Search results for: Decision Support System.
4179 An FPGA Implementation of Intelligent Visual Based Fall Detection
Authors: Peng Shen Ong, Yoong Choon Chang, Chee Pun Ooi, Ettikan K. Karuppiah, Shahirina Mohd Tahir
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Falling has been one of the major concerns and threats to the independence of the elderly in their daily lives. With the worldwide significant growth of the aging population, it is essential to have a promising solution of fall detection which is able to operate at high accuracy in real-time and supports large scale implementation using multiple cameras. Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) is a highly promising tool to be used as a hardware accelerator in many emerging embedded vision based system. Thus, it is the main objective of this paper to present an FPGA-based solution of visual based fall detection to meet stringent real-time requirements with high accuracy. The hardware architecture of visual based fall detection which utilizes the pixel locality to reduce memory accesses is proposed. By exploiting the parallel and pipeline architecture of FPGA, our hardware implementation of visual based fall detection using FGPA is able to achieve a performance of 60fps for a series of video analytical functions at VGA resolutions (640x480). The results of this work show that FPGA has great potentials and impacts in enabling large scale vision system in the future healthcare industry due to its flexibility and scalability.Keywords: Fall detection, FPGA, hardware implementation.
Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 24724178 Vision-Based Collision Avoidance for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles by Recurrent Neural Networks
Authors: Yao-Hong Tsai
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Due to the sensor technology, video surveillance has become the main way for security control in every big city in the world. Surveillance is usually used by governments for intelligence gathering, the prevention of crime, the protection of a process, person, group or object, or the investigation of crime. Many surveillance systems based on computer vision technology have been developed in recent years. Moving target tracking is the most common task for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) to find and track objects of interest in mobile aerial surveillance for civilian applications. The paper is focused on vision-based collision avoidance for UAVs by recurrent neural networks. First, images from cameras on UAV were fused based on deep convolutional neural network. Then, a recurrent neural network was constructed to obtain high-level image features for object tracking and extracting low-level image features for noise reducing. The system distributed the calculation of the whole system to local and cloud platform to efficiently perform object detection, tracking and collision avoidance based on multiple UAVs. The experiments on several challenging datasets showed that the proposed algorithm outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.Keywords: Unmanned aerial vehicle, object tracking, deep learning, collision avoidance.
Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 9644177 Developing an Advanced Algorithm Capable of Classifying News, Articles and Other Textual Documents Using Text Mining Techniques
Authors: R. B. Knudsen, O. T. Rasmussen, R. A. Alphinas
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The reason for conducting this research is to develop an algorithm that is capable of classifying news articles from the automobile industry, according to the competitive actions that they entail, with the use of Text Mining (TM) methods. It is needed to test how to properly preprocess the data for this research by preparing pipelines which fits each algorithm the best. The pipelines are tested along with nine different classification algorithms in the realm of regression, support vector machines, and neural networks. Preliminary testing for identifying the optimal pipelines and algorithms resulted in the selection of two algorithms with two different pipelines. The two algorithms are Logistic Regression (LR) and Artificial Neural Network (ANN). These algorithms are optimized further, where several parameters of each algorithm are tested. The best result is achieved with the ANN. The final model yields an accuracy of 0.79, a precision of 0.80, a recall of 0.78, and an F1 score of 0.76. By removing three of the classes that created noise, the final algorithm is capable of reaching an accuracy of 94%.
Keywords: Artificial neural network, competitive dynamics, logistic regression, text classification, text mining.
Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 5474176 A Comparative Study of SVM Classifiers and Artificial Neural Networks Application for Rolling Element Bearing Fault Diagnosis using Wavelet Transform Preprocessing
Authors: Commander Sunil Tyagi
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Effectiveness of Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) and Support Vector Machines (SVM) classifiers for fault diagnosis of rolling element bearings are presented in this paper. The characteristic features of vibration signals of rotating driveline that was run in its normal condition and with faults introduced were used as input to ANN and SVM classifiers. Simple statistical features such as standard deviation, skewness, kurtosis etc. of the time-domain vibration signal segments along with peaks of the signal and peak of power spectral density (PSD) are used as features to input the ANN and SVM classifier. The effect of preprocessing of the vibration signal by Discreet Wavelet Transform (DWT) prior to feature extraction is also studied. It is shown from the experimental results that the performance of SVM classifier in identification of bearing condition is better then ANN and pre-processing of vibration signal by DWT enhances the effectiveness of both ANN and SVM classifierKeywords: ANN, Artificial Intelligence, Fault Diagnosis, Pattern Recognition, Rolling Element Bearing, SVM. Wavelet Transform
Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 21284175 Estimation of the Drought Index Based on the Climatic Projections of Precipitation of the Uruguay River Basin
Authors: José Leandro Melgar Néris, Claudinéia Brazil, Luciane Teresa Salvi, Isabel Cristina Damin
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The impact the climate change is not recent, the main variable in the hydrological cycle is the sequence and shortage of a drought, which has a significant impact on the socioeconomic, agricultural and environmental spheres. This study aims to characterize and quantify, based on precipitation climatic projections, the rainy and dry events in the region of the Uruguay River Basin, through the Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI). The database is the image that is part of the Intercomparison of Model Models, Phase 5 (CMIP5), which provides condition prediction models, organized according to the Representative Routes of Concentration (CPR). Compared to the normal set of climates in the Uruguay River Watershed through precipitation projections, seasonal precipitation increases for all proposed scenarios, with a low climate trend. From the data of this research, the idea is that this article can be used to support research and the responsible bodies can use it as a subsidy for mitigation measures in other hydrographic basins.
Keywords: Drought index, climatic projections, precipitation of the Uruguay River Basin, Standardized Precipitation Index.
Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 6094174 The Technological Problem of Simulation of the Logistics Center
Authors: Juraj Camaj, Anna Dolinayova, Jana Lalinska, Miroslav Bariak
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Planning of infrastructure and processes in logistic center within the frame of various kinds of logistic hubs and technological activities in them represent quite complex problem. The main goal is to design appropriate layout, which enables to realize expected operation on the desired levels. The simulation software represents progressive contemporary experimental technique, which can support complex processes of infrastructure planning and all of activities on it. It means that simulation experiments, reflecting various planned infrastructure variants, investigate and verify their eligibilities in relation with corresponding expected operation. The inducted approach enables to make qualified decisions about infrastructure investments or measures, which derive benefit from simulation-based verifications. The paper represents simulation software for simulation infrastructural layout and technological activities in marshalling yard, intermodal terminal, warehouse and combination between them as the parts of logistic center.
Keywords: Marshalling yard, intermodal terminal, warehouse, transport technology, simulation.
Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 25364173 The Impact of Bank Consolidation on Lending to SMES in Nigeria
Authors: Chimaobi Valentine Okolo
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This paper seeks to assess the implications of bank consolidation on lending, which largely determine the survival and performance of small and medium scale enterprises and in turn the development of the Nigerian economy. Ordinary least square technique, correlation matrix test and Granger –causality test were employed to measure the extent to which lending to small and medium scale enterprises were influenced. The result showed that bank deposit (BD) impacted on lending to small and medium scale enterprises. Commercial and merchant bank lending rate had statistically insignificant effect on the dependent variable. There is a shift of focus by commercial banks from small and medium scale enterprises (small customers) to major investors (big customers). While micro finance banks work hard at providing funds to small and medium scale entrepreneurs, their capacity to meet the needs of these entrepreneurs is constrained. The capital and deposits of micro finance bank should be boosted in order to effectively support small and medium scale enterprises through loans.Keywords: Asset size, bank consolidation, lending, small and medium enterprises.
Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 27754172 Personas Help Understand Users’ Needs, Goals and Desires in an Online Institutional Repository
Authors: Maha ALjohani, James Blustein
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Communicating users' needs, goals and problems help designers and developers overcome challenges faced by end users. Personas are used to represent end users’ needs. In our research, creating personas allowed the following questions to be answered: Who are the potential user groups? What do they want to achieve by using the service? What are the problems that users face? What should the service provide to them? To develop realistic personas, we conducted a focus group discussion with undergraduate and graduate students and also interviewed a university librarian. The personas were created to help evaluating the Institutional Repository that is based on the DSpace system. The profiles helped to communicate users' needs, abilities, tasks, and problems, and the task scenarios used in the heuristic evaluation were based on these personas. Four personas resulted of a focus group discussion with undergraduate and graduate students and from interviewing a university librarian. We then used these personas to create focused task-scenarios for a heuristic evaluation on the system interface to ensure that it met users' needs, goals, problems and desires. In this paper, we present the process that we used to create the personas that led to devise the task scenarios used in the heuristic evaluation as a follow up study of the DSpace university repository.Keywords: Heuristic Evaluation, Institutional Repositories, User Experience, Human Computer Interaction, User Profiles, Personas, Task Scenarios, Heuristics.
Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 21744171 Development of New Control Techniques for Vibration Isolation of Structures using Smart Materials
Authors: Shubha P Bhat, Krishnamurthy, T.C.Manjunath, C. Ardil
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In this paper, the effects of the restoring force device on the response of a space frame structure resting on sliding type of bearing with a restoring force device is studied. The NS component of the El - Centro earthquake and harmonic ground acceleration is considered for earthquake excitation. The structure is modeled by considering six-degrees of freedom (three translations and three rotations) at each node. The sliding support is modeled as a fictitious spring with two horizontal degrees of freedom. The response quantities considered for the study are the top floor acceleration, base shear, bending moment and base displacement. It is concluded from the study that the displacement of the structure reduces by the use of the restoring force device. Also, the peak values of acceleration, bending moment and base shear also decreases. The simulation results show the effectiveness of the developed and proposed method.Keywords: DOF, Space structures, Acceleration, Excitation, Smart structure, Vibration, Isolation, Earthquakes.
Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 18484170 Requirements Driven Multiple View Paradigm for Developing Security Architecture
Authors: K. Chandra Sekaran
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This paper describes a paradigmatic approach to develop architecture of secure systems by describing the requirements from four different points of view: that of the owner, the administrator, the user, and the network. Deriving requirements and developing architecture implies the joint elicitation and describing the problem and the structure of the solution. The view points proposed in this paper are those we consider as requirements towards their contributions as major parties in the design, implementation, usage and maintenance of secure systems. The dramatic growth of the technology of Internet and the applications deployed in World Wide Web have lead to the situation where the security has become a very important concern in the development of secure systems. Many security approaches are currently being used in organizations. In spite of the widespread use of many different security solutions, the security remains a problem. It is argued that the approach that is described in this paper for the development of secure architecture is practical by all means. The models representing these multiple points of view are termed the requirements model (views of owner and administrator) and the operations model (views of user and network). In this paper, this multiple view paradigm is explained by first describing the specific requirements and or characteristics of secure systems (particularly in the domain of networks) and the secure architecture / system development methodology.
Keywords: Multiple view paradigms, requirements model, operations model, secure system, owner, administrator, user, network.
Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 13784169 Comparing and Combining the Axial with the Network Maps for Analyzing Urban Street Pattern
Authors: Nophaket Napong
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Rooted in the study of social functioning of space in architecture, Space Syntax (SS) and the more recent Network Pattern (NP) researches demonstrate the 'spatial structures' of city, i.e. the hierarchical patterns of streets, junctions and alley ends. Applying SS and NP models, planners can conceptualize the real city-s patterns. Although, both models yield the optimal path of the city their underpinning displays of the city-s spatial configuration differ. The Axial Map analyzes the topological non-distance-based connectivity structure, whereas, the Central-Node Map and the Shortcut-Path Map, in contrast, analyze the metrical distance-based structures. This research contrasts and combines them to understand various forms of city-s structures. It concludes that, while they reveal different spatial structures, Space Syntax and Network Pattern urban models support each the other. Combining together they simulate the global access and the locally compact structures namely the central nodes and the shortcuts for the city.
Keywords: Street pattern, space syntax, syntactic and metrical models, network pattern models.
Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 14654168 Moving from Rule-based to Principle-based in Public Sector: Preparers' Perspective
Authors: Roshayani Arshad, Normah Omar, Siti Fatimah Awang
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The move from cash accounting to accrual accounting, or rule-based to principle-based accounting, by many governments is part of an ongoing efforts in promoting a more business-like and performance-focused public sector. Using questionnaire responses from preparers of financial statements of public universities in Malaysia, this study examines the implementation challenges and benefits of principle-based accounting. Results from these responses suggest that most respondents perceived significant costs would be incurred in relation to staff training and recruitment of staffs with relevant technical knowledge. In addition, most respondents also perceived that there will be significant changes in the current accounting system and structure in order to comply with the principle-based accounting requirements. However, most respondents perceived that these changes might not result in significant benefits for management purposes, for example, financial management, budgeting and allocation of resources. Nevertheless, most respondents perceived that principle-based accounting information would facilitate the monitoring function of the board. The general perception is that adoption of principle-based accounting information is not significantly useful than rule-based accounting information is expected to change over time as preparers of the financial statements gradually understand and appreciate the benefits of principle-based accounting information. This infers that the perceived usefulness of different accounting system is a function of familiarity by the preparers.
Keywords: Accrual accounting, principle-based accounting, public sector, rule-based accounting.
Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 29634167 Multilevel Classifiers in Recognition of Handwritten Kannada Numerals
Authors: Dinesh Acharya U., N. V. Subba Reddy, Krishnamoorthi Makkithaya
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The recognition of handwritten numeral is an important area of research for its applications in post office, banks and other organizations. This paper presents automatic recognition of handwritten Kannada numerals based on structural features. Five different types of features, namely, profile based 10-segment string, water reservoir; vertical and horizontal strokes, end points and average boundary length from the minimal bounding box are used in the recognition of numeral. The effect of each feature and their combination in the numeral classification is analyzed using nearest neighbor classifiers. It is common to combine multiple categories of features into a single feature vector for the classification. Instead, separate classifiers can be used to classify based on each visual feature individually and the final classification can be obtained based on the combination of separate base classification results. One popular approach is to combine the classifier results into a feature vector and leaving the decision to next level classifier. This method is extended to extract a better information, possibility distribution, from the base classifiers in resolving the conflicts among the classification results. Here, we use fuzzy k Nearest Neighbor (fuzzy k-NN) as base classifier for individual feature sets, the results of which together forms the feature vector for the final k Nearest Neighbor (k-NN) classifier. Testing is done, using different features, individually and in combination, on a database containing 1600 samples of different numerals and the results are compared with the results of different existing methods.Keywords: Fuzzy k Nearest Neighbor, Multiple Classifiers, Numeral Recognition, Structural features.
Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 17564166 Agile Software Development Implementation in Developing a Diet Tracker Mobile Application
Authors: Dwi Puspita Sari, Gulnur Baltabayeva, Nadia Salman, Maxut Toleuov, Vijay Kanabar
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Technology era drives people to use mobile phone to support their daily life activities. Technology development has a rapid phase which pushes the IT company to adjust any technology changes in order to fulfill customer’s satisfaction. As a result of that, many companies in the USA emerged from systematics software development approach to agile software development approach in developing systems and applications to develop many mobile phone applications in a short phase to fulfill user’s needs. As a systematic approach is considered as time consuming, costly, and too risky, agile software development has become a more popular approach to use for developing software including mobile applications. This paper reflects a short-term project to develop a diet tracker mobile application using agile software development that focused on applying scrum framework in the development process.
Keywords: Agile software development, scrum, diet tracker, mobile application.
Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 9044165 The Study of the Interaction between Catanionic Surface Micelle SDS-CTAB and Insulin at Air/Water Interface
Authors: B. Tah, P. Pal, M. Mahato, R. Sarkar, G. B. Talapatra
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Herein, we report the different types of surface morphology due to the interaction between the pure protein Insulin (INS) and catanionic surfactant mixture of Sodium Dodecyl Sulfate (SDS) and Cetyl Trimethyl Ammonium Bromide (CTAB) at air/water interface obtained by the Langmuir-Blodgett (LB) technique. We characterized the aggregations by Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM), Atomic Force Microscopy (AFM) and Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) in LB films. We found that the INS adsorption increased in presence of catanionic surfactant at air/water interface. The presence of small amount of surfactant induces two-stage growth kinetics due to the pure protein absorption and protein-catanionic surface micelle interaction. The protein remains in native state in presence of small amount of surfactant mixture. Smaller amount of surfactant mixture with INS is producing surface micelle type structure. This may be considered for drug delivery system. On the other hand, INS becomes unfolded and fibrillated in presence of higher amount of surfactant mixture. In both the cases, the protein was successfully immobilized on a glass substrate by the LB technique. These results may find applications in the fundamental science of the physical chemistry of surfactant systems, as well as in the preparation of drug-delivery system.
Keywords: Air/water interface, Catanionic micelle, Insulin, Langmuir-Blodgett film
Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 24974164 Optimization for Reducing Handoff Latency and Utilization of Bandwidth in ATM Networks
Authors: Pooja, Megha Kulshrestha, V. K. Banga, Parvinder S. Sandhu
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To support mobility in ATM networks, a number of technical challenges need to be resolved. The impact of handoff schemes in terms of service disruption, handoff latency, cost implications and excess resources required during handoffs needs to be addressed. In this paper, a one phase handoff and route optimization solution using reserved PVCs between adjacent ATM switches to reroute connections during inter-switch handoff is studied. In the second phase, a distributed optimization process is initiated to optimally reroute handoff connections. The main objective is to find the optimal operating point at which to perform optimization subject to cost constraint with the purpose of reducing blocking probability of inter-switch handoff calls for delay tolerant traffic. We examine the relation between the required bandwidth resources and optimization rate. Also we calculate and study the handoff blocking probability due to lack of bandwidth for resources reserved to facilitate the rapid rerouting.Keywords: Wireless ATM, Mobility, Latency, Optimization rateand Blocking Probability.
Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 14524163 Visual Analytics in K 12 Education - Emerging Dimensions of Complexity
Authors: Linnea Stenliden
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The aim of this paper is to understand emerging learning conditions, when a visual analytics is implemented and used in K 12 (education). To date, little attention has been paid to the role visual analytics (digital media and technology that highlight visual data communication in order to support analytical tasks) can play in education, and to the extent to which these tools can process actionable data for young students. This study was conducted in three public K 12 schools, in four social science classes with students aged 10 to 13 years, over a period of two to four weeks at each school. Empirical data were generated using video observations and analyzed with help of metaphors within Actor-network theory (ANT). The learning conditions are found to be distinguished by broad complexity, characterized by four dimensions. These emerge from the actors’ deeply intertwined relations in the activities. The paper argues in relation to the found dimensions that novel approaches to teaching and learning could benefit students’ knowledge building as they work with visual analytics, analyzing visualized data.
Keywords: Analytical reasoning, complexity, data use, problem space, visual analytics, visual storytelling, translation.
Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 17004162 Computer-Aided Classification of Liver Lesions Using Contrasting Features Difference
Authors: Hussein Alahmer, Amr Ahmed
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Liver cancer is one of the common diseases that cause the death. Early detection is important to diagnose and reduce the incidence of death. Improvements in medical imaging and image processing techniques have significantly enhanced interpretation of medical images. Computer-Aided Diagnosis (CAD) systems based on these techniques play a vital role in the early detection of liver disease and hence reduce liver cancer death rate. This paper presents an automated CAD system consists of three stages; firstly, automatic liver segmentation and lesion’s detection. Secondly, extracting features. Finally, classifying liver lesions into benign and malignant by using the novel contrasting feature-difference approach. Several types of intensity, texture features are extracted from both; the lesion area and its surrounding normal liver tissue. The difference between the features of both areas is then used as the new lesion descriptors. Machine learning classifiers are then trained on the new descriptors to automatically classify liver lesions into benign or malignant. The experimental results show promising improvements. Moreover, the proposed approach can overcome the problems of varying ranges of intensity and textures between patients, demographics, and imaging devices and settings.
Keywords: CAD system, difference of feature, Fuzzy c means, Liver segmentation.
Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 14254161 MPPT Operation for PV Grid-connected System using RBFNN and Fuzzy Classification
Authors: A. Chaouachi, R. M. Kamel, K. Nagasaka
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This paper presents a novel methodology for Maximum Power Point Tracking (MPPT) of a grid-connected 20 kW Photovoltaic (PV) system using neuro-fuzzy network. The proposed method predicts the reference PV voltage guarantying optimal power transfer between the PV generator and the main utility grid. The neuro-fuzzy network is composed of a fuzzy rule-based classifier and three Radial Basis Function Neural Networks (RBFNN). Inputs of the network (irradiance and temperature) are classified before they are fed into the appropriated RBFNN for either training or estimation process while the output is the reference voltage. The main advantage of the proposed methodology, comparing to a conventional single neural network-based approach, is the distinct generalization ability regarding to the nonlinear and dynamic behavior of a PV generator. In fact, the neuro-fuzzy network is a neural network based multi-model machine learning that defines a set of local models emulating the complex and non-linear behavior of a PV generator under a wide range of operating conditions. Simulation results under several rapid irradiance variations proved that the proposed MPPT method fulfilled the highest efficiency comparing to a conventional single neural network.
Keywords: MPPT, neuro-fuzzy, RBFN, grid-connected, photovoltaic.
Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 31874160 Is Cognitive Dissonance an Intrinsic Property of the Human Mind? An Experimental Solution to a Half-Century Debate
Authors: Álvaro Machado Dias, Eduardo Oda, Henrique Teruo Akiba, Leo Arruda, Luiz Felipe Bruder
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Cognitive Dissonance can be conceived both as a concept related to the tendency to avoid internal contradictions in certain situations, and as a higher order theory about information processing in the human mind. In the last decades, this last sense has been strongly surpassed by the former, as nearly all experiment on the matter discuss cognitive dissonance as an output of motivational contradictions. In that sense, the question remains: is cognitive dissonance a process intrinsically associated with the way that the mind processes information, or is it caused by such specific contradictions? Objective: To evaluate the effects of cognitive dissonance in the absence of rewards or any mechanisms to manipulate motivation. Method: To solve this question, we introduce a new task, the hypothetical social arrays paradigm, which was applied to 50 undergraduate students. Results: Our findings support the perspective that the human mind shows a tendency to avoid internal dissonance even when there are no rewards or punishment involved. Moreover, our findings also suggest that this principle works outside the conscious level.
Keywords: Cognitive Dissonance, Cognitive Psychology, Information Processing.
Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 16454159 The Relationship between Procurement Strategies and Sustainability Outcomes: A Systematic Literature Review
Authors: Cathy T. Mpanga Kowet, Aghaegbuna Obinna U. Ozumba
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This study examined and identified the inconsistencies, relationships, gaps and recurring themes in literature regarding the relationship between procurement strategies employed in the construction projects for sustainable buildings and realization of sustainability goals. A systematic literature review of studies on the relationship between various procurement strategies and attainment of sustainability outcomes was conducted. Using specific terms, papers published between 2002 and 2018 were identified and screened according to an inclusion and exclusion criteria. Current findings reveal that, although the attainment of sustainability goals is achievable with both traditional and contemporary procurement strategies, only projects delivered using modern procurement strategies are capable of meeting and exceeding targeted sustainability objectives. However, traditional procurement strategy remains the preferred method for most green building construction projects. The results suggest implications for decision makers in considering the impact of selected procurement strategies on targeted sustainability goals, in the early stages of sustainable building construction projects. The study shows that there is a gap between the reported appropriate procurement strategies and what is being practiced currently. Theoretically, the study expands on the literature on adoption and diffusion of contemporary procurement strategies, by consolidating existing studies to highlight the current gaps. While the study is at the literature review stage, deductions will serve as basis for field work involving empirical data.
Keywords: Green building, green construction, procurement method, procurement strategy, sustainability objectives, sustainability outcomes.
Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 9584158 Developing a Model for the Relation between Heritage and Place Identity
Authors: A. Arjomand Kermani, N. Charbgoo, M. Alalhesabi
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In the situation of great acceleration of changes and the need for new developments in the cities on one hand and conservation and regeneration approaches on the other hand, place identity and its relation with heritage context have taken on new importance. This relation is generally mutual and complex one. The significant point in this relation is that the process of identifying something as heritage rather than just historical phenomena, brings that which may be inherited into the realm of identity. In planning and urban design as well as environmental psychology and phenomenology domain, place identity and its attributes and components were studied and discussed. However, the relation between physical environment (especially heritage) and identity has been neglected in the planning literature. This article aims to review the knowledge on this field and develop a model on the influence and relation of these two major concepts (heritage and identity). To build this conceptual model, we draw on available literature in environmental psychology as well as planning on place identity and heritage environment using a descriptive-analytical methodology to understand how they can inform the planning strategies and governance policies. A cross-disciplinary analysis is essential to understand the nature of place identity and heritage context and develop a more holistic model of their relationship in order to be employed in planning process and decision making. Moreover, this broader and more holistic perspective would enable both social scientists and planners to learn from one another’s expertise for a fuller understanding of community dynamics. The result indicates that a combination of these perspectives can provide a richer understanding—not only of how planning impacts our experience of place, but also how place identity can impact community planning and development.
Keywords: heritage, Inter-disciplinary study, Place identity, planning
Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 19264157 Electronic Transactions: Jurisdictional Issues in the European Union
Authors: Faeze Razmpa
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One of the main consequences of the ubiquitous usage of Internet as a means to conduct business has been the progressive internationalization of contracts created to support such transactions. As electronic commerce becomes International commerce, the reality is that commercial disputes will occur creating such questions as: "In which country do I bring proceedings?" and "Which law is to be applied to solve disputes?" The decentralized and global structure of the Internet and its decentralized operation have given e-commerce a transnational element that affects two questions essential to any transaction: applicable law and jurisdiction in the event of dispute. The sharing of applicable law and jurisdiction among States in respect of international transactions traditionally has been based on the use of contact factors generally of a territorial nature (the place where real estate is located, customary residence, principal establishment, place of shipping goods). The characteristics of the Internet as a new space sometimes make it difficult to apply these rules, and may make them inoperative or lead to results that are surprising or totally foreign to the contracting parties and other elements and circumstances of the case.
Keywords: Electronic, European Union, Jurisdiction, Internet
Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 17884156 MATLAB-based System for Centralized Monitoring and Self Restoration against Fiber Fault in FTTH
Authors: Mohammad Syuhaimi Ab-Rahman, Boonchuan Ng, Kasmiran Jumari
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This paper presented a MATLAB-based system named Smart Access Network Testing, Analyzing and Database (SANTAD), purposely for in-service transmission surveillance and self restoration against fiber fault in fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) access network. The developed program will be installed with optical line terminal (OLT) at central office (CO) to monitor the status and detect any fiber fault that occurs in FTTH downwardly from CO towards residential customer locations. SANTAD is interfaced with optical time domain reflectometer (OTDR) to accumulate every network testing result to be displayed on a single computer screen for further analysis. This program will identify and present the parameters of each optical fiber line such as the line's status either in working or nonworking condition, magnitude of decreasing at each point, failure location, and other details as shown in the OTDR's screen. The failure status will be delivered to field engineers for promptly actions, meanwhile the failure line will be diverted to protection line to ensure the traffic flow continuously. This approach has a bright prospect to improve the survivability and reliability as well as increase the efficiency and monitoring capabilities in FTTH.
Keywords: MATLAB, SANTAD, in-service transmission surveillance, self restoration, fiber fault, FTTH
Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 21184155 Application of Systems Engineering Tools and Methods to Improve Healthcare Delivery Inside the Emergency Department of a Mid-Size Hospital
Authors: Mohamed Elshal, Hazim El-Mounayri, Omar El-Mounayri
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Emergency department (ED) is considered as a complex system of interacting entities: patients, human resources, software and hardware systems, interfaces, and other systems. This paper represents a research for implementing a detailed Systems Engineering (SE) approach in a mid-size hospital in central Indiana. This methodology will be applied by “The Initiative for Product Lifecycle Innovation (IPLI)” institution at Indiana University to study and solve the crowding problem with the aim of increasing throughput of patients and enhance their treatment experience; therefore, the nature of crowding problem needs to be investigated with all other problems that leads to it. The presented SE methods are workflow analysis and systems modeling where SE tools such as Microsoft Visio are used to construct a group of system-level diagrams that demonstrate: patient’s workflow, documentation and communication flow, data systems, human resources workflow and requirements, leadership involved, and integration between ER different systems. Finally, the ultimate goal will be managing the process through implementation of an executable model using commercialized software tools, which will identify bottlenecks, improve documentation flow, and help make the process faster.Keywords: Systems modeling, ED operation, workflow modeling, systems analysis.
Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 10504154 The Effect of Glass Thickness on Stress in Vacuum Glazing
Authors: Farid Arya, Trevor Hyde, Andrea Trevisi, Paolo Basso, Danilo Bardaro
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Heat transfer through multiple pane windows can be reduced by creating a vacuum pressure less than 0.1 Pa between the glass panes, with low emittance coatings on one or more of the internal surfaces. Fabrication of vacuum glazing (VG) requires the formation of a hermetic seal around the periphery of the glass panes together with an array of support pillars between the panes to prevent them from touching under atmospheric pressure. Atmospheric pressure and temperature differentials induce stress which can affect the integrity of the glazing. Several parameters define the stresses in VG including the glass thickness, pillar specifications, glazing dimensions and edge seal configuration. Inherent stresses in VG can result in fractures in the glass panes and failure of the edge seal. In this study, stress in VG with different glass thicknesses is theoretically studied using Finite Element Modelling (FEM). Based on the finding in this study, suggestions are made to address problems resulting from the use of thinner glass panes in the fabrication of VG. This can lead to the development of high performance, light and thin VG.Keywords: ABAQUS, glazing, stress, vacuum glazing, vacuum insulation.
Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 8604153 Electricity Load Modeling: An Application to Italian Market
Authors: Giovanni Masala, Stefania Marica
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Forecasting electricity load plays a crucial role regards decision making and planning for economical purposes. Besides, in the light of the recent privatization and deregulation of the power industry, the forecasting of future electricity load turned out to be a very challenging problem. Empirical data about electricity load highlights a clear seasonal behavior (higher load during the winter season), which is partly due to climatic effects. We also emphasize the presence of load periodicity at a weekly basis (electricity load is usually lower on weekends or holidays) and at daily basis (electricity load is clearly influenced by the hour). Finally, a long-term trend may depend on the general economic situation (for example, industrial production affects electricity load). All these features must be captured by the model. The purpose of this paper is then to build an hourly electricity load model. The deterministic component of the model requires non-linear regression and Fourier series while we will investigate the stochastic component through econometrical tools. The calibration of the parameters’ model will be performed by using data coming from the Italian market in a 6 year period (2007- 2012). Then, we will perform a Monte Carlo simulation in order to compare the simulated data respect to the real data (both in-sample and out-of-sample inspection). The reliability of the model will be deduced thanks to standard tests which highlight a good fitting of the simulated values.Keywords: ARMA-GARCH process, electricity load, fitting tests, Fourier series, Monte Carlo simulation, non-linear regression.
Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 14924152 Leadership´s Controlling via Complexity Investigation in Crisis Scenarios
Authors: Jiří Barta, Oldřich Svoboda, Jiří. F. Urbánek
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In this paper will be discussed two coin´s sides of crisis scenarios dynamics. On the one's side is negative role of subsidiary scenario branches in its compactness weakening by means unduly chaotic atomizing, having many interactive feedbacks cases, increasing a value of a complexity here. This negative role reflects the complexity of use cases, weakening leader compliancy, which brings something as a ´readiness for controlling capabilities provision´. Leader´s dissatisfaction has zero compliancy, but factual it is a ´crossbar´ (interface in fact) between planning and executing use cases. On the other side of this coin, an advantage of rich scenarios embranchment is possible to see in a support of response awareness, readiness, preparedness, adaptability, creativity and flexibility. Here rich scenarios embranchment contributes to the steadiness and resistance of scenario mission actors. These all will be presented in live power-points ´Blazons´, modelled via DYVELOP (Dynamic Vector Logistics of Processes) on the Conference.
Keywords: Leadership, Controlling, Complexity, DYVELOP, Scenarios.
Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 20134151 Sustainable Building Technologies for Post-Disaster Temporary Housing: Integrated Sustainability Assessment and Life Cycle Assessment
Authors: S. M. Amin Hosseini, Oriol Pons, Albert de la Fuente
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After natural disasters, displaced people (DP) require important numbers of housing units, which have to be erected quickly due to emergency pressures. These tight timeframes can cause the multiplication of the environmental construction impacts. These negative impacts worsen the already high energy consumption and pollution caused by the building sector. Indeed, post-disaster housing, which is often carried out without pre-planning, usually causes high negative environmental impacts, besides other economic and social impacts. Therefore, it is necessary to establish a suitable strategy to deal with this problem which also takes into account the instability of its causes, like changing ratio between rural and urban population. To this end, this study aims to present a model that assists decision-makers to choose the most suitable building technology for post-disaster housing units. This model focuses on the alternatives sustainability and fulfillment of the stakeholders’ satisfactions. Four building technologies have been analyzed to determine the most sustainability technology and to validate the presented model. In 2003, Bam earthquake DP had their temporary housing units (THUs) built using these four technologies: autoclaved aerated concrete blocks (AAC), concrete masonry unit (CMU), pressed reeds panel (PR), and 3D sandwich panel (3D). The results of this analysis confirm that PR and CMU obtain the highest sustainability indexes. However, the second life scenario of THUs could have considerable impacts on the results.
Keywords: Sustainability, post-disaster temporary housing, integrated value model for sustainability assessment (MIVES), life cycle assessment (LCA).
Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 16494150 Image Classification and Accuracy Assessment Using the Confusion Matrix, Contingency Matrix, and Kappa Coefficient
Authors: F. F. Howard, C. B. Boye, I. Yakubu, J. S. Y. Kuma
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One of the ways that could be used for the production of land use and land cover maps by a procedure known as image classification is the use of the remote sensing technique. Numerous elements ought to be taken into consideration, including the availability of highly satisfactory Landsat imagery, secondary data and a precise classification process. The goal of this study was to classify and map the land use and land cover of the study area using remote sensing and Geospatial Information System (GIS) analysis. The classification was done using Landsat 8 satellite images acquired in December 2020 covering the study area. The Landsat image was downloaded from the USGS. The Landsat image with 30 m resolution was geo-referenced to the WGS_84 datum and Universal Transverse Mercator (UTM) Zone 30N coordinate projection system. A radiometric correction was applied to the image to reduce the noise in the image. This study consists of two sections: the Land Use/Land Cover (LULC) and Accuracy Assessments using the confusion and contingency matrix and the Kappa coefficient. The LULC classifications were vegetation (agriculture) (67.87%), water bodies (0.01%), mining areas (5.24%), forest (26.02%), and settlement (0.88%). The overall accuracy of 97.87% and the kappa coefficient (K) of 97.3% were obtained for the confusion matrix. While an overall accuracy of 95.7% and a Kappa coefficient of 0.947 were obtained for the contingency matrix, the kappa coefficients were rated as substantial; hence, the classified image is fit for further research.
Keywords: Confusion Matrix, contingency matrix, kappa coefficient, land used/ land cover, accuracy assessment.
Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 286