Search results for: optically accessible engine
Commenced in January 2007
Frequency: Monthly
Edition: International
Paper Count: 494

Search results for: optically accessible engine

134 The Effect of Failure Rate on Repair and Maintenance Costs of Four Agricultural Tractor Models

Authors: Fatemeh Afsharnia, Mohammad Amin Asoodar, Abbas Abdeshahi

Abstract:

In economical evaluation literature, although the combination of some variables such as repair and maintenance costs and accumulated use hours has been widely considered in determining of optimum life for tractor, no investigation has indicated the influence of failure rate on repair and maintenance costs. In this study, the owners of three hundred tractors, which include Massey Ferguson, John Deere and Universal, were interviewed, from five regions of Khouzestan Province. A regression model was used to predict the tractors annual repair and maintenance costs based on failure rate. Results showed that the maximum percentage of annual repair and maintenance costs occurred in engine parts for MF285, JD3140 and U650 tractors while these costs for tire, ring, ball bearing and operator seat were higher compared to other MF399 tractor systems. According to the results of the regression, the failure rate increase would lead to annual repair and maintenance costs increase for all tractors. But, of all the tractors, repair and maintenance costs of JD3140 tractors extremely affected by the failure rate increase.

Keywords: Failure rate, tractor, annual repair and maintenance costs, regression model, Khouzestan.

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133 Design and Development of Real-Time Optimal Energy Management System for Hybrid Electric Vehicles

Authors: Masood Roohi, Amir Taghavipour

Abstract:

This paper describes a strategy to develop an energy management system (EMS) for a charge-sustaining power-split hybrid electric vehicle. This kind of hybrid electric vehicles (HEVs) benefit from the advantages of both parallel and series architecture. However, it gets relatively more complicated to manage power flow between the battery and the engine optimally. The applied strategy in this paper is based on nonlinear model predictive control approach. First of all, an appropriate control-oriented model which was accurate enough and simple was derived. Towards utilization of this controller in real-time, the problem was solved off-line for a vast area of reference signals and initial conditions and stored the computed manipulated variables inside look-up tables. Look-up tables take a little amount of memory. Also, the computational load dramatically decreased, because to find required manipulated variables the controller just needed a simple interpolation between tables.

Keywords: Hybrid electric vehicles, energy management system, nonlinear model predictive control, real-time.

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132 A Web-Based Self-Learning Grammar for Spoken Language Understanding

Authors: S. M. Biondi, V. Catania, R. Di Natale, A. R. Intilisano, D. Panno

Abstract:

One of the major goals of Spoken Dialog Systems (SDS) is to understand what the user utters. In the SDS domain, the Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) Module classifies user utterances by means of a pre-definite conceptual knowledge. The SLU module is able to recognize only the meaning previously included in its knowledge base. Due the vastity of that knowledge, the information storing is a very expensive process. Updating and managing the knowledge base are time-consuming and error-prone processes because of the rapidly growing number of entities like proper nouns and domain-specific nouns. This paper proposes a solution to the problem of Name Entity Recognition (NER) applied to a SDS domain. The proposed solution attempts to automatically recognize the meaning associated with an utterance by using the PANKOW (Pattern based Annotation through Knowledge On the Web) method at runtime. The method being proposed extracts information from the Web to increase the SLU knowledge module and reduces the development effort. In particular, the Google Search Engine is used to extract information from the Facebook social network.

Keywords: Spoken Dialog System, Spoken Language Understanding, Web Semantic, Name Entity Recognition.

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131 Influence of Machining Process on Surface Integrity of Plasma Coating

Authors: T. Zlámal, J. Petrů, M. Pagáč, P. Krajkovič

Abstract:

For the required function of components with the thermal spray coating, it is necessary to perform additional machining of the coated surface. The paper deals with assessing the surface integrity of Metco 2042, a plasma sprayed coating, after its machining. The selected plasma sprayed coating serves as an abradable sealing coating in a jet engine. Therefore, the spray and its surface must meet high quality and functional requirements. Plasma sprayed coatings are characterized by lamellar structure, which requires a special approach to their machining. Therefore, the experimental part involves the set-up of special cutting tools and cutting parameters under which the applied coating was machined. For the assessment of suitably set machining parameters, selected parameters of surface integrity were measured and evaluated during the experiment. To determine the size of surface irregularities and the effect of the selected machining technology on the sprayed coating surface, the surface roughness parameters Ra and Rz were measured. Furthermore, the measurement of sprayed coating surface hardness by the HR 15 Y method before and after machining process was used to determine the surface strengthening. The changes of strengthening were detected after the machining. The impact of chosen cutting parameters on the surface roughness after the machining was not proven.

Keywords: Machining, plasma sprayed coating, surface integrity, strengthening.

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130 Knowledge Reactor: A Contextual Computing Work in Progress for Eldercare

Authors: Scott N. Gerard, Aliza Heching, Susann M. Keohane, Samuel S. Adams

Abstract:

The world-wide population of people over 60 years of age is growing rapidly. The explosion is placing increasingly onerous demands on individual families, multiple industries and entire countries. Current, human-intensive approaches to eldercare are not sustainable, but IoT and AI technologies can help. The Knowledge Reactor (KR) is a contextual, data fusion engine built to address this and other similar problems. It fuses and centralizes IoT and System of Record/Engagement data into a reactive knowledge graph. Cognitive applications and services are constructed with its multiagent architecture. The KR can scale-up and scaledown, because it exploits container-based, horizontally scalable services for graph store (JanusGraph) and pub-sub (Kafka) technologies. While the KR can be applied to many domains that require IoT and AI technologies, this paper describes how the KR specifically supports the challenging domain of cognitive eldercare. Rule- and machine learning-based analytics infer activities of daily living from IoT sensor readings. KR scalability, adaptability, flexibility and usability are demonstrated.

Keywords: Ambient sensing, AI, artificial intelligence, eldercare, IoT, internet of things, knowledge graph.

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129 Generic Workload Management System Using Condor-Based Pilot Factory in PanDA Framework

Authors: Po-Hsiang Chiu, Torre Wenaus

Abstract:

In the current Grid environment, efficient workload management presents a significant challenge, for which there are exorbitant de facto standards encompassing resource discovery, brokerage, and data transfer, among others. In addition, the real-time resource status, essential for an optimal resource allocation strategy, is often not readily accessible. To address these issues and provide a cleaner abstraction of the Grid with the potential of generalizing into arbitrary resource-sharing environment, this paper proposes a new Condor-based pilot mechanism applied in the PanDA architecture, PanDA-PF WMS, with the goal of providing a more generic yet efficient resource allocating strategy. In this architecture, the PanDA server primarily acts as a repository of user jobs, responding to pilot requests from distributed, remote resources. Scheduling decisions are subsequently made according to the real-time resource information reported by pilots. Pilot Factory is a Condor-inspired solution for a scalable pilot dissemination and effectively functions as a resource provisioning mechanism through which the user-job server, PanDA, reaches out to the candidate resources only on demand.

Keywords: Condor, glidein, PanDA, Pilot, Pilot Factory.

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128 An Information Theoretic Approach to Rescoring Peptides Produced by De Novo Peptide Sequencing

Authors: John R. Rose, James P. Cleveland, Alvin Fox

Abstract:

Tandem mass spectrometry (MS/MS) is the engine driving high-throughput protein identification. Protein mixtures possibly representing thousands of proteins from multiple species are treated with proteolytic enzymes, cutting the proteins into smaller peptides that are then analyzed generating MS/MS spectra. The task of determining the identity of the peptide from its spectrum is currently the weak point in the process. Current approaches to de novo sequencing are able to compute candidate peptides efficiently. The problem lies in the limitations of current scoring functions. In this paper we introduce the concept of proteome signature. By examining proteins and compiling proteome signatures (amino acid usage) it is possible to characterize likely combinations of amino acids and better distinguish between candidate peptides. Our results strongly support the hypothesis that a scoring function that considers amino acid usage patterns is better able to distinguish between candidate peptides. This in turn leads to higher accuracy in peptide prediction.

Keywords: Tandem mass spectrometry, proteomics, scoring, peptide, de novo, mutual information

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127 A Functional Thermochemical Energy Storage System for Mobile Applications: Design and Performance Analysis

Authors: Jure Galović, Peter Hofmann

Abstract:

Thermochemical energy storage (TCES), as a long-term and lossless energy storage principle, provides a contribution for the reduction of greenhouse emissions of mobile applications, such as passenger vehicles with an internal combustion engine. A prototype of a TCES system, based on reversible sorption reactions of LiBr composite and methanol has been designed at Vienna University of Technology. In this paper, the selection of reactive and inert carrier materials as well as the design of heat exchangers (reactor vessel and evapo-condenser) was reviewed and the cycle stability under real operating conditions was investigated. The performance of the developed system strongly depends on the environmental temperatures, to which the reactor vessel and evapo-condenser are exposed during the phases of thermal conversion. For an integration of the system into mobile applications, the functionality of the designed prototype was proved in numerous conducted cycles whereby no adverse reactions were observed.

Keywords: Mobile applications, LiBr composite, methanol, performance of TCES system, sorption process, thermochemical energy storage.

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126 Using the Semantic Web in Ubiquitous and Mobile Computing: the Morfeo Experience

Authors: José M. Cantera, Miguel Jiménez, Genoveva López, Javier Soriano

Abstract:

With the advent of emerging personal computing paradigms such as ubiquitous and mobile computing, Web contents are becoming accessible from a wide range of mobile devices. Since these devices do not have the same rendering capabilities, Web contents need to be adapted for transparent access from a variety of client agents. Such content adaptation results in better rendering and faster delivery to the client device. Nevertheless, Web content adaptation sets new challenges for semantic markup. This paper presents an advanced components platform, called MorfeoSMC, enabling the development of mobility applications and services according to a channel model based on Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) principles. It then goes on to describe the potential for integration with the Semantic Web through a novel framework of external semantic annotation of mobile Web contents. The role of semantic annotation in this framework is to describe the contents of individual documents themselves, assuring the preservation of the semantics during the process of adapting content rendering, as well as to exploit these semantic annotations in a novel user profile-aware content adaptation process. Semantic Web content adaptation is a way of adding value to and facilitates repurposing of Web contents (enhanced browsing, Web Services location and access, etc).

Keywords: Semantic web, ubiquitous and mobile computing, web content transcoding, semantic markup, mobile computing middleware and services.

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125 Design and Testing of Nanotechnology Based Sequential Circuits Using MX-CQCA Logic in VHDL

Authors: K. Maria Agnes, J. Joshua Bapu

Abstract:

This paper impart the design and testing of Nanotechnology based sequential circuits using multiplexer conservative QCA (MX-CQCA) logic gates, which is easily testable using only two vectors. This method has great prospective in the design of sequential circuits based on reversible conservative logic gates and also smashes the sequential circuits implemented in traditional gates in terms of testability. Reversible circuits are similar to usual logic circuits except that they are built from reversible gates. Designs of multiplexer conservative QCA logic based two vectors testable double edge triggered (DET) sequential circuits in VHDL language are also accessible here; it will also diminish intricacy in testing side. Also other types of sequential circuits such as D, SR, JK latches are designed using this MX-CQCA logic gate. The objective behind the proposed design methodologies is to amalgamate arithmetic and logic functional units optimizing key metrics such as garbage outputs, delay, area and power. The projected MX-CQCA gate outshines other reversible gates in terms of the intricacy, delay.

Keywords: Conservative logic, Double edge triggered (DET) flip flop, majority voters, MX-CQCA gate, reversible logic, Quantum dot Cellular automata.

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124 Design Criteria Recommendation to Achieve Accessibility In-house to Different Users

Authors: C. Valderrama-Ulloa, C. Schmitt, J.-P. Marchetti, V. Bucarey

Abstract:

Access to adequate housing is a fundamental human right and a crucial factor for health. Housing should be inclusive, accessible, and able to meet the needs of all its inhabitants at every stage of their lives without hindering their health, autonomy, or independence. This article addresses the importance of designing housing for people with disabilities, which varies depending on individual abilities, preferences, and cultural considerations. Based on the components of the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health, wheelchair users, little people (achondroplasia), children with autism spectrum disorder and Down syndrome were characterized, and six domains of activities related to daily life inside homes were defined. The article describes the main barriers homes present for this group of people. It proposes a list of architectural and design aspects to reduce barriers to housing use. The aspects are divided into three main groups: space management, building services, and supporting facilities. The article emphasizes the importance of consulting professionals and users with experience designing for diverse needs to create inclusive, safe, and supportive housing for people with disabilities.

Keywords: Achondroplasia, autism spectrum disorder, disability, down syndrome, wheelchair user.

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123 Design of a Service-Enabled Dependable Integration Environment

Authors: Fuyang Peng, Donghong Li

Abstract:

The aim of information systems integration is to make all the data sources, applications and business flows integrated into the new environment so that unwanted redundancies are reduced and bottlenecks and mismatches are eliminated. Two issues have to be dealt with to meet such requirements: the software architecture that supports resource integration, and the adaptor development tool that help integration and migration of legacy applications. In this paper, a service-enabled dependable integration environment (SDIE), is presented, which has two key components, i.e., a dependable service integration platform and a legacy application integration tool. For the dependable platform for service integration, the service integration bus, the service management framework, the dependable engine for service composition, and the service registry and discovery components are described. For the legacy application integration tool, its basic organization, functionalities and dependable measures taken are presented. Due to its service-oriented integration model, the light-weight extensible container, the service component combination-oriented p-lattice structure, and other features, SDIE has advantages in openness, flexibility, performance-price ratio and feature support over commercial products, is better than most of the open source integration software in functionality, performance and dependability support.

Keywords: Application integration, dependability, legacy, SOA.

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122 Malicious Route Defending Reliable-Data Transmission Scheme for Multi Path Routing in Wireless Network

Authors: S. Raja Ratna, R. Ravi

Abstract:

Securing the confidential data transferred via wireless network remains a challenging problem. It is paramount to ensure that data are accessible only by the legitimate users rather than by the attackers. One of the most serious threats to organization is jamming, which disrupts the communication between any two pairs of nodes. Therefore, designing an attack-defending scheme without any packet loss in data transmission is an important challenge. In this paper, Dependence based Malicious Route Defending DMRD Scheme has been proposed in multi path routing environment to prevent jamming attack. The key idea is to defend the malicious route to ensure perspicuous transmission. This scheme develops a two layered architecture and it operates in two different steps. In the first step, possible routes are captured and their agent dependence values are marked using triple agents. In the second step, the dependence values are compared by performing comparator filtering to detect malicious route as well as to identify a reliable route for secured data transmission. By simulation studies, it is observed that the proposed scheme significantly identifies malicious route by attaining lower delay time and route discovery time; it also achieves higher throughput.

Keywords: Attacker, Dependence, Jamming, Malicious.

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121 Online Brands: A Comparative Study of World Top Ranked Universities with Science and Technology Programs

Authors: Zullina H. Shaari, Amzairi Amar, Abdul Mutalib Embong, Hezlina Hashim

Abstract:

University websites are considered as one of the brand primary touch points for multiple stakeholders, but most of them did not have great designs to create favorable impressions. Some of the elements that web designers should carefully consider are the appearance, the content, the functionality, usability and search engine optimization. However, priority should be placed on website simplicity and negative space. In terms of content, previous research suggests that universities should include reputation, learning environment, graduate career prospects, image destination, cultural integration, and virtual tour on their websites. The study examines how top 200 world ranking science and technology-based universities present their brands online and whether the websites capture the content dimensions. Content analysis of the websites revealed that the top ranking universities captured these dimensions at varying degree. Besides, the UK-based university had better priority on website simplicity and negative space compared to the Malaysian-based university.

Keywords: Science and technology programs, top-ranked universities, online brands, university websites.

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120 Pollution Control and Sustainable Urban Transport System - Electric Vehicle

Authors: M.M. Al Emran Hasan, M.Ektesabi, A.Kapoor

Abstract:

Recently electric vehicles are becoming popular as an alternative of conventional fossil fuel vehicles. Conventional Internal Combustion Engine (ICE) vehicle uses fossil fuel which contributing a major part of overall carbon emission in the environment. Carbon and other green house gas emission are responsible for global warming and resulting climate change. It becomes vital to evaluate performance of vehicle based on emission. In this paper an effort has been made to depict the picture of emission caused by vehicle and scenario of Australia has taken into account. Effort has been made to compare the fossil based vehicle with electric vehicle in phases. The study also evaluates advancement in electric vehicle technology, required infrastructure for sustainability and future scope of developments. This paper also includes the evaluation of electric vehicle concept for pollution control and sustainable transport systems in future. This study can be a benchmark for development of electric vehicle as low carbon emission alternative for the cities of tomorrow.

Keywords: Electric Vehicle, Fossil Fuel, Internal CombustionEngine, Green House Gas, In wheel motor, Smart grid

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119 An Ontology Based Question Answering System on Software Test Document Domain

Authors: Meltem Serhatli, Ferda N. Alpaslan

Abstract:

Processing the data by computers and performing reasoning tasks is an important aim in Computer Science. Semantic Web is one step towards it. The use of ontologies to enhance the information by semantically is the current trend. Huge amount of domain specific, unstructured on-line data needs to be expressed in machine understandable and semantically searchable format. Currently users are often forced to search manually in the results returned by the keyword-based search services. They also want to use their native languages to express what they search. In this paper, an ontology-based automated question answering system on software test documents domain is presented. The system allows users to enter a question about the domain by means of natural language and returns exact answer of the questions. Conversion of the natural language question into the ontology based query is the challenging part of the system. To be able to achieve this, a new algorithm regarding free text to ontology based search engine query conversion is proposed. The algorithm is based on investigation of suitable question type and parsing the words of the question sentence.

Keywords: Description Logics, ontology, question answering, reasoning.

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118 Geometric Simplification Method of Building Energy Model Based on Building Performance Simulation

Authors: Yan Lyu, Yiqun Pan, Zhizhong Huang

Abstract:

In the design stage of a new building, the energy model of this building is often required for the analysis of the performance on energy efficiency. In practice, a certain degree of geometric simplification should be done in the establishment of building energy models, since the detailed geometric features of a real building are hard to be described perfectly in most energy simulation engine, such as ESP-r, eQuest or EnergyPlus. Actually, the detailed description is not necessary when the result with extremely high accuracy is not demanded. Therefore, this paper analyzed the relationship between the error of the simulation result from building energy models and the geometric simplification of the models. Finally, the following two parameters are selected as the indices to characterize the geometric feature of in building energy simulation: the southward projected area and total side surface area of the building. Based on the parameterization method, the simplification from an arbitrary column building to a typical shape (a cuboid) building can be made for energy modeling. The result in this study indicates that no more than 7% prediction error of annual cooling/heating load will be caused by the geometric simplification for those buildings with the ratio of southward projection length to total perimeter of the bottom of 0.25~0.35, which means this method is applicable for building performance simulation.

Keywords: building energy model, simulation, geometric simplification, design, regression

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117 Reducing Weight and Fuel Consumption of Civil Aircraft by EML

Authors: L. Bertola, T. Cox, P. Wheeler, S. Garvey, H. Morvan

Abstract:

Electromagnetic Launch (EML) systems have been proposed for military applications to accelerate jet planes on aircraft carriers. This paper proposes the implementation of similar technology to aid civil aircraft take-off, which can provide significant economic, environmental and technical benefits. Assisted launch has the potential of reducing on ground noise and emissions near airports and improving overall aircraft efficiency through reducing engine thrust requirements. This paper presents a take-off performance analysis for an Airbus A320-200 taking off with and without the assistance of the electromagnetic catapult. Assisted take-off allows for a significant reduction in take-off field length, giving more capacity with existing airport footprints and reducing the necessary footprint of new airports, which will both reduce costs and increase the number of suitable sites. The electromagnetic catapult may allow the installation of smaller engines with lower rated thrust. The consequent fuel consumption and operational cost reduction is estimated. The potential of reducing the aircraft operational costs and the runway length required make EML system an attractive solution to the air traffic growth in busy airports.

Keywords: EML system, fuel consumption, take-off analysis, weight reduction.

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116 Effect of Atmospheric Pressure on the Flow at the Outlet of a Propellant Nozzle

Authors: R. Haoui

Abstract:

The purpose of this work is to simulate the flow at the exit of Vulcan 1 engine of European launcher Ariane 5. The geometry of the propellant nozzle is already determined using the characteristics method. The pressure in the outlet section of the nozzle is less than atmospheric pressure on the ground, causing the existence of oblique and normal shock waves at the exit. During the rise of the launcher, the atmospheric pressure decreases and the shock wave disappears. The code allows the capture of shock wave at exit of nozzle. The numerical technique uses the Flux Vector Splitting method of Van Leer to ensure convergence and avoid the calculation instabilities. The Courant, Friedrichs and Lewy coefficient (CFL) and mesh size level are selected to ensure the numerical convergence. The nonlinear partial derivative equations system which governs this flow is solved by an explicit unsteady numerical scheme by the finite volume method. The accuracy of the solution depends on the size of the mesh and also the step of time used in the discretized equations. We have chosen in this study the mesh that gives us a stationary solution with good accuracy.

Keywords: Launchers, supersonic flow, finite volume, nozzles, shock wave.

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115 Adsorptive Waste Heat Based Air-Conditioning Control Strategy for Automotives

Authors: Indrasen Raghupatruni, Michael Glora, Ralf Diekmann, Thomas Demmer

Abstract:

As the trend in automotive technology is fast moving towards hybridization and electrification to curb emissions as well as to improve the fuel efficiency, air-conditioning systems in passenger cars have not caught up with this trend and still remain as the major energy consumers amongst others. Adsorption based air-conditioning systems, e.g. with silica-gel water pair, which are already in use for residential and commercial applications, are now being considered as a technology leap once proven feasible for the passenger cars. In this paper we discuss a methodology, challenges and feasibility of implementing an adsorption based air-conditioning system in a passenger car utilizing the exhaust waste heat. We also propose an optimized control strategy with interfaces to the engine control unit of the vehicle for operating this system with reasonable efficiency supported by our simulation and validation results in a prototype vehicle, additionally comparing to existing implementations, simulation based as well as experimental. Finally we discuss the influence of start-stop and hybrid systems on the operation strategy of the adsorption air-conditioning system.

Keywords: Adsorption air-conditioning, feasibility study, optimized control strategy, prototype vehicle.

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114 Food Security in Nigeria: An Examination of Food Availability and Accessibility in Nigeria

Authors: Chimaobi Valentine Okolo, Chizoba Obidigbo

Abstract:

As a basic physiology need, threat to sufficient food production is threat to human survival. Food security has been an issue that has gained global concern. This paper looks at the food security in Nigeria by assessing the availability of food and accessibility of the available food. The paper employed multiple linear regression technique and graphic trends of growth rates of relevant variables to show the situation of food security in Nigeria. Results of the tests revealed that population growth rate was higher than the growth rate of food availability in Nigeria for the earlier period of the study. Commercial bank credit to agricultural sector, foreign exchange utilization for food and the Agricultural Credit Guarantee Scheme Fund (ACGSF) contributed significantly to food availability in Nigeria. Food prices grew at a faster rate than the average income level, making it difficult to access sufficient food. It implies that prior to the year 2012; there was insufficient food to feed the Nigerian populace. However, continued credit to the food and agricultural sector will ensure sustained and sufficient production of food in Nigeria. Microfinance banks should make sufficient credit available to smallholder farmer. Government should further control and subsidize the rising price of food to make it more accessible by the people.

Keywords: Food security, food availability and food accessibility.

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113 Looking for a Favorable Central Place for the Establishment of Educational and Health Care Centre to Equally Facilitate Both Genders in Taluka Kunri of District Umerkot, Sindh, Pakistan

Authors: Muhammad Liaquat Ali, Nasir-uddin Khan, Mushtaq Hussain, Asif Mansoor, Muhammad Shahid

Abstract:

Population in rural areas are scattered in the form of different villages or settlements. The proper selection of land to launch any educational or health activities to equally facilitate both the genders is the sticky situation, both for Govt. and Private organizations. Govt. spends substantial funds for the establishment of education institution/health centre at the place which is feasible and accessible to general public. However for specific gender, the gender population is also considered so that both the gender may be benefited equally. In this research, efforts have been made to illustrate how one can choose or locate the best central place/ area in Taluka Kunri of district Umerkot Sindh Pakistan where the Educational or Health activity is to be initiated. For the purpose the concept of centre of mass theorem is used as a tool to develop mathematical model, subsequently utilize in achieving the objectives.

Keywords: Centre of mass theorem, Establishment of technical/ vocational/ health care centre, Gender population of taluka Kunri of District Umerkot, Graphical interpretation of town committee/villages.

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112 Grouping and Indexing Color Features for Efficient Image Retrieval

Authors: M. V. Sudhamani, C. R. Venugopal

Abstract:

Content-based Image Retrieval (CBIR) aims at searching image databases for specific images that are similar to a given query image based on matching of features derived from the image content. This paper focuses on a low-dimensional color based indexing technique for achieving efficient and effective retrieval performance. In our approach, the color features are extracted using the mean shift algorithm, a robust clustering technique. Then the cluster (region) mode is used as representative of the image in 3-D color space. The feature descriptor consists of the representative color of a region and is indexed using a spatial indexing method that uses *R -tree thus avoiding the high-dimensional indexing problems associated with the traditional color histogram. Alternatively, the images in the database are clustered based on region feature similarity using Euclidian distance. Only representative (centroids) features of these clusters are indexed using *R -tree thus improving the efficiency. For similarity retrieval, each representative color in the query image or region is used independently to find regions containing that color. The results of these methods are compared. A JAVA based query engine supporting query-by- example is built to retrieve images by color.

Keywords: Content-based, indexing, cluster, region.

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111 Health Monitoring and Failure Detection of Electronic and Structural Components in Small Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

Authors: Gopi Kandaswamy, P. Balamuralidhar

Abstract:

Fully autonomous small Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are increasingly being used in many commercial applications. Although a lot of research has been done to develop safe, reliable and durable UAVs, accidents due to electronic and structural failures are not uncommon and pose a huge safety risk to the UAV operators and the public. Hence there is a strong need for an automated health monitoring system for UAVs with a view to minimizing mission failures thereby increasing safety. This paper describes our approach to monitoring the electronic and structural components in a small UAV without the need for additional sensors to do the monitoring. Our system monitors data from four sources; sensors, navigation algorithms, control inputs from the operator and flight controller outputs. It then does statistical analysis on the data and applies a rule based engine to detect failures. This information can then be fed back into the UAV and a decision to continue or abort the mission can be taken automatically by the UAV and independent of the operator. Our system has been verified using data obtained from real flights over the past year from UAVs of various sizes that have been designed and deployed by us for various applications.

Keywords: Fault detection, health monitoring, unmanned aerial vehicles, vibration analysis.

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110 Intelligent Mobile Search Oriented to Global e-Commerce

Authors: Abdelkader Dekdouk

Abstract:

In this paper we propose a novel approach for searching eCommerce products using a mobile phone, illustrated by a prototype eCoMobile. This approach aims to globalize the mobile search by integrating the concept of user multilinguism into it. To show that, we particularly deal with English and Arabic languages. Indeed the mobile user can formulate his query on a commercial product in either language (English/Arabic). The description of his information need on commercial products relies on the ontology that represents the conceptualization of the product catalogue knowledge domain defined in both English and Arabic languages. A query expressed on a mobile device client defines the concept that corresponds to the name of the product followed by a set of pairs (property, value) specifying the characteristics of the product. Once a query is submitted it is then communicated to the server side which analyses it and in its turn performs an http request to an eCommerce application server (like Amazon). This latter responds by returning an XML file representing a set of elements where each element defines an item of the searched product with its specific characteristics. The XML file is analyzed on the server side and then items are displayed on the mobile device client along with its relevant characteristics in the chosen language.

Keywords: Mobile computing, search engine, multilingualglobal eCommerce, ontology, XML.

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109 An Investigation on Hybrid Composite Drive Shaft for Automotive Industry

Authors: Gizem Arslan Özgen, Kutay Yücetürk, Metin Tanoğlu, Engin Aktaş

Abstract:

Power transmitted from the engine to the final drive where useful work is applied through a system consisting of a gearbox, clutch, drive shaft and a differential in the rear-wheel-drive automobiles. It is well-known that the steel drive shaft is usually manufactured in two pieces to increase the fundamental bending natural frequency to ensure safe operation conditions. In this work, hybrid one-piece propeller shafts composed of carbon/epoxy and glass/epoxy composites have been designed for a rear wheel drive automobile satisfying three design specifications, such as static torque transmission capability, torsional buckling and the fundamental natural bending frequency. Hybridization of carbon and glass fibers is being studied to optimize the cost/performance requirements. Composites shaft materials with various fiber orientation angles and stacking sequences are being fabricated and analyzed using finite element analysis (FEA).

Keywords: Composite propeller shaft, hybridization, epoxy matrix, static torque transmission capability, torsional buckling strength, fundamental natural bending frequency.

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108 Numerical Simulation of Supersonic Gas Jet Flows and Acoustics Fields

Authors: Lei Zhang, Wen-jun Ruan, Hao Wang, Peng-xin Wang

Abstract:

The source of the jet noise is generated by rocket exhaust plume during rocket engine testing. A domain decomposition approach is applied to the jet noise prediction in this paper. The aerodynamic noise coupling is based on the splitting into acoustic sources generation and sound propagation in separate physical domains. Large Eddy Simulation (LES) is used to simulate the supersonic jet flow. Based on the simulation results of the flow-fields, the jet noise distribution of the sound pressure level is obtained by applying the Ffowcs Williams-Hawkings (FW-H) acoustics equation and Fourier transform. The calculation results show that the complex structures of expansion waves, compression waves and the turbulent boundary layer could occur due to the strong interaction between the gas jet and the ambient air. In addition, the jet core region, the shock cell and the sound pressure level of the gas jet increase with the nozzle size increasing. Importantly, the numerical simulation results of the far-field sound are in good agreement with the experimental measurements in directivity.

Keywords: Supersonic gas jet, Large Eddy Simulation(LES), acoustic noise, Ffowcs Williams-Hawkings (FW-H) equations, nozzle size.

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107 Geovisualization of Tourist Activity Travel Patterns Using 3D GIS: An Empirical Study of Tamsui, Taiwan

Authors: Meng-Lung Lin, Chien-Min Chu, Chung-Hung Tsai, Chih-Cheng Chen, Chen-Yuan Chen

Abstract:

The study of tourist activities and the mapping of their routes in space and time has become an important issue in tourism management. Here we represent space-time paths for the tourism industry by visualizing individual tourist activities and the paths followed using a 3D Geographic Information System (GIS). Considerable attention has been devoted to the measurement of accessibility to shopping, eating, walking and other services at the tourist destination. I turns out that GIS is a useful tool for studying the spatial behaviors of tourists in the area. The value of GIS is especially advantageous for space-time potential path area measures, especially for the accurate visualization of possible paths through existing city road networks. This study seeks to apply space-time concepts with a detailed street network map obtained from Google Maps to measure tourist paths both spatially and temporally. These paths are further determined based on data obtained from map questionnaires regarding the trip activities of 40 individuals. The analysis of the data makes it possible to determining the locations of the more popular paths. The results can be visualized using 3D GIS to show the areas and potential activity opportunities accessible to tourists during their travel time.

Keywords: Tourist activity analysis, space-time path, GIS, geovisualization, activity-travel pattern.

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106 Incorporating Semantic Similarity Measure in Genetic Algorithm : An Approach for Searching the Gene Ontology Terms

Authors: Razib M. Othman, Safaai Deris, Rosli M. Illias, Hany T. Alashwal, Rohayanti Hassan, FarhanMohamed

Abstract:

The most important property of the Gene Ontology is the terms. These control vocabularies are defined to provide consistent descriptions of gene products that are shareable and computationally accessible by humans, software agent, or other machine-readable meta-data. Each term is associated with information such as definition, synonyms, database references, amino acid sequences, and relationships to other terms. This information has made the Gene Ontology broadly applied in microarray and proteomic analysis. However, the process of searching the terms is still carried out using traditional approach which is based on keyword matching. The weaknesses of this approach are: ignoring semantic relationships between terms, and highly depending on a specialist to find similar terms. Therefore, this study combines semantic similarity measure and genetic algorithm to perform a better retrieval process for searching semantically similar terms. The semantic similarity measure is used to compute similitude strength between two terms. Then, the genetic algorithm is employed to perform batch retrievals and to handle the situation of the large search space of the Gene Ontology graph. The computational results are presented to show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.

Keywords: Gene Ontology, Semantic similarity measure, Genetic algorithm, Ontology search

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105 Small Businesses as Vehicles for Job Creation in North-West Nigeria

Authors: Mustapha Shitu Suleiman, Francis Neshamba, Nestor Valero-Silva

Abstract:

Small businesses are considered as engine of economic growth, contributing to employment generation, wealth creation, and poverty alleviation and food security in both developed and developing countries. Nigeria is facing many socio-economic problems and it is believed that by supporting small business development, as propellers of new ideas and more effective users of resources, often driven by individual creativity and innovation, Nigeria would be able to address some of its economic and social challenges, such as unemployment and economic diversification. Using secondary literature, this paper examines the role small businesses can play in the creation of jobs in North-West Nigeria to overcome issues of unemployment, which is the most devastating economic challenge facing the region. Most studies in this area have focused on Nigeria as a whole and only a few studies provide a regional focus, hence, this study will contribute to knowledge by filling this gap by concentrating on North-West Nigeria. It is hoped that with the present administration’s determination to improve the economy, small businesses would be used as vehicles for diversification of the economy away from crude oil to create jobs that would lead to a reduction in the country’s high unemployment level.

Keywords: Job creation, North-West Nigeria, small business, unemployment.

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