Search results for: Multi drug resistant

Authors: Jito Vanualailai, Bibhya Sharma

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Swarm principles are increasingly being used to design controllers for the coordination of multi-robot systems or, in general, multi-agent systems. This paper proposes a two-dimensional Lagrangian swarm model that enables the planar agents, modeled as point masses, to swarm whilst effectively avoiding each other and obstacles in the environment. A novel method, based on an extended Lyapunov approach, is used to construct the model. Importantly, the Lyapunov method ensures a form of practical stability that guarantees an emergent behavior, namely, a cohesive and wellspaced swarm with a constant arrangement of individuals about the swarm centroid. Computer simulations illustrate this basic feature of collective behavior. As an application, we show how multiple planar mobile unicycle-like robots swarm to eventually form patterns in which their velocities and orientations stabilize.

Keywords: Attractive-repulsive swarm model, individual-based swarm model, Lagrangian swarm model, Lyapunov stability, Lyapunov-like function, practical stability, unicycle.

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Authors: Y. Harold Robinson, M. Rajaram

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Wireless mesh networking is rapidly gaining in popularity with a variety of users: from municipalities to enterprises, from telecom service providers to public safety and military organizations. This increasing popularity is based on two basic facts: ease of deployment and increase in network capacity expressed in bandwidth per footage; WMNs do not rely on any fixed infrastructure. Many efforts have been used to maximizing throughput of the network in a multi-channel multi-radio wireless mesh network. Current approaches are purely based on either static or dynamic channel allocation approaches. In this paper, we use a hybrid multichannel multi radio wireless mesh networking architecture, where static and dynamic interfaces are built in the nodes. Dynamic Adaptive Channel Allocation protocol (DACA), it considers optimization for both throughput and delay in the channel allocation. The assignment of the channel has been allocated to be codependent with the routing problem in the wireless mesh network and that should be based on passage flow on every link. Temporal and spatial relationship rises to re compute the channel assignment every time when the pattern changes in mesh network, channel assignment algorithms assign channels in network. In this paper a computing path which captures the available path bandwidth is the proposed information and the proficient routing protocol based on the new path which provides both static and dynamic links. The consistency property guarantees that each node makes an appropriate packet forwarding decision and balancing the control usage of the network, so that a data packet will traverse through the right path.

Keywords: Wireless mesh network, spatial time division multiple access, hybrid topology, timeslot allocation.

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Authors: Minwoo Son, Seung-Hun Lee, Dongkyoo Shin, Dongil Shin

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The next stage of the home networking environment is supposed to be ubiquitous, where each piece of material is equipped with an RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) tag. To fully support the ubiquitous environment, home networking middleware should be able to recommend home services based on a user-s interests and efficiently manage information on service usage profiles for the users. Therefore, USN (Ubiquitous Sensor Network) technology, which recognizes and manages a appliance-s state-information (location, capabilities, and so on) by connecting RFID tags is considered. The Intelligent Multi-Agent Middleware (IMAM) architecture was proposed to intelligently manage the mobile RFID-based home networking and to automatically supply information about home services that match a user-s interests. Evaluation results for personalization services for IMAM using Bayesian-Net and Decision Trees are presented.

Keywords: Intelligent Agents, Home Network, Mobile RFID, Intelligent Middleware.

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Authors: Faraj El Dabee, Romeo Marian, Yousef Amer

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Just-In-Time (JIT) is a lean manufacturing tool, which provides the benefits of efficiency, and of minimizing unnecessary costs for many organisations. However, the risks arising from these benefits have been disregarded. These risks impact on system processes disrupting the whole supply chain. This paper proposes an inventory model that can simultaneously reduce costs and risks in JIT systems. This model is developed to ascertain an optimal ordering strategy for procuring raw materials by using regular multi-external and local backup suppliers to reduce the total cost of the products, and at the same time to reduce the risks arising from this cost reduction within production systems. Some results that will be illustrated in the second part of this paper are presented.

Keywords: Lean manufacturing, Just-in-Time (JIT), production system, cost-risk reduction, inventory model, eternal supplier, local backup supplier.

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Authors: N. Behidj-Benyounes, K. Benyounes, T. Dahmene, N. Chebouti, S. Gana

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Essential oils have a significant antimicrobial activity. These oils can successfully replace the antibiotics. So, the microorganisms show their inefficiencies resistant for the antibiotics. For this reason, we study the physicochemical analysis and antimicrobial activity of the essential oil of Daucus carota. The extraction is done by steam distillation of water which brought us a very significant return of 4.65%. The analysis of the essential oil is performed by GC / MS and has allowed us to identify 32 compounds in the oil of D. carota flowering tops of Bouira. Three of which are in the majority are the α-Pinene (22.3%), the carotol (21.7%) and the limonene (15.8%).

Keywords: α-Pinene, carotol, Daucus carota, limonene.

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Authors: Ramesh S., Sasiraaju A. S., Sidhaarth K., Sudhan Rajkumar N., Manivel Muralidaran V.

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This work presents the result of investigations aimed at determining the hardness of the welded Chromoly (A 4130) steel plate of 2” thickness. Multi pass welding for the thick sections was carried out and analyzed for the Chromoly alloy steel plates. The study of hardness at the weld metal reveals that there is the presence of different micro structure products which yields diverse properties. The welding carried out using GMAW with ER70s-2 electrode. Single V groove design was selected for the butt joint configuration. The presence of hydrogen has been suppressed by selecting low hydrogen electrode. Preheating of the plate prior to welding reduces the cooling rate which also affects the weld metal microstructure. The shielding gas composition used in this analysis is 80% Ar-20% CO2. The experimental analysis gives the detailed study of the hardness of the material.

Keywords: Chromoly, Gas Metal Arc Weld (GMAW), Hardness, Multi pass weld, Shielding gas composition.

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Authors: Ingu Kim, Shangmun Shin, Yongsun Choi, Nguyen Manh Thang, Edwin R. Ramos, Won-Joo Hwang

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Project selection problems on management information system (MIS) are often considered a multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) for a solving method. These problems contain two aspects, such as interdependencies among criteria and candidate projects and qualitative and quantitative factors of projects. However, most existing methods reported in literature consider these aspects separately even though these two aspects are simultaneously incorporated. For this reason, we proposed a hybrid method using analytic network process (ANP) and fuzzy logic in order to represent both aspects. We then propose a goal programming model to conduct an optimization for the project selection problems interpreted by a hybrid concept. Finally, a numerical example is conducted as verification purposes.

Keywords: Analytic Network Process (ANP), Multi-Criteria Decision-Making (MCDM), Fuzzy Logic, Information System Project Selection, Goal Programming.

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Authors: N. W. U. D. Chathurani, Shlomo Geva, Vinod Chandran, Proboda Rajapaksha

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Selecting an appropriate image representation is the most important factor in implementing an effective Content-Based Image Retrieval (CBIR) system. This paper presents a multi-feature fusion approach for efficient CBIR, based on the distance distribution of features and relative feature weights at the time of query processing. It is a simple yet effective approach, which is free from the effect of features' dimensions, ranges, internal feature normalization and the distance measure. This approach can easily be adopted in any feature combination to improve retrieval quality. The proposed approach is empirically evaluated using two benchmark datasets for image classification (a subset of the Corel dataset and Oliva and Torralba) and compared with existing approaches. The performance of the proposed approach is confirmed with the significantly improved performance in comparison with the independently evaluated baseline of the previously proposed feature fusion approaches.

Keywords: Feature fusion, image retrieval, membership function, normalization.

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Authors: Masaki Ohno, Cervinia Manalo, Tetsuji Okuda, Satoshi Nakai, Wataru Nishijima

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Reverse osmosis (RO) membranes have been widely used for desalination to purify water for drinking and other purposes. Although at present most RO membranes have no resistance to chlorine, chlorine-resistant membranes are being developed. Therefore, direct chlorine treatment or chlorine washing will be an option in preventing biofouling on chlorine-resistant membranes. Furthermore, if particle accumulation control is possible by using chlorine washing, expensive pretreatment for particle removal can be removed or simplified. The objective of this study was to determine the effective hypochlorite washing condition required for controlling biofilm formation and inorganic particle accumulation on RO membrane in a continuous flow channel with RO membrane and spacer. In this study, direct chlorine washing was done by soaking fouled RO membranes in hypochlorite solution and fluorescence intensity was used to quantify biofilm on the membrane surface. After 48 h of soaking the membranes in high fouling potential waters, the fluorescence intensity decreased to 0 from 470 using the following washing conditions: 10 mg/L chlorine concentration, 2 times/d washing interval, and 30 min washing time. The chlorine concentration required to control biofilm formation decreased as the chlorine concentration (0.5–10 mg/L), the washing interval (1–4 times/d), or the washing time (1–30 min) increased. For the sample solutions used in the study, 10 mg/L chlorine concentration with 2 times/d interval, and 5 min washing time was required for biofilm control. The optimum chlorine washing conditions obtained from soaking experiments proved to be applicable also in controlling biofilm formation in continuous flow experiments. Moreover, chlorine washing employed in controlling biofilm with suspended particles resulted in lower amounts of organic (0.03 mg/cm²) and inorganic (0.14 mg/cm²) deposits on the membrane than that for sample water without chlorine washing (0.14 mg/cm² and 0.33 mg/cm², respectively). The amount of biofilm formed was 79% controlled by continuous washing with 10 mg/L of free chlorine concentration, and the inorganic accumulation amount decreased by 58% to levels similar to that of pure water with kaolin (0.17 mg/cm²) as feed water. These results confirmed the acceleration of particle accumulation due to biofilm formation, and that the inhibition of biofilm growth can almost completely reduce further particle accumulation. In addition, effective hypochlorite washing condition which can control both biofilm formation and particle accumulation could be achieved.

Keywords: Biofouling control, hypochlorite, reverse osmosis, washing condition optimization.

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Authors: Seyedeh Belin Tavakoly Sany, H. Rosli, R. Majid, S. Aishah

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In this study, water monitoring was performed from Nov. 2012 to Oct. 2013 to assess water quality and evaluate the spatial and temporal distribution of physicochemical and biological variables in water. Water samples were collected from 10 coastal water stations of West Port. In the case of water-quality assessment, multi-metric indices and operational indicators have been proposed to classify the trophic status at different stations. The trophic level of West Port coastal water ranges from eutrophic to hypertrophic. Chl-a concentration was used to estimate the biological response of phytoplankton biomass and indicated eutrophic conditions in West Port and mesotrophic conditions at the control site. During the study period, no eutrophication events or secondary symptoms occurred, which may be related to hydrodynamic turbulence and water exchange, which prevent the development of eutrophic conditions in the West Port.

Keywords: Water quality, multi-metric indices, operational indicator, Malaysia, West Port.

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Authors: Peter Drotar, Juraj Gazda, Pavol Galajda, Dusan Kocur

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The study in this paper underlines the importance of correct joint selection of the spreading codes for uplink of multicarrier code division multiple access (MC-CDMA) at the transmitter side and detector at the receiver side in the presence of nonlinear distortion due to high power amplifier (HPA). The bit error rate (BER) of system for different spreading sequences (Walsh code, Gold code, orthogonal Gold code, Golay code and Zadoff-Chu code) and different kinds of receivers (minimum mean-square error receiver (MMSE-MUD) and microstatistic multi-user receiver (MSF-MUD)) is compared by means of simulations for MC-CDMA transmission system. Finally, the results of analysis will show, that the application of MSF-MUD in combination with Golay codes can outperform significantly the other tested spreading codes and receivers for all mostly used models of HPA.

Keywords: HPA, MC-CDMA, microstatistic filter, multi-user receivers, PAPR.

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Authors: Cyrille Lambert, Tatiana Kalganova, Emanuele Stomeo

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Since 1992, year where Hugo de Garis has published the first paper on Evolvable Hardware (EHW), a period of intense creativity has followed. It has been actively researched, developed and applied to various problems. Different approaches have been proposed that created three main classifications: extrinsic, mixtrinsic and intrinsic EHW. Each of these solutions has a real interest. Nevertheless, although the extrinsic evolution generates some excellent results, the intrinsic systems are not so advanced. This paper suggests 3 possible solutions to implement the run-time configuration intrinsic EHW system: FPGA-based Run-Time Configuration system, JBits-based Run-Time Configuration system and Multi-board functional-level Run-Time Configuration system. The main characteristic of the proposed architectures is that they are implemented on Field Programmable Gate Array. A comparison of proposed solutions demonstrates that multi-board functional-level run-time configuration is superior in terms of scalability, flexibility and the implementation easiness.

Keywords: Evolvable hardware, evolutionary computation, FPGA systems.

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Authors: Hong Bae Kim, Chang Ho Hur

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Many governments have tried to reduce CO₂ emissions which are believed to be the main cause for global warming. The deployment of electric automobiles is regarded as an effective way to reduce CO₂ emissions. The Korean government has planned to deploy about 200,000 electric automobiles. The policy for the deployment of electric automobiles aims at not only decreasing gasoline consumption but also increasing electricity production. However, if an electricity consuming regions is not consistent with an electricity producing region, the policy generates environmental problems between regions. Hence, this paper has established the energy multi-region input-output model to specifically analyze the impacts of the deployment of electric automobiles on regional energy consumption and CO₂ emissions. Finally, the paper suggests policy directions regarding the deployment of electric automobiles.

Keywords: Electric automobiles, CO2 emissions, regional imbalances in electricity production and consumption, energy multi-region input-output model.

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Authors: Ghada S. Moussa

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With the increase in population along with economic prosperity, an enormous increase in the number and types of vehicles on the roads occurred. This fact brings a growing need for efficiently yet effectively classifying vehicles into their corresponding categories, which play a crucial role in many areas of infrastructure planning and traffic management.

This paper presents two vehicle-type classification approaches; 1) geometric-based and 2) appearance-based. The two classification approaches are used for two tasks: multi-class and intra-class vehicle classifications. For the evaluation purpose of the proposed classification approaches’ performance and the identification of the most effective yet efficient one, 10-fold cross-validation technique is used with a large dataset. The proposed approaches are distinguishable from previous research on vehicle classification in which: i) they consider both geometric and appearance attributes of vehicles, and ii) they perform remarkably well in both multi-class and intra-class vehicle classification. Experimental results exhibit promising potentials implementations of the proposed vehicle classification approaches into real-world applications.

Keywords: Appearance attributes, Geometric attributes, Support vector machine, Vehicle classification.

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Authors: E. C. Mattos, V. S. M. G. Daros, R. Dal Col, A. L. Nascimento

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The aim of this study is to present the results of a retrospective survey on the foreign matter found in foods analyzed at the Adolfo Lutz Institute, from July 2001 to July 2015. All the analyses were conducted according to the official methods described on Association of Official Agricultural Chemists (AOAC) for the micro analytical procedures and Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for the macro analytical procedures. The results showed flours, cereals and derivatives such as baking and pasta products were the types of food where foreign matters were found more frequently followed by condiments and teas. Fragments of stored grains insects, its larvae, nets, excrement, dead mites and rodent excrement were the most foreign matter found in food. Besides, foreign matters that can cause a physical risk to the consumer’s health such as metal, stones, glass, wood were found but rarely. Miscellaneous (shell, sand, dirt and seeds) were also reported. There are a lot of extraneous materials that are considered unavoidable since are something inherent to the product itself, such as insect fragments in grains. In contrast, there are avoidable extraneous materials that are less tolerated because it is preventable with the Good Manufacturing Practice. The conclusion of this work is that although most extraneous materials found in food are considered unavoidable it is necessary to keep the Good Manufacturing Practice throughout the food processing as well as maintaining a constant surveillance of the production process in order to avoid accidents that may lead to occurrence of these extraneous materials in food.

Keywords: Food contamination, extraneous materials, foreign matter, surveillance.

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Authors: Thabet Slimani, Boutheina Ben Yaghlane, Khaled Mellouli

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In the last few years, the Semantic Web gained scientific acceptance as a means of relationships identification in knowledge base, widely known by semantic association. Query about complex relationships between entities is a strong requirement for many applications in analytical domains. In bioinformatics for example, it is critical to extract exchanges between proteins. Currently, the widely known result of such queries is to provide paths between connected entities from data graph. However, they do not always give good results while facing the user need by the best association or a set of limited best association, because they only consider all existing paths but ignore the path evaluation. In this paper, we present an approach for supporting association discovery queries. Our proposal includes (i) a query language PmSPRQL which provides a multiparadigm query expressions for association extraction and (ii) some quantification measures making easy the process of association ranking. The originality of our proposal is demonstrated by a performance evaluation of our approach on real world datasets.

Keywords: Association extraction, query Language, relationships, knowledge base, multi-paradigm query.

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Authors: Sangram Keshori Mohapatra, Sidhartha Panda, Prasant Kumar Satpathy

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This paper describes the power-system stability improvement by a static synchronous compensator (STATCOM) based damping controller with Differential evolution (DE) algorithm is used to find out the optimal controller parameters. The present study considered both local and remote signals with associated time delays. The performances of the proposed controllers have been compared with different disturbances for both single-machine infinite bus power system and multi-machine power system. The performance of the proposed controllers with variations in the signal transmission delays has also been investigated. To show the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed controller the Simulation results are presented under different disturbances and loading conditions.

Keywords: Controller Design, Differential Evolution Algorithm Static Synchronous Compensator, Time Delay, Power System Stability, Single Machine Infinite-bus Power System, Multi-Machine Power System.

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Authors: F.C. Amadi, G. C. Enyi, G. G. Nasr

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Hydraulic fracturing is one of the most important stimulation techniques available to the petroleum engineer to extract hydrocarbons in tight gas sandstones. It allows more oil and gas production in tight reservoirs as compared to conventional means. The main aim of the study is to optimize the hydraulic fracturing as technique and for this purpose three multi-zones layer formation is considered and fractured contemporaneously. The three zones are named as Zone1 (upper zone), Zone2 (middle zone) and Zone3 (lower zone) respectively and they all occur in shale rock. Simulation was performed with Mfrac integrated software which gives a variety of 3D fracture options. This simulation process yielded an average fracture efficiency of 93.8%for the three respective zones and an increase of the average permeability of the rock system. An average fracture length of 909 ft with net height (propped height) of 210 ft (average) was achieved. Optimum fracturing results was also achieved with maximum fracture width of 0.379 inches at an injection rate of 13.01 bpm with 17995 Mscf of gas production.

Keywords: Hydraulic fracturing, Mfrac, Optimisation, Tight reservoir.

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Authors: Lewis E. Hibell, Honghai Liu, David J. Brown

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This paper presents the use of a newly created network structure known as a Self-Delaying Dynamic Network (SDN) to create a high resolution image from a set of time stepped input frames. These SDNs are non-recurrent temporal neural networks which can process time sampled data. SDNs can store input data for a lifecycle and feature dynamic logic based connections between layers. Several low resolution images and one high resolution image of a scene were presented to the SDN during training by a Genetic Algorithm. The SDN was trained to process the input frames in order to recreate the high resolution image. The trained SDN was then used to enhance a number of unseen noisy image sets. The quality of high resolution images produced by the SDN is compared to that of high resolution images generated using Bi-Cubic interpolation. The SDN produced images are superior in several ways to the images produced using Bi-Cubic interpolation.

Keywords: Image Enhancement, Neural Networks, Multi-Frame.

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Authors: B. Sudhakar, K. A. Ponnusamy

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In India cotton was the major commercial crop and cultivating all the states. In recent years, area of cotton declined due to pest and disease attack, drought, lower price for the produces etc. The first reason as pest and disease attack will be the challenges and it is of utmost importance that in future the insect problems would have to be tackled through Integrated Pest Management (IPM). The present study deals with principle knowledge of IPM adopting cotton cultivators in irrigated and rainfed conditions. Under irrigated conditions, among cultural practices, all respondents had principle knowledge about growing high yielding and pest resistant hybrids, sowing quality and certified seeds and avoiding cotton ratoon cropping. Regarding mechanical practices all respondents had principle knowledge about collecting and destroying egg, larvae and pupae of pests and removing and destroying pest and disease infected cotton squares, flowers and other shed materials. With regard to biological practices, 93% of them had principle knowledge about spraying neem oil, followed by 82% about tying Trichogramma eggcard. Among chemical practices, more than 90% of the respondents had principle knowledge about of spraying herbicide (96%), identifying ETL (Economic Threshold Level) for cotton pests (94%), and applying safe insecticides (90%). Under rainfed condition, among cultural practices, all respondents had principle knowledge about sowing quality and certified seeds and growing high yielding and pest resistant hybrids seeds. Regarding mechanical practices hundred percentage of the respondents had principle knowledge on the mechanical practices viz., collecting and destroying egg, larvae and pupae of pests and removing and destroying pest and disease infected cotton squares, flowers and other shed materials. With regard to biological practices, 96% of the respondents had correct in principle knowledge about spraying neem oil, followed by 89% about tying Trichogramma eggcard. With regard to chemical practices, more than 90% of the respondents had principle knowledge of applying safe insecticides (95%), avoiding repeated use of the same insecticides (95%), identifying ETL for cotton pests (94%) and applying granular insecticides (90%).

Keywords: Biological practices, chemical practices, cultural practices, mechanical practices, integrated pest management.

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Authors: Ding Jue, Li Jiahua, Lei Zhidi, Weng Peifen, Li Xiaowei

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With the rapid development of national modern industry, people begin to pay attention to environmental pollution and harm caused by industrial dust. Based on above, a numerical study on the dedusting technology of industrial environment was conducted. The dynamic models of multicomponent particles collision and coagulation, breakage and deposition are developed, and the interaction of water droplet and aerosol particle in 2-Dimension flow field was researched by Eulerian-Lagrangian method and Multi-Monte Carlo method. The effects of the droplet scale, movement speed of droplet and the flow field structure on scavenging efficiency were analyzed. The results show that under the certain condition, 30μm of droplet has the best scavenging efficiency. At the initial speed 1m/s of droplets, droplets and aerosol particles have more time to interact, so it has a better scavenging efficiency for the particle.

Keywords: Water droplet, aerosol particle, collision and coagulation, multi-Monte Carlo method.

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Authors: Mehdi Seifbarghy, Keyvan Roshan

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Main goal of preventive healthcare problems are at decreasing the likelihood and severity of potentially life-threatening illnesses by protection and early detection. The levels of establishment and staffing costs along with summation of the travel and waiting time that clients spent are considered as objectives functions of the proposed nonlinear integer programming model. In this paper, we have proposed a bi-objective mathematical model for designing a network of preventive healthcare facilities so as to minimize aforementioned objectives, simultaneously. Moreover, each facility acts as M/M/1 queuing system. The number of facilities to be established, the location of each facility, and the level of technology for each facility to be chosen are provided as the main determinants of a healthcare facility network. Finally, to demonstrate performance of the proposed model, four multi-objective decision making techniques are presented to solve the model.

Keywords: Preventive healthcare problems, Non-linear integer programming models, Multi-objective decision making techniques

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Authors: S. Madhu, V. V. Subba Rao

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In the implementation of Carbon Nanotube Reinforced Polymer matrix Composites in structural applications, deflection and stress analysis are important considerations. In the present study, a multi scale analysis of deflection and stress analysis of carbon nanotube (CNT) reinforced polymer composite plates is presented. A micromechanics model based on the Mori-Tanaka method is developed by introducing straight CNTs aligned in one direction. The effect of volume fraction and diameter of CNTs on plate deflection and the stresses are investigated using classical laminate plate theory (CLPT). The study is primarily conducted with the intention of observing the suitability of CNT reinforced polymer composite plates under static loading for structural applications.

Keywords: Carbon Nanotube, Micromechanics, Composite plate, Multi-scale analysis, Classical Laminate Plate Theory.

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Authors: Tomasz Dubiel, Tadeusz Balawender, Mirosław Osetek

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The paper presents the influence of non-metallic inclusions on the multi-stage forging process and the mechanical properties of the dodecagon socket bolt used in the automotive industry. The detected metallurgical defect was so large that it directly influenced the mechanical properties of the bolt and resulted in failure to meet the requirements of the mechanical property class. In order to assess the defect, an X-ray examination and metallographic examination of the defective bolt were performed, showing exogenous non-metallic inclusion. The size of the defect on the cross section was 0.531 mm in width and 1.523 mm in length; the defect was continuous along the entire axis of the bolt. In analysis, a finite element method (FEM) simulation of the multi-stage forging process was designed, taking into account a non-metallic inclusion parallel to the sample axis, reflecting the studied case. The process of defect propagation due to material upset in the head area was analyzed. The final forging stage in shaping the dodecagonal socket and filling the flange area was particularly studied. The effect of the defect was observed to significantly reduce the effective cross-section as a result of the expansion of the defect perpendicular to the axis of the bolt. The mechanical properties of products with and without the defect were analyzed. In the first step, the hardness test confirmed that the required value for the mechanical class 8.8 of both bolt types was obtained. In the second step, the bolts were subjected to a static tensile test. The bolts without the defect gave a positive result, while all 10 bolts with the defect gave a negative result, achieving a tensile strength below the requirements. Tensile strength tests were confirmed by metallographic tests and FEM simulation with perpendicular inclusion spread in the area of the head. The bolts were damaged directly under the bolt head, which is inconsistent with the requirements of ISO 898-1. It has been shown that non-metallic inclusions with orientation in accordance with the axis of the bolt can directly cause loss of functionality and these defects should be detected even before assembling in the machine element.

Keywords: continuous casting, multi-stage forging, non-metallic inclusion, upset bolt head

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Authors: Peter Newton, Peter Newman, Stephen Glackin, Roman Trubka

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Pressures for urban redevelopment are intensifying in all large cities. A new logic for urban development is required – green urbanism – that provides a spatial framework for directing population and investment inwards to brownfields and greyfields precincts, rather than outwards to the greenfields. This represents both a major opportunity and a major challenge for city planners in pluralist liberal democracies. However, plans for more compact forms of urban redevelopment are stalling in the face of community resistance. A new paradigm and spatial planning platform is required that will support timely multi-level and multi-actor stakeholder engagement, resulting in the emergence of consensus plans for precinct-level urban regeneration capable of more rapid implementation. Using Melbourne, Australia as a case study, this paper addresses two of the urban intervention challenges – where and how – via the application of a 21st century planning tool ENVISION created for this purpose.

Keywords: Green urbanism, greyfields, planning tools, urban regeneration.

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Authors: M. Bakhouya, S. A. Bahra, T. El-Ghazawi

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The Partitioned Global Address Space (PGAS) programming paradigm offers ease-of-use in expressing parallelism through a global shared address space while emphasizing performance by providing locality awareness through the partitioning of this address space. Therefore, the interest in PGAS programming languages is growing and many new languages have emerged and are becoming ubiquitously available on nearly all modern parallel architectures. Recently, new parallel machines with multiple cores are designed for targeting high performance applications. Most of the efforts have gone into benchmarking but there are a few examples of real high performance applications running on multicore machines. In this paper, we present and evaluate a parallelization technique for implementing a local DNA sequence alignment algorithm using a PGAS based language, UPC (Unified Parallel C) on a chip multithreading architecture, the UltraSPARC T1.

Keywords: Partitioned Global Address Space, Unified Parallel C, Multicore machines, Multi-threading Architecture, Sequence alignment.

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Authors: K. Balamurugan, R. Muralisachithanandam, V. Dharmalingam, R. Srikanth

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This paper deals with the optimal choice and allocation of multi FACTS devices in Deregulated power system using Evolutionary Programming method. The objective is to achieve the power system economic generation allocation and dispatch in deregulated electricity market. Using the proposed method, the locations of the FACTS devices, their types and ratings are optimized simultaneously. Different kinds of FACTS devices are simulated in this study such as UPFC, TCSC, TCPST, and SVC. Simulation results validate the capability of this new approach in minimizing the overall system cost function, which includes the investment costs of the FACTS devices and the bid offers of the market participants. The proposed algorithm is an effective and practical method for the choice and allocation of FACTS devices in deregulated electricity market environment. The standard data of IEEE 14 Bus systems has been taken into account and simulated with aid of MAT-lab software and results were obtained.

Keywords: FACTS devices, Optimal allocation, Deregulated electricity market, Evolutionary programming, Mat Lab.

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Authors: Mehtap Dursun, E. Ertugrul Karsak, Melis Almula Karadayi

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Disposal of health-care waste (HCW) is considered as an important environmental problem especially in large cities. Multiple criteria decision making (MCDM) techniques are apt to deal with quantitative and qualitative considerations of the health-care waste management (HCWM) problems. This research proposes a fuzzy multi-criteria group decision making approach with a multilevel hierarchical structure including qualitative as well as quantitative performance attributes for evaluating HCW disposal alternatives for Istanbul. Using the entropy weighting method, objective weights as well as subjective weights are taken into account to determine the importance weighting of quantitative performance attributes. The results obtained using the proposed methodology are thoroughly analyzed.

Keywords: Entropy weighting method, group decision making, health-care waste management, hierarchical fuzzy multi-criteriadecision making

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Authors: Rafat Alshorman, Walter Hussak

Abstract:

In mobile environments, unspecified numbers of transactions arrive in continuous streams. To prove correctness of their concurrent execution a method of modelling an infinite number of transactions is needed. Standard database techniques model fixed finite schedules of transactions. Lately, techniques based on temporal logic have been proposed as suitable for modelling infinite schedules. The drawback of these techniques is that proving the basic serializability correctness condition is impractical, as encoding (the absence of) conflict cyclicity within large sets of transactions results in prohibitively large temporal logic formulae. In this paper, we show that, under certain common assumptions on the graph structure of data items accessed by the transactions, conflict cyclicity need only be checked within all possible pairs of transactions. This results in formulae of considerably reduced size in any temporal-logic-based approach to proving serializability, and scales to arbitrary numbers of transactions.

Keywords: multi-step transactions, serializability, directed graph.

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Authors: Dulal Acharjee, Punyaban Patel

Abstract:

For collecting data from all sensor nodes, some changes in Dynamic Source Routing (DSR) protocol is proposed. At each hop level, route-ranking technique is used for distributing packets to different selected routes dynamically. For calculating rank of a route, different parameters like: delay, residual energy and probability of packet loss are used. A hybrid topology of DMPR(Disjoint Multi Path Routing) and MMPR(Meshed Multi Path Routing) is formed, where braided topology is used in different faulty zones of network. For reducing energy consumption, variant transmission ranges is used instead of fixed transmission range. For reducing number of packet drop, a fuzzy logic inference scheme is used to insert different types of delays dynamically. A rule based system infers membership function strength which is used to calculate the final delay amount to be inserted into each of the node at different clusters. In braided path, a proposed 'Dual Line ACK Link'scheme is proposed for sending ACK signal from a damaged node or link to a parent node to ensure that any error in link or any node-failure message may not be lost anyway. This paper tries to design the theoretical aspects of a model which may be applied for collecting data from any large hanging iron structure with the help of wireless sensor network. But analyzing these data is the subject of material science and civil structural construction technology, that part is out of scope of this paper.

Keywords: Metallic corrosion, Multi Path Routing, DisjointMPR, Meshed MPR, braided path, dual line ACK link, route rankingand Fuzzy Logic.

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