes large computation time. Hence, the hybrid approach is proposed by combining the Duplication Scheduling Heuristic and Simulated Annealing (SA) and the makespan results of Simple Simulated Annealing and Hybrid approach are analyzed.

Keywords: Multiprocessor task scheduling Problem, Makespan, Duplication Scheduling Heuristic, Simulated Annealing, Hybrid Approach.

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Authors: R. Sullivan, T. Holden, G. Tremberger, Jr, E. Cheung, C. Branch, J. Burrero, G. Surpris, S. Quintana, A. Rameau, N. Gadura, H. Yao, R. Subramaniam, P. Schneider, S. A. Rotenberg, P. Marchese, A. Flamhlolz, D. Lieberman, T. Cheung

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Migration in breast cancer cell wound healing assay had been studied using image fractal dimension analysis. The migration of MDA-MB-231 cells (highly motile) in a wound healing assay was captured using time-lapse phase contrast video microscopy and compared to MDA-MB-468 cell migration (moderately motile). The Higuchi fractal method was used to compute the fractal dimension of the image intensity fluctuation along a single pixel width region parallel to the wound. The near-wound region fractal dimension was found to decrease three times faster in the MDA-MB- 231 cells initially as compared to the less cancerous MDA-MB-468 cells. The inner region fractal dimension was found to be fairly constant for both cell types in time and suggests a wound influence range of about 15 cell layer. The box-counting fractal dimension method was also used to study region of interest (ROI). The MDAMB- 468 ROI area fractal dimension was found to decrease continuously up to 7 hours. The MDA-MB-231 ROI area fractal dimension was found to increase and is consistent with the behavior of a HGF-treated MDA-MB-231 wound healing assay posted in the public domain. A fractal dimension based capacity index has been formulated to quantify the invasiveness of the MDA-MB-231 cells in the perpendicular-to-wound direction. Our results suggest that image intensity fluctuation fractal dimension analysis can be used as a tool to quantify cell migration in terms of cancer severity and treatment responses.

Keywords: Higuchi fractal dimension, box-counting fractal dimension, cancer cell migration, wound healing.

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Authors: Mahdiyeh Zafaranchi, Ethan S. Cantor, William T. Riddell, Jess W. Everett

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The New Jersey Department of Military and Veteran’s Affairs (NJ DMAVA) operates over 50 facilities throughout the state of New Jersey, US. NJ DMAVA is under a mandate to move toward decarbonization, which will eventually include eliminating the use of natural gas and other fossil fuels for heating. At the same time, the organization requires increased resiliency regarding electric grid disruption. These competing goals necessitate adopting the use of on-site renewables such as photovoltaic and geothermal power, as well as implementing power control strategies through microgrids. Planning for these changes requires a detailed understanding of current and future electricity use on yearly, monthly, and shorter time scales, as well as a breakdown of consumption by heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) equipment. This paper discusses case studies of two buildings that were simulated using the QUick Energy Simulation Tool (eQUEST). Both buildings use electricity from the grid and photovoltaics. One building also uses natural gas. While electricity use data are available in hourly intervals and natural gas data are available in monthly intervals, the simulations were developed using monthly and yearly totals. This approach was chosen to reflect the information available for most NJ DMAVA facilities. Once completed, simulation results are compared to metrics recommended by several organizations to validate energy use simulations. In addition to yearly and monthly totals, the simulated peak demands are compared to actual monthly peak demand values. The simulations resulted in monthly peak demand values that were within 30% of the measured values. These benchmarks will help to assess future energy planning efforts for NJ DMAVA.

Keywords: Building Energy Modeling, eQUEST, peak demand, smart meters.

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Authors: Mokgadi Moletsane-Kekae, Robert Kananga Mukuna

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The study focused on the analysis of the Adjusted Rorschach Comprehensive System’s responses. The objective of this study is to analyse the participants’ response rate of the Adjusted Rorschach Comprehensive System with regards to critical psychology approach. The use of critical psychology theory in this study was crucial because it responds to the current inadequate western theory or practice in the field of psychology. The study adopted a qualitative approach and a case study design. The study was grounded on interpretivist paradigm. The sample size comprised six learners (three boys and three girls, aged of 14 years) from historically disadvantaged school in the Western Cape, South Africa. The Adjusted Rorschach Comprehensive System (ARCS) administration procedure, biographical information, semi-structured interviews, and observation were used to collect data. Data was analysed using thematic framework. The study found out that, factors that increased the response rates during the administration of ARCS were, language, seating arrangement, drawing, viewing, and describing. The study recommended that, psychological test designers take into consideration the philosophy or worldviews of the local people for whom the test is designed to minimize low response rates.

Keywords: Adjusted Rorschach comprehensive system, critical psychology, learners, responses.

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Authors: Anurag Sharma, Christian W. Omlin

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Self-organizing map (SOM) is a well known data reduction technique used in data mining. It can reveal structure in data sets through data visualization that is otherwise hard to detect from raw data alone. However, interpretation through visual inspection is prone to errors and can be very tedious. There are several techniques for the automatic detection of clusters of code vectors found by SOM, but they generally do not take into account the distribution of code vectors; this may lead to unsatisfactory clustering and poor definition of cluster boundaries, particularly where the density of data points is low. In this paper, we propose the use of an adaptive heuristic particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm for finding cluster boundaries directly from the code vectors obtained from SOM. The application of our method to several standard data sets demonstrates its feasibility. PSO algorithm utilizes a so-called U-matrix of SOM to determine cluster boundaries; the results of this novel automatic method compare very favorably to boundary detection through traditional algorithms namely k-means and hierarchical based approach which are normally used to interpret the output of SOM.

Keywords: cluster boundaries, clustering, code vectors, data mining, particle swarm optimization, self-organizing maps, U-matrix.

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Authors: Yung-Gi Wu

Abstract:

With the growing of computer and network, digital data can be spread to anywhere in the world quickly. In addition, digital data can also be copied or tampered easily so that the security issue becomes an important topic in the protection of digital data. Digital watermark is a method to protect the ownership of digital data. Embedding the watermark will influence the quality certainly. In this paper, Vector Quantization (VQ) is used to embed the watermark into the image to fulfill the goal of data hiding. This kind of watermarking is invisible which means that the users will not conscious the existing of embedded watermark even though the embedded image has tiny difference compared to the original image. Meanwhile, VQ needs a lot of computation burden so that we adopt a fast VQ encoding scheme by partial distortion searching (PDS) and mean approximation scheme to speed up the data hiding process. The watermarks we hide to the image could be gray, bi-level and color images. Texts are also can be regarded as watermark to embed. In order to test the robustness of the system, we adopt Photoshop to fulfill sharpen, cropping and altering to check if the extracted watermark is still recognizable. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed system can resist the above three kinds of tampering in general cases.

Keywords: Data hiding, vector quantization, watermark.

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Authors: Parviz Fattahi

Abstract:

Scheduling for the flexible job shop is very important in both fields of production management and combinatorial optimization. However, it quit difficult to achieve an optimal solution to this problem with traditional optimization approaches owing to the high computational complexity. The combining of several optimization criteria induces additional complexity and new problems. In this paper, a Pareto approach to solve the multi objective flexible job shop scheduling problems is proposed. The objectives considered are to minimize the overall completion time (makespan) and total weighted tardiness (TWT). An effective simulated annealing algorithm based on the proposed approach is presented to solve multi objective flexible job shop scheduling problem. An external memory of non-dominated solutions is considered to save and update the non-dominated solutions during the solution process. Numerical examples are used to evaluate and study the performance of the proposed algorithm. The proposed algorithm can be applied easily in real factory conditions and for large size problems. It should thus be useful to both practitioners and researchers.

Keywords: Flexible job shop, Scheduling, Hierarchical approach, simulated annealing, tabu search, multi objective.

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Authors: Nerguè Kassahan Kone, Souleymane Oumtanaga

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The third generation (3G) of cellular system adopted the spread spectrum as solution for the transmission of the data in the physical layer. Contrary to systems IS-95 or CDMAOne (systems with spread spectrum of the preceding generation), the new standard, called Universal Mobil Telecommunications System (UMTS), uses long codes in the down link. The system is conceived for the vocal communication and the transmission of the data. In particular, the down link is very important, because of the asymmetrical request of the data, i.e., more remote loading towards the mobiles than towards the basic station. Moreover, the UMTS uses for the down link an orthogonal spreading out with a variable factor of spreading out (OVSF for Orthogonal Variable Spreading Factor). This characteristic makes it possible to increase the flow of data of one or more users by reducing their factor of spreading out without changing the factor of spreading out of other users. In the current standard of the UMTS, two techniques to increase the performances of the down link were proposed, the diversity of sending antenna and the codes space-time. These two techniques fight only fainding. The receiver proposed for the mobil station is the RAKE, but one can imagine a receiver more sophisticated, able to reduce the interference between users and the impact of the coloured noise and interferences to narrow band. In this context, where the users have long codes synchronized with variable factor of spreading out and ignorance by the mobile of the other active codes/users, the use of the sequences of code pseudo-noises different lengths is presented in the form of one of the most appropriate solutions.

Keywords: DS-CDMA, multiple access interference, ratio Signal / interference + Noise.

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Authors: M.St. Węglowski, D. Miara, S. Błacha, J. Dworak, J. Rykała, K. Kwieciński, J. Pikuła, G. Ziobro, A. Szafron, P. Zimierska-Nowak, M. Richert, P. Noga

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In the paper the results of welding of car’s air-conditioning elements are presented. These systems based on, mainly, the environmental unfriendly refrigerants. Thus, the producers of cars will have to stop using traditional refrigerant and to change it to carbon dioxide (R744). This refrigerant is environmental friendly. However, it should be noted that the air condition system working with R744 refrigerant operates at high temperature (up to 150 °C) and high pressure (up to 130 bar). These two parameters are much higher than for other refrigerants. Thus new materials, design as well as joining technologies are strongly needed for these systems. AISI 304 and 316L steels as well as aluminium alloys 5xxx are ranked among the prospective materials. As a joining process laser welding, plasma welding, electron beam welding as well as high rotary friction welding can be applied. In the study, the metallographic examination based on light microscopy as well as SEM was applied to estimate the quality of welded joints. The analysis of welding was supported by numerical modelling based on Sysweld software. The results indicated that using laser, plasma and electron beam welding, it is possible to obtain proper quality of welds in stainless steel. Moreover, high rotary friction welding allows to guarantee the metallic continuity in the aluminium welded area. The metallographic examination revealed that the grain growth in the heat affected zone (HAZ) in laser and electron beam welded joints were not observed. It is due to low heat input and short welding time. The grain growth and subgrains can be observed at room temperature when the solidification mode is austenitic. This caused low microstructural changes during solidification. The columnar grain structure was found in the weld metal. Meanwhile, the equiaxed grains were detected in the interface. The numerical modelling of laser welding process allowed to estimate the temperature profile in the welded joint as well as predicts the dimensions of welds. The agreement between FEM analysis and experimental data was achieved.  

Keywords: Car’s air–conditioning, microstructure, numerical modelling, welding.

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Authors: I. R. Kanu, T. J. Aspray, A. J. Adeloye

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As a result of the ambiguity and complexity surrounding anaerobic digester foaming, efforts have been made by various researchers to understand the process of anaerobic digester foaming so as to proffer a solution that can be universally applied rather than site specific. All attempts ranging from experimental analysis to comparative review of other process has not fully explained the conditions and process of foaming in anaerobic digester. Studying the current available knowledge on foam formation and relating it to anaerobic digester process and operating condition, this piece of work presents a succinct and enhanced understanding of foaming in anaerobic digesters as well as introducing a simple method to identify the onset of anaerobic digester foaming based on analysis of historical data from a field scale system.

Keywords: Anaerobic digester, foam, biogas, surfactants, wastewater sludge.

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Authors: Dong-Woo Lim, Chang-Jae Chun, Hyung-Myung Kim

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We consider a two-way relay network where two sources exchange information. A relay helps the two sources exchange information using the decode-and-XOR-forward protocol. We investigate the power minimization problem with minimum rate constraints. The system needs two time slots and in each time slot the required rate pair should be achievable. The power consumption is minimized in each time slot and we obtained the closed form solution. The simulation results confirm that the proposed power allocation scheme consumes lower total power than the conventional schemes.

Keywords: Decode-and-XOR-forward, power minimization, two-way relay

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Authors: Ching-Sung Wang, Teng-Wei Wang, Zhen-Ting Zheng

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This study mainly concerns a safety device designed for child care. When children are out of sight or the caregivers cannot always pay attention to the situation, through the functions of this device, caregivers can immediately be informed to make sure that the children do not get lost or hurt, and thus, ensure their safety. Starting from this concept, a device is produced based on the relatively low-cost Bluetooth piconet system and a three-axis gyroscope sensor. This device can transmit data to a mobile phone app through Bluetooth, in order that the user can learn the situation at any time. By simply clipping the device in a pocket or on the waist, after switching on/starting the device, it will send data to the phone to detect the child’s fall and distance. Once the child is beyond the angle or distance set by the app, it will issue a warning to inform the phone owner.

Keywords: Children care, piconet system, three-axis gyroscope, distance detection, falls detection.

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Authors: Tamás Hartványi, Ferenc Tóth

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European telecommunication distribution center performance is measured by service lead time and quality. Operation model is CTO (customized to order) namely, a high mix customization of telecommunication network equipment and parts. CTO operation contains material receiving, warehousing, network and server assembly to order and configure based on customer specifications. Variety of the product and orders does not support mass production structure. One of the success factors to satisfy customer is to have a proper aggregated planning method for the operation in order to have optimized human resources and highly efficient asset utilization. Research will investigate several methods and find proper way to have an order book simulation where practical optimization problem may contain thousands of variables and the simulation running times of developed algorithms were taken into account with high importance. There are two operation research models that were developed, customer demand is given in orders, no change over time, customer demands are given for product types, and changeover time is constant.

Keywords: CTO, aggregated planning, demand simulation, changeover time.

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Authors: Wen-Chi Hou, Cheng Luo, Zhewei Jiang, Feng Yan

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In this research, we propose to use the discrete cosine transform to approximate the cumulative distributions of data cube cells- values. The cosine transform is known to have a good energy compaction property and thus can approximate data distribution functions easily with small number of coefficients. The derived estimator is accurate and easy to update. We perform experiments to compare its performance with a well-known technique - the (Haar) wavelet. The experimental results show that the cosine transform performs much better than the wavelet in estimation accuracy, speed, space efficiency, and update easiness.

Keywords: DCT, Data Cube

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Authors: Lili Wang, Meng Hu

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In this paper, a class of recurrent neural networks (RNNs) with variable delays are studied on almost periodic time scales, some sufficient conditions are established for the existence and global exponential stability of the almost periodic solution. These results have important leading significance in designs and applications of RNNs. Finally, two examples and numerical simulations are presented to illustrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the results.

Keywords: Recurrent neural network, Almost periodic solution, Global exponential stability, Time scale.

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Authors: Maohai Li, Bingrong Hong, Zesu Cai, Ronghua Luo

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This paper presents the novel Rao-Blackwellised particle filter (RBPF) for mobile robot simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) using monocular vision. The particle filter is combined with unscented Kalman filter (UKF) to extending the path posterior by sampling new poses that integrate the current observation which drastically reduces the uncertainty about the robot pose. The landmark position estimation and update is also implemented through UKF. Furthermore, the number of resampling steps is determined adaptively, which seriously reduces the particle depletion problem, and introducing the evolution strategies (ES) for avoiding particle impoverishment. The 3D natural point landmarks are structured with matching Scale Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT) feature pairs. The matching for multi-dimension SIFT features is implemented with a KD-Tree in the time cost of O(log2 N). Experiment results on real robot in our indoor environment show the advantages of our methods over previous approaches.

Keywords: Mobile robot, simultaneous localization and mapping, Rao-Blackwellised particle filter, evolution strategies, scale invariant feature transform.

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Authors: C. Schulz-Herzenberg

Abstract:

Due to the legacy of apartheid segregation South Africa remains a divided society where most voters live in politically homogenous social environments. This paper argues that political discussion within one’s social context plays a primary role in shaping political attitudes and vote choice. Using data from the Comparative National Elections Project 2004 and 2009 South African post-election surveys, the paper explores the extent of social context partisan homogeneity in South Africa and finds that voters are not overly embedded in homogenous social contexts. It then demonstrates the consequences of partisan homogeneity on voting behavior. Homogenous social contexts tend to encourage stronger partisan loyalties and fewer defections in vote choice while voters in more heterogeneous contexts show less consistency in their attitudes and behaviour. Finally, the analysis shows how momentous sociopolitical events at the time of a particular election can change the social context, with important consequences for electoral outcomes.

Keywords: Political communication, social context, South Africa, voting behaviour.

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Authors: Muhammad Nizam, Azah Mohamed, Majid Al-Dabbagh, Aini Hussain

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This paper presents dynamic voltage collapse prediction on an actual power system using support vector machines. Dynamic voltage collapse prediction is first determined based on the PTSI calculated from information in dynamic simulation output. Simulations were carried out on a practical 87 bus test system by considering load increase as the contingency. The data collected from the time domain simulation is then used as input to the SVM in which support vector regression is used as a predictor to determine the dynamic voltage collapse indices of the power system. To reduce training time and improve accuracy of the SVM, the Kernel function type and Kernel parameter are considered. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed SVM method, its performance is compared with the multi layer perceptron neural network (MLPNN). Studies show that the SVM gives faster and more accurate results for dynamic voltage collapse prediction compared with the MLPNN.

Keywords: Dynamic voltage collapse, prediction, artificial neural network, support vector machines

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Authors: Mahshid Hatamzad, Geanette Polanco

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Improving the performance of Winter Road Maintenance (WRM) can increase the traffic safety and reduce the cost as well as environmental impacts. This study evaluates the efficiency of WRM technique, named salting, in the Arctic area by using Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA), which is a non-parametric linear method to measure the efficiencies of decision-making units (DMUs) based on handling multiple inputs and multiple outputs at the same time that their associated weights are not known. Here, roads are considered as DMUs for which the efficiency must be determined. The three input variables considered are traffic flow, road area and WRM cost. In addition, the two output variables included are level of safety in the roads and environment impacts resulted from WRM, which is also considered as an uncontrollable factor in the second scenario. The results show the performance of DMUs from the most efficient WRM to the inefficient/least efficient one and this information provides decision makers with technical support and the required suggested improvements for inefficient WRM, in order to achieve a cost-effective WRM and a safe road transportation during wintertime in the Arctic areas.

Keywords: DEA, environmental impacts, risk and safety, WRM.

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Authors: Jing Zhang, Jie Chen

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In this paper, we mainly analyze an automated parking system where the storage and retrieval requests are performed by a tower crane. In this parking system, the S/R crane which is located at the middle of the bottom of the cylinder parking area can rotate in both clockwise and counterclockwise and three kinds of movements can be done simultaneously. We develop some mathematical travel time models for the single command cycle under the random storage assignment using the characteristics of this system. Finally, we compare these travel models with discrete case and it is shown that these travel models display a good satisfactory performance.

Keywords: Parking system, travel time model, tower crane.

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Authors: Supattra Kanchanopast

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The purpose of this research was to study the customers’ behavioral trend for online accommodation system at Bangkonthi District, Samutsongkhram province. The research collected data from 400 online users. A questionnaire was utilized as the tool in collecting information. Descriptive statistics included frequency, percentage, mean and standard deviation. Independent- sample t- test, analysis of variance and Pearson Correlation were also used. The findings of this research revealed that the majority of the respondents were male, 25-32 years old, and graduated a bachelor degree. The respondents mostly worked in private sectors and had monthly income between 10,001-15,000 baht. The regular online users, visiting this system between 3-4 times/month, spending 1-2 hours/time, searched for online accommodation information. This result showed that the users had good and high attitude towards the system. According to the hypothesis testing, the number of online usage had positive related to the behavioral trends: accommodation purchasing intention and recommend the accommodation to others. Furthermore, both the number of online usage and overall attitude had a significant correlation to accommodation purchase intention and recommend the accommodation to others.

Keywords: Customer Behavior, Information System Management, Online Accommodation Services.

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Authors: Sudhir Agashe, Ashok Ghatol, Sujata Agashe

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In this paper the development of a heat exchanger as a pilot plant for educational purpose is discussed and the use of neural network for controlling the process is being presented. The aim of the study is to highlight the need of a specific Pseudo Random Binary Sequence (PRBS) to excite a process under control. As the neural network is a data driven technique, the method for data generation plays an important role. In light of this a careful experimentation procedure for data generation was crucial task. Heat exchange is a complex process, which has a capacity and a time lag as process elements. The proposed system is a typical pipe-in- pipe type heat exchanger. The complexity of the system demands careful selection, proper installation and commissioning. The temperature, flow, and pressure sensors play a vital role in the control performance. The final control element used is a pneumatically operated control valve. While carrying out the experimentation on heat exchanger a welldrafted procedure is followed giving utmost attention towards safety of the system. The results obtained are encouraging and revealing the fact that if the process details are known completely as far as process parameters are concerned and utilities are well stabilized then feedback systems are suitable, whereas neural network control paradigm is useful for the processes with nonlinearity and less knowledge about process. The implementation of NN control reinforces the concepts of process control and NN control paradigm. The result also underlined the importance of excitation signal typically for that process. Data acquisition, processing, and presentation in a typical format are the most important parameters while validating the results.

Keywords: Process identification, neural network, heat exchanger.

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Authors: M. Almohaimeed, Y. Alhaidari, H. Alhamdan, A. Alfaries, A. Ater Kranov

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A university-wide survey to obtain baseline data regarding the perceptions of key terms related to e-learning and distance learning among students, faculty and staff was conducted to help achieve the goals of Princess Nourah bint Abdulrahman University’s and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s National Center for e-learning and Distance Learning. This paper comprises a relevant literature review, the survey methodology, preliminary data analysis, discussion, and recommendations for further research. The major findings indicate a deep and wide differentiation of understanding among users of critical key terms.

Keywords: E-learning, distance learning, on-line learning, perceptions of learning environments.

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Authors: M. K. Benhaoua, A. K. Singh, A. E. H. Benyamina, A. Kumar, P. Boulet

Abstract:

In this paper, we propose a new packing strategy to find a free resource for run-time mapping of application tasks to NoC-based Heterogeneous MPSoC. The proposed strategy minimizes the task mapping time in addition to placing the communicating tasks close to each other. To evaluate our approach, a comparative study is carried out for a platform containing single task supported PEs. Experiments show that our strategy provides better results when compared to latest dynamic mapping strategies reported in the literature.

Keywords: Multi-Processor Systems-on-Chip (MPSoCs), Network-on-Chip (NoC), Heterogeneous architectures, Dynamic mapping heuristics.

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Authors: Yasin Bilim, Alaaddin Başoda

Abstract:

The recent growth of internet applications on hospitality and tourism provokes on-line consumer comments and reviews. Many researchers and practitioners have named this enormous potential as “e-WOM (electronic word of mouth)”. Travel comments are important experiential information for the potential travellers. Many researches have been conducted to analyse the effects of e-WOM on hotel consumers. Broadly quantitative methods have been used for analysing online comments. But, a few studies have mentioned about the positive practical aspects of the comments for hotel marketers. The study aims to show different usage and effects of hotel consumers’ comments. As qualitative analysis method, grounded theory, content and discourse analysis, were used. The data based on the 10 resort hotel consumers’ on-line comments. Results show that consumers tend to write comments about service person, rooms, food services and pool in their online space. These indicators can be used by hotel marketers as a marketing information tool.

Keywords: Comments, E-WOM, hotel consumer, qualitative.

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