Search results for: noise performance.

Authors: Ntantos P.N, Karpouzos D.K

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In this paper, a benchmarking framework is presented for the performance assessment of irrigations systems. Firstly, a data envelopment analysis (DEA) is applied to measure the technical efficiency of irrigation systems. This method, based on linear programming, aims to determine a consistent efficiency ranking of irrigation systems in which known inputs, such as water volume supplied and total irrigated area, and a given output corresponding to the total value of irrigation production are taken into account simultaneously. Secondly, in order to examine the irrigation efficiency in more detail, a cross – system comparison is elaborated using a performance indicators set selected by IWMI. The above methodologies were applied in Thessaloniki plain, located in Northern Greece while the results of the application are presented and discussed. The conjunctive use of DEA and performance indicators seems to be a very useful tool for efficiency assessment and identification of best practices in irrigation systems management.

Keywords: Benchmarking, D.E.A, Performance Indicators, Irrigation systems.

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Authors: Hsiu-Pi Lin, Wen-Chen Huang, Hui-Fang Chen, Yan-Pin Ke

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Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) has become a new trend of business governance. Few research studies on CSR published in Taiwanese academia, especially for medical settings, we were interested in probing the relationship of CSR and financial performance in medical settings in Taiwan. The results illustrate that: (1) a time delay effect exists with a lag between CSR effort and its performance in the hospital foundation, (2) input into the internal domains of CSR will be helpful to improve employee productivity in the hospital foundation, and (3) input into the external domains of CSR will be helpful in improving financial performance in the hospital foundation. This study overviews CSR in the medical industry in Taiwan and the relationship of CSR and financial performance. Discussions of possible implications from the study results are applied to consult the CSR concept that will be transferred into a business strategy for the organization manager.

Keywords: Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), financialperformance, hospital foundation,

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Authors: Yaowaluck Ruampol, Suthakorn Wasupokin

Abstract:

The research on the development of speaking using folk tales based on performance activities aimed to (1) study the development of speaking skill for early- childhood students, and (2) evaluate the development of speaking skill before and after speaking activities. Ten students of Kindergarten level 2, who have enrolled in the subject of the research for speaking development of semester 2 in 2013 were purposively selected as the research cohort. The research tools were lesson plans for speaking activities and pre-post test for speaking development that were approved as content validity and reliability (IOC=.66-1.00,α=0.967). The research found that the development of speaking skill of the research samples before using performance activities on folk tales in developing speaking skill was in the normal high level. Additionally, the results appeared that the preschoolers after applying speaking skill on performance activities also imaginatively created their speaking skill.

Keywords: Speaking development, folk tales, performance activities, early-childhood students.

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Authors: Asadullah I. Qazi, Mansoor Ahsan, Zahir Ashraf, Uzair Ahmad

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System identification of an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV), to acquire its mathematical model, is a significant step in the process of aircraft flight automation. The need for reliable mathematical model is an established requirement for autopilot design, flight simulator development, aircraft performance appraisal, analysis of aircraft modifications, preflight testing of prototype aircraft and investigation of fatigue life and stress distribution etc.  This research is aimed at system identification of a fixed wing UAV by means of specifically designed flight experiment. The purposely designed flight maneuvers were performed on the UAV and aircraft states were recorded during these flights. Acquired data were preprocessed for noise filtering and bias removal followed by parameter estimation of longitudinal dynamics transfer functions using MATLAB system identification toolbox. Black box identification based transfer function models, in response to elevator and throttle inputs, were estimated using least square error   technique. The identification results show a high confidence level and goodness of fit between the estimated model and actual aircraft response.

Keywords: Black box modeling, fixed wing aircraft, least square error, longitudinal dynamics, system identification.

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Authors: Harish Chander, Balwinder Singh, Ravinder Khanna

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In this paper, we present the comparative subjective analysis of Improved Minima Controlled Recursive Averaging (IMCRA) Algorithm, the Kalman filter and the cascading of IMCRA and Kalman filter algorithms. Performance of speech enhancement algorithms can be predicted in two different ways. One is the objective method of evaluation in which the speech quality parameters are predicted computationally. The second is a subjective listening test in which the processed speech signal is subjected to the listeners who judge the quality of speech on certain parameters. The comparative objective evaluation of these algorithms was analyzed in terms of Global SNR, Segmental SNR and Perceptual Evaluation of Speech Quality (PESQ) by the authors and it was reported that with cascaded algorithms there is a substantial increase in objective parameters. Since subjective evaluation is the real test to judge the quality of speech enhancement algorithms, the authenticity of superiority of cascaded algorithms over individual IMCRA and Kalman algorithms is tested through subjective analysis in this paper. The results of subjective listening tests have confirmed that the cascaded algorithms perform better under all types of noise conditions.

Keywords: Speech enhancement, spectral domain, time domain, PESQ, subjective analysis, objective analysis.

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Authors: Roshayani Arshad, Suaini Othman, Rohana Othman

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This study examines the effect of Islamic Corporate Social Responsibility disclosure and on corporate reputation as well as performance. These relationships are examined based on content analysis of of annual reports of 17 Islamic banks in Malaysia for 2008, 2009 and 2010. Results of this study provide evidence that CSR activities communicated in corporate annual reports are significantly positively related with corporate reputation as well as firm performance. These results indicate that CSR activities and disclosure from Islamic perspectives are equally important business strategies in creating continuous superior performance for organisations. In addition, it also highlights that organisations need to develop a stakeholder orientation particularly in an environment of increasing pressure from jurisdictions dominated by Islamic stakeholders on organisations engaging in Islamic products to increase their social responsibilities from the Islamic perspectives.

Keywords: Islamic Corporate Social Responsibility, Corporate Reputation, Firm Performance, Islamic Banks

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Authors: Cesar H. Ortega Jimenez, Ignacio Eguia Salinas, Pedro Garrido Vega, Jose A. Dominguez Machuca

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The aim of this study is to identify the conditions of implementation for reconfigurability in summarizing past flexible manufacturing systems (FMS) research by drawing overall conclusions from many separate High Performance Manufacturing (HPM) studies. Meta-analysis will be applied to links between HPM programs and their practices related to FMS and manufacturing performance with particular reference to responsiveness performance. More specifically, an application of meta-analysis will be made with reference to two of the main steps towards the development of an empirically-tested theory: testing the adequacy of the measurement of variables and testing the linkages between the variables.

Keywords: FMS (flexible manufacturing system), HPM (highperformance manufacturing), reconfigurability, RMS (reconfigurablemanufacturing system), responsiveness

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Authors: Kwangho Cha, Hyeyoung Cho, Sungho Kim

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As many scientific applications require large data processing, the importance of parallel I/O has been increasingly recognized. Collective I/O is one of the considerable features of parallel I/O and enables application programmers to easily handle their large data volume. In this paper we measured and analyzed the performance of original collective I/O and the subgroup method, the way of using collective I/O of MPI effectively. From the experimental results, we found that the subgroup method showed good performance with small data size.

Keywords: Collective I/O, MPI, parallel file system.

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Authors: Erh-Wen Hu, Cyril S. Ku, Andrew T. Russo, Bogong Su, Jian Wang

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Unlike general-purpose processors, digital signal processors (DSP processors) are strongly application-dependent. To meet the needs for diverse applications, a wide variety of DSP processors based on different architectures ranging from the traditional to VLIW have been introduced to the market over the years. The functionality, performance, and cost of these processors vary over a wide range. In order to select a processor that meets the design criteria for an application, processor performance is usually the major concern for digital signal processing (DSP) application developers. Performance data are also essential for the designers of DSP processors to improve their design. Consequently, several DSP performance benchmarks have been proposed over the past decade or so. However, none of these benchmarks seem to have included recent new DSP applications. In this paper, we use a new benchmark that we recently developed to compare the performance of popular DSP processors from Texas Instruments and StarCore. The new benchmark is based on the Selectable Mode Vocoder (SMV), a speech-coding program from the recent third generation (3G) wireless voice applications. All benchmark kernels are compiled by the compilers of the respective DSP processors and run on their simulators. Weighted arithmetic mean of clock cycles and arithmetic mean of code size are used to compare the performance of five DSP processors. In addition, we studied how the performance of a processor is affected by code structure, features of processor architecture and optimization of compiler. The extensive experimental data gathered, analyzed, and presented in this paper should be helpful for DSP processor and compiler designers to meet their specific design goals.

Keywords: digital signal processors, DSP benchmark, instruction level parallelism, modified cyclomatic complexity, performance analysis.

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Authors: Vahid R. Asghari, Mehrdad Ardebilipour

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In the context of spectrum surveillance, a new method to recover the code of spread spectrum signal is presented, while the receiver has no knowledge of the transmitter-s spreading sequence. In our previous paper, we used Genetic algorithm (GA), to recover spreading code. Although genetic algorithms (GAs) are well known for their robustness in solving complex optimization problems, but nonetheless, by increasing the length of the code, we will often lead to an unacceptable slow convergence speed. To solve this problem we introduce Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) into code estimation in spread spectrum communication system. In searching process for code estimation, the PSO algorithm has the merits of rapid convergence to the global optimum, without being trapped in local suboptimum, and good robustness to noise. In this paper we describe how to implement PSO as a component of a searching algorithm in code estimation. Swarm intelligence boasts a number of advantages due to the use of mobile agents. Some of them are: Scalability, Fault tolerance, Adaptation, Speed, Modularity, Autonomy, and Parallelism. These properties make swarm intelligence very attractive for spread spectrum code estimation. They also make swarm intelligence suitable for a variety of other kinds of channels. Our results compare between swarm-based algorithms and Genetic algorithms, and also show PSO algorithm performance in code estimation process.

Keywords: Code estimation, Particle Swarm Optimization(PSO), Spread spectrum.

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Authors: Kati Kõrbe Kaare, Ott Koppel

Abstract:

Transport and logistics are the lifeblood of societies. There is a strong correlation between overall growth in economic activity and growth of transport. The movement of people and goods has the potential for creating wealth and prosperity, therefore the state of transportation infrastructure and especially the condition of road networks is often a governmental priority. The design, building and maintenance of national roads constitute a substantial share of government budgets. Taking into account the magnitude and importance of these investments, the expedience, efficiency and sustainability of these projects are of great public interest. This paper provides an overview of supply chain management principles applied to road construction. In addition, road construction performance measurement systems and ICT solutions are discussed. Road construction in Estonia is analyzed. The authors propose the development of a national performance measurement system for road construction.

Keywords: ICT in road construction, key performance indicators, quality performance measurement, road construction supply chain.

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Authors: Waqar Haque, Pai Qi

Abstract:

The speculative locking (SL) protocol extends the twophase locking (2PL) protocol to allow for parallelism among conflicting transactions. The adaptive speculative locking (ASL) protocol provided further enhancements and outperformed SL protocols under most conditions. Neither of these protocols consider the impact of network latency on the performance of the distributed database systems. We have studied the performance of ASL protocol taking into account the communication overhead. The results indicate that though system load can counter network latency, it can still become a bottleneck in many situations. The impact of latency on performance depends on many factors including the system resources. A flexible discrete event simulator was used as the testbed for this study.

Keywords: concurrency control, distributed database systems, speculative locking

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Authors: R. Matousek, S. Lang, P. Minar, P. Pivonka

Abstract:

In the control theory one attempts to find a controller that provides the best possible performance with respect to some given measures of performance. There are many sorts of controllers e.g. a typical PID controller, LQR controller, Fuzzy controller etc. In the paper will be introduced polynomial controller with novel tuning method which is based on the special pole placement encoding scheme and optimization by Genetic Algorithms (GA). The examples will show the performance of the novel designed polynomial controller with comparison to common PID controller.

Keywords: Evolutionary design, Genetic algorithms, PID controller, Pole placement, Polynomial controller

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Authors: Sheila R. Bonito

Abstract:

This study describes the relationship between motivation factors and academic performance among distance education students enrolled in a postgraduate nursing course. Students (n=96) participated in a survey that assesses student's motivational orientations from a cognitive perspective using a selfadministered questionnaire based on Pintrich-s Motivation Strategies for Learning Questionnaire (MLSQ). Results showed students- motivational factors are highest on task value (6.44, 0.71); followed by intrinsic goal orientation (6.20, 0.76), control beliefs (6.02, 0.89); extrinsic goal orientation (5.85, 1.13); self-efficacy for learning and performance (5.62, 0.84), and finally, test anxiety (4.21, 1.37). Weak positive correlations were found between academic performance and intrinsic goal orientation (r=0.13), extrinsic goal orientation (r=0.04), task value (r=0.09), control beliefs (r=0.02), and self-efficacy (r=0.05), while there was weak negative correlation with test anxiety (r=-0.04). Conclusions from the study indicate the need to focus on improving tasks and targeting intrinsic goal orientations of students to courses since these were positively correlated with academic performance and downplay the use of tests since these were negatively correlated with academic performance.

Keywords: Motivation factors, academic performance, distance education

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Authors: S. Falkenberg, L. Overmeyer

Abstract:

The “conveyor belt" as a product represents a complex high performance component with a wide range of different applications. Further development of these highly complex components demands an integration of new technologies and new enhanced materials. In this context nanostructured fillers appear to have a more promising effect on the performance of the conveyor belt composite than conventional micro-scaled fillers. Within the project “DotTrans" nanostructured fillers, for example silicon dioxide, are used to optimize performance parameters of conveyor belt systems. The objective of the project includes operating parameters like energy consumption or friction characteristics as well as adaptive parameters like cut or wear resistance.

Keywords: Conveyor belt, nanostructured fillers, wear resistance, friction characteristics.

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Authors: M. A. Ahmadi, O. Alidoust, I. Sadrinejad, M. Nayeri

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Self-compacting concrete (SCC), a new kind of high performance concrete (HPC) have been first developed in Japan in 1986. The development of SCC has made casting of dense reinforcement and mass concrete convenient, has minimized noise. Fresh self-compacting concrete (SCC) flows into formwork and around obstructions under its own weight to fill it completely and self-compact (without any need for vibration), without any segregation and blocking. The elimination of the need for compaction leads to better quality concrete and substantial improvement of working conditions. SCC mixes generally have a much higher content of fine fillers, including cement, and produce excessively high compressive strength concrete, which restricts its field of application to special concrete only. To use SCC mixes in general concrete construction practice, requires low cost materials to make inexpensive concrete. Rice husk ash (RHA) has been used as a highly reactive pozzolanic material to improve the microstructure of the interfacial transition zone (ITZ) between the cement paste and the aggregate in self compacting concrete. Mechanical experiments of RHA blended Portland cement concretes revealed that in addition to the pozzolanic reactivity of RHA (chemical aspect), the particle grading (physical aspect) of cement and RHA mixtures also exerted significant influences on the blending efficiency. The scope of this research was to determine the usefulness of Rice husk ash (RHA) in the development of economical self compacting concrete (SCC). The cost of materials will be decreased by reducing the cement content by using waste material like rice husk ash instead of. This paper presents a study on the development of Mechanical properties up to 180 days of self compacting and ordinary concretes with rice-husk ash (RHA), from a rice paddy milling industry in Rasht (Iran). Two different replacement percentages of cement by RHA, 10%, and 20%, and two different water/cementicious material ratios (0.40 and 0.35), were used for both of self compacting and normal concrete specimens. The results are compared with those of the self compacting concrete without RHA, with compressive, flexural strength and modulus of elasticity. It is concluded that RHA provides a positive effect on the Mechanical properties at age after 60 days. Base of the result self compacting concrete specimens have higher value than normal concrete specimens in all test except modulus of elasticity. Also specimens with 20% replacement of cement by RHA have the best performance.

Keywords: Self compacting concrete (SCC), Rice husk ash(RHA), Mechanical properties.

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Authors: Mahmoud Miri, Morteza Naghipour, Amir Kashiryfar

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The unanticipated destruct of more of the steel moment frames in Northridge earthquake, altered class of regard to the beamto- column connections in moment frames. Panel zone is one the significant part of joints which, it-s stiffness and rigidity has an important effect on the behavior and ductility of the frame. Specifically that behavior of panel zone has a very significant effect on the special moment frames. In this paper , meanwhile the relations for modeling of panel zone in frames are expressed , special moment frames with different spans and stories were studied in the way of performance-based design. The frames designed in according with Iranian steel building code. The effect of panel zone is also considered and in the case of non-existence of performance level, by changing in intimacies and parameter of panel zone, performance level is considered.

Keywords: steel moment frame, panel zone, performance based design

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Authors: E. Ahvar, M. Fathy

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Ad hoc networks are characterized by multihop wireless connectivity, frequently changing network topology and the need for efficient dynamic routing protocols. We compare the performance of three routing protocols for mobile ad hoc networks: Dynamic Source Routing (DSR), Ad Hoc On-Demand Distance Vector Routing (AODV), location-aided routing (LAR1).Our evaluation is based on energy consumption in mobile ad hoc networks. The performance differentials are analyzed using varying network load, mobility, and network size. We simulate protocols with GLOMOSIM simulator. Based on the observations, we make recommendations about when the performance of either protocol can be best.

Keywords: Ad hoc Network, energy consumption, Glomosim, routing protocols.

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Authors: E. A. Tkachenko, E. M. Rogova, V. V. Klimov

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One of the basic issues of development management is connected with performance measurement as a prerequisite for identifying the achievement of development objectives. The aim of our research is to develop an improved model of assessing a company’s development results. The model should take into account the cyclical nature of development and the high degree of uncertainty in dealing with numerous management tasks. Our hypotheses may be formulated as follows: Hypothesis 1. The cycle of a company’s development may be studied from the standpoint of a project cycle. To do that, methods and tools of project analysis are to be used. Hypothesis 2. The problem of the uncertainty when justifying managerial decisions within the framework of a company’s development cycle can be solved through the use of the mathematical apparatus of fuzzy logic. The reasoned justification of the validity of the hypotheses made is given in the suggested article. The fuzzy logic toolkit applies to the case of technology shift within an enterprise. It is proven that some restrictions in performance measurement that are incurred to conventional methods could be eliminated by implementation of the fuzzy logic apparatus in performance measurement models.

Keywords: Fuzzy logic, fuzzy sets, performance measurement, project analysis.

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Authors: Daya Weerasinghe

Abstract:

Parental expectations often differ to that of their children and the influence and involvement of parents, at home, may affect the student performance in the classroom. This paper presents results from a survey of Asian and European background secondary school mathematics students (N=128) in Melbourne, Australia. Student responses to survey questions were analysed using confirmatory factor analysis, followed by t-tests and ANOVA. The aim of the analysis was to identify similarities and differences in parental expectations in relation to ethnicity, gender, and the year level of the students. The notable findings from the analysis showed no significant difference (at 0.05 level) in parental expectations and student performance, in relation to ethnicity or gender. Conversely, there was a significant difference in both parental expectations and student performance between year 7 and year 12 students. Further, whilst there was a significant difference in parental expectations between year 7 and year 11 students, the students’ performances were not significantly different. The results suggest further research may be needed to understand the parental expectations and student performance between the lower and upper secondary school mathematics students.

Keywords: Ethnic background, gender, parental expectations, student performance, year level.

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Authors: Farhad Asadi, Hossein Sadati

Abstract:

In fields such as neuroscience and especially in cognition modeling of mental processes, uncertainty processing in temporal zone of signal is vital. In this paper, Bayesian online inferences in estimation of change-points location in signal are constructed. This method separated the observed signal into independent series and studies the change and variation of the regime of data locally with related statistical characteristics. We give conditions on simulations of the method when the data characteristics of signals vary, and provide empirical evidence to show the performance of method. It is verified that correlation between series around the change point location and its characteristics such as Signal to Noise Ratios and mean value of signal has important factor on fluctuating in finding proper location of change point. And one of the main contributions of this study is related to representing of these influences of signal statistical characteristics for finding abrupt variation in signal. There are two different structures for simulations which in first case one abrupt change in temporal section of signal is considered with variable position and secondly multiple variations are considered. Finally, influence of statistical characteristic for changing the location of change point is explained in details in simulation results with different artificial signals.

Keywords: Time series, fluctuation in statistical characteristics, optimal learning.

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Authors: Fabrício José Piacente, Vanessa de Cillos Silva, Thigo Luiz Mello Melato

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The construction industry has been demonstrating increased growth and importance in Brazil’s national economic development. This study aims to evaluate the financial performance of the leading companies in the construction sector in Brazil in the period from 2009 to 2012. An analysis is made of the capital structure, liquidity, and profitability of the six largest companies in the construction sector in Brazil: Brookfield, Cyrela, Gafisa, MRV, PDG and Rossi. The results are then compared with standard industry ratios. It was found that among the companies analyzed, MRV and Cyrela showed the best relative performance in the period under consideration.

Keywords: Accounting ratios, construction, financial performance.

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Authors: Omid A. Zargar

Abstract:

The simulated mass and spring method evaluation for subway or railways construction and installation systems have a wide application in rail industries. This kind of design should be optimizing all related parameters to reduce the amount of vibration in cities, homelands, historical zones and other critical locations. Finite element method could help us a lot to analysis such applications with an excellent accuracy but always developing some simple, fast and user friendly evaluation method required in subway industrial applications. In addition, process parameter optimization extremely required in railway industries to achieve some optimal design of railways with maximum safety, reliability and performance. Furthermore, it is important to reduce vibrations and further related maintenance costs as well as possible. In this paper a simple but useful simulated mass and spring evaluation system developed for Esfahan subway construction. Besides, some of related recent patent and innovations in rail world industries like Suspension mass tuned vibration reducer, short sleeper vibration attenuation fastener and Airtight track vibration-noise reducing fastener discussed in details.

Keywords: Subway construction engineering, natural frequency, operation frequency, vibration analysis, polyurethane layer.

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Authors: Radosveta Sokullu, Engin Karatepe

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In the last couple of years Bluetooth has gained a large share in the market of home and personal appliances. It is now a well established technology a short range supplement to the wireless world of 802.11. The two main trends of research that have sprung from these developments are directed towards the coexistence and performance issues of Bluetooth and 802.11 as well as the co-existence in the very short range of multiple Bluetooth devices. Our work aims at thoroughly investigating different aspects of co-channel interference and effects of transmission power, distance and 802.11 interference on Bluetooth connections.

Keywords: Bluetooth, co-channel interference, 802.11, performance analysis

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Authors: Tal Ben-Zvi, Donald N. Lombardi

Abstract:

This study uses a simulation to establish a realistic environment for laboratory research on Accountable Care Organizations. We study network attributes in order to gain insights regarding healthcare providers- conduct and performance. Our findings indicate how network structure creates significant differences in organizational performance. We demonstrate how healthcare providers positioning themselves at the central, pivotal point of the network while maintaining their alliances with their partners produce better outcomes.

Keywords: Social Networks, Decision-Making, Accountable Care Organizations, Performance

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Authors: Shivakumar, G. S. Vijay, P. Srinivas Pai, B. R. Shrinivasa Rao

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In the present study, RBF neural networks were used for predicting the performance and emission parameters of a biodiesel engine. Engine experiments were carried out in a 4 stroke diesel engine using blends of diesel and Honge methyl ester as the fuel. Performance parameters like BTE, BSEC, Tex and emissions from the engine were measured. These experimental results were used for ANN modeling. RBF center initialization was done by random selection and by using Clustered techniques. Network was trained by using fixed and varying widths for the RBF units. It was observed that RBF results were having a good agreement with the experimental results. Networks trained by using clustering technique gave better results than using random selection of centers in terms of reduced MRE and increased prediction accuracy. The average MRE for the performance parameters was 3.25% with the prediction accuracy of 98% and for emissions it was 10.4% with a prediction accuracy of 80%.

Keywords: Radial Basis Function networks, emissions, Performance parameters, Fuzzy c means.

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Authors: Salwa Aftab, Sehrish Riaz

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The objective of this study was to check the impact of grade sensitivity on learning motivation and academic performance of students and to remove the degree of difference that exists among students regarding the cause of their learning motivation and also to gain knowledge about this matter since it has not been adequately researched. Data collection was primarily done through the academic sector of Pakistan and was depended upon the responses given by students solely. A sample size of 208 university students was selected. Both paper and online surveys were used to collect data from respondents. The results of the study revealed that grade sensitivity has a positive relationship with the learning motivation of students and their academic performance. These findings were carried out through systematic correlation and regression analysis.

Keywords: Academic performance, correlation, grade sensitivity, learning motivation, regression.

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Authors: Na Li, Samuel Simon Araya, Søren Knudsen Kær

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This study investigates the effects of operating parameters of different current density, temperature and pressure on the performance of a proton exchange membrane (PEM) water electrolysis stack. A 7-cell PEM water electrolysis stack was assembled and tested under different operation modules. The voltage change and polarization curves under different test conditions, namely current density, temperature and pressure, were recorded. Results show that higher temperature has positive effect on overall stack performance, where temperature of 80 ℃ improved the cell performance greatly. However, the cathode pressure and current density has little effect on stack performance.

Keywords: PEM electrolysis stack, current density, temperature, pressure.

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Authors: Mahtab Davari, Charles Edward Okon, Somayeh Aghanavesi

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Every institute of learning is usually interested in the performance of enrolled students. The level of these performances determines the approach an institute of study may adopt in rendering academic services. The focus of this paper is to evaluate students' academic performance in given courses of study using machine learning methods. This study evaluated various supervised machine learning classification algorithms such as Logistic Regression (LR), Support Vector Machine (SVM), Random Forest, Decision Tree, K-Nearest Neighbors, Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA), and Quadratic Discriminant Analysis, using selected features to predict study performance. The accuracy, precision, recall, and F1 score obtained from a 5-Fold Cross-Validation were used to determine the best classification algorithm to predict students’ performances. SVM (using a linear kernel), LDA, and LR were identified as the best-performing machine learning methods. Also, using the LR model, this study identified students' educational habits such as reading and paying attention in class as strong determinants for a student to have an above-average performance. Other important features include the academic history of the student and work. Demographic factors such as age, gender, high school graduation, etc., had no significant effect on a student's performance.

Keywords: Student performance, supervised machine learning, prediction, classification, cross-validation.

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Authors: Randeep Kaur, Jyoti Ohri

Abstract:

This paper proposes a new technique to design a fixed-structure robust loop shaping controller for the pneumatic servosystem. In this paper, a new method based on a particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm for tuning the weighting function parameters to design an H∞ controller is presented. The PSO algorithm is used to minimize the infinity norm of the transfer function of the nominal closed loop system to obtain the optimal parameters of the weighting functions. The optimal stability margin is used as an objective in PSO for selecting the optimal weighting parameters; it is shown that the proposed method can simplify the design procedure of H∞ control to obtain optimal robust controller for pneumatic servosystem. In addition, the order of the proposed controller is much lower than that of the conventional robust loop shaping controller, making it easy to implement in practical works. Also two-degree-of-freedom (2DOF) control design procedure is proposed to improve tracking performance in the face of noise and disturbance. Result of simulations demonstrates the advantages of the proposed controller in terms of simple structure and robustness against plant perturbations and disturbances.

Keywords: Robust control, Pneumatic Servosystem, PSO, H∞ control, 2DOF.

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