Search results for: Service Exploration

Authors: Armando Calabrese, Guendalina Capece, Michele Corbò, Nathan Levialdi Ghiron, Matteo M. Marucchi

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People from different cultures favor web pages characterized by the values of their culture and, therefore, tend to prefer different characteristics of a website according to their cultural values in terms of navigation, security, product information, customer service, shopping and design tools. For a company aiming to globalize its market it is useful to implement country specific cultural interfaces and different web sites for countries with different cultures. This paper, following the conclusions proposed by two models of Hall and Hofstede, and the studies of Marcus and Gould, defines, through an empirical analysis, the guidelines of web design for both the Scandinavian countries and Malaysia.

Keywords: Cultural dimensions, cultural markers, Hofstede, web design, web marketing.

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Authors: Dimitrios J. Dimitriou

Abstract:

Considering a worldwide tendency, air transports are growing very fast and many changes have taken place in planning, management and decision making process. Given the complexity of airport operation, the best use of existing capacity is the key driver of efficiency and productivity. This paper deals with the evaluation framework for the ground access at airports, by using a set of mode choice indicators providing key messages towards airport’s ground access performance. The application presents results for a sample of 12 European airports, illustrating recommendations to define policy and improve service for the air transport access chain.

Keywords: Air transport chain, airport ground access, airport access performance, airport policy.

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Authors: Tang Wei, Yang Xiaofeng, Gui Yewei, Du Yanxia

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Complex lifting entry was selected for precise landing performance during the Mars Science Laboratory entry. This study aims to develop the three-dimensional numerical method for precise computation and the surface panel method for rapid engineering prediction. Detailed flow field analysis for Mars exploration mission was performed by carrying on a series of fully three-dimensional Navier-Stokes computations. The static aerodynamic performance was then discussed, including the surface pressure, lift and drag coefficient, lift-to-drag ratio with the numerical and engineering method. Computation results shown that the shock layer is thin because of lower effective specific heat ratio, and that calculated results from both methods agree well with each other, and is consistent with the reference data. Aerodynamic performance analysis shows that CG location determines trim characteristics and pitch stability, and certain radially and axially shift of the CG location can alter the capsule lifting entry performance, which is of vital significance for the aerodynamic configuration design and inner instrument layout of the Mars entry capsule.

Keywords: Mars entry capsule, static aerodynamics, computational fluid dynamics, hypersonic.

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Authors: Gayadhar Panda, Sidhartha Panda, C. Ardil

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A modified Genetic Algorithm (GA) based optimal selection of parameters for Automatic Generation Control (AGC) of multi-area electric energy systems is proposed in this paper. Simulations on multi-area reheat thermal system with and without consideration of nonlinearity like governor dead band followed by 1% step load perturbation is performed to exemplify the optimum parameter search. In this proposed method, a modified Genetic Algorithm is proposed where one point crossover with modification is employed. Positional dependency in respect of crossing site helps to maintain diversity of search point as well as exploitation of already known optimum value. This makes a trade-off between exploration and exploitation of search space to find global optimum in less number of generations. The proposed GA along with decomposition technique as developed has been used to obtain the optimum megawatt frequency control of multi-area electric energy systems. Time-domain simulations are conducted with trapezoidal integration along with decomposition technique. The superiority of the proposed method over existing one is verified from simulations and comparisons.

Keywords: Automatic Generation Control (AGC), Reheat, Proportional Integral (PI) controller, Dead Band, Genetic Algorithm(GA).

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Authors: Omid Sharifi, Member, ACM, Zeki Bayram, Member, ACM

Abstract:

We demonstrate through a sample application, Ebanking, that the Web Service Modelling Language Ontology component can be used as a very powerful object-oriented database design language with logic capabilities. Its conceptual syntax allows the definition of class hierarchies, and logic syntax allows the definition of constraints in the database. Relations, which are available for modelling relations of three or more concepts, can be connected to logical expressions, allowing the implicit specification of database content. Using a reasoning tool, logic queries can also be made against the database in simulation mode.

Keywords: Semantic web, ontology, E-banking, database, WSML, WSMO, E-R diagram.

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Authors: Vishnu Pratap Singh Kirar

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Wireless sensor network (WSN) is a network of many interconnected networked systems, they equipped with energy resources and they are used to detect other physical characteristics. On WSN, there are many researches are performed in past decades. WSN applicable in many security systems govern by military and in many civilian related applications. Thus, the security of WSN gets attention of researchers and gives an opportunity for many future aspects. Still, there are many other issues are related to deployment and overall coverage, scalability, size, energy efficiency, quality of service (QoS), computational power and many more. In this paper we discus about various applications and security related issue and requirements of WSN.

Keywords: Wireless Sensor Network (WSN), Wireless Network Attacks, Wireless Network Security.

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Authors: Yessine Hadj Kacem, Adel Mahfoudhi, Hedi Tmar, Mohamed Abid

Abstract:

Unified Modeling Language (UML) extensions for real time embedded systems (RTES) co-design, are taking a growing interest by a great number of industrial and research communities. The extension mechanism is provided by UML profiles for RTES. It aims at improving an easily-understood method of system design for non-experts. On the other hand, one of the key items of the co- design methods is the Hardware/Software partitioning and scheduling tasks. Indeed, it is mandatory to define where and when tasks are implemented and run. Unfortunately the main goals of co-design are not included in the usual practice of UML profiles. So, there exists a need for mapping used models to an execution platform for both schedulability test and HW/SW partitioning. In the present work, test schedulability and design space exploration are performed at an early stage. The proposed approach adopts Model Driven Engineering MDE. It starts from UML specification annotated with the recent profile for the Modeling and Analysis of Real Time Embedded systems MARTE. Following refinement strategy, transformation rules allow to find a feasible schedule that satisfies timing constraints and to define where tasks will be implemented. The overall approach is experimented for the design of a football player robot application.

Keywords: MDE, UML profile, scheduling analysis, HW/SW partitioning.

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Authors: Hao Liu, Lihui Zheng, Chinedu J. Okere, Chao Wang, Xiangchun Wang, Peng Zhang

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The coalbed methane (CBM) extraction industry (an unconventional energy source) has not established guidelines for experimental evaluation of sensitivity damage for coal samples. The existing experimental process of previous researches mainly followed the industry standard for conventional oil and gas reservoirs (CIS). However, the existing evaluation method ignores certain critical differences between CBM reservoirs and conventional reservoirs, which could inevitably result in an inaccurate evaluation of sensitivity damage and, eventually, poor decisions regarding the formulation of formation damage prevention measures. In this study, we propose improved experimental guidelines for evaluating seepage sensitivity damage of CBM reservoirs by leveraging on the shortcomings of the existing methods. The proposed method was established via a theoretical analysis of the main drawbacks of the existing methods and validated through comparative experiments. The results show that the proposed evaluation technique provided reliable experimental results that can better reflect actual reservoir conditions and correctly guide the future development of CBM reservoirs. This study is pioneering the research on the optimization of experimental parameters for efficient exploration and development of CBM reservoirs.

Keywords: Coalbed methane, formation damage, permeability, unconventional energy source.

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Authors: Aaqif Afzaal Abbasi, Javaid Iqbal, Akhtar Nawaz Malik

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4G Communication Networks provide heterogeneous wireless technologies to mobile subscribers through IP based networks and users can avail high speed access while roaming across multiple wireless channels; possible by an organized way to manage the Quality of Service (QoS) functionalities in these networks. This paper proposes the idea of developing a novel QoS optimization architecture that will judge the user requirements and knowing peak times of services utilization can save the bandwidth/cost factors. The proposed architecture can be customized according to the network usage priorities so as to considerably improve a network-s QoS performance.

Keywords: QoS, Network Coverage Boundary, ServicesArchives Units (SAU), Cumulative Services Archives Units (CSAU).

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Authors: Fuyang Peng, Bo Deng, Chao Qi

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This paper presents the design and implementation of CASTE, a Cloud-based automatic software test environment. We first present the architecture of CASTE, then the main packages and classes of it are described in detail. CASTE is built upon a private Infrastructure as a Service platform. Through concentrated resource management of virtualized testing environment and automatic execution control of test scripts, we get a better solution to the testing resource utilization and test automation problem. Experiments on CASTE give very appealing results.

Keywords: Software testing, test environment, test script, cloud computing, IaaS, test automation.

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Authors: Wern-Yarng Shieh, Hsin-Chuan Chen, Ti-Ho Wang, Bo-Wei Chen

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Infrared communication in the wavelength band 780- 950 nm is very suitable for short-range point-to-point communications. It is a good choice for vehicle-to-vehicle communication in several intelligent-transportation-system (ITS) applications such as cooperative driving, collision warning, and pileup-crash prevention. In this paper, with the aid of a physical model established in our previous works, we explore the communication area of an infrared intervehicle communication system utilizing a typical low-cost cormmercial lightemitting diodes (LEDs) as the emitter and planar p-i-n photodiodes as the receiver. The radiation pattern of the emitter fabricated by aforementioned LEDs and the receiving pattern of the receiver are approximated by a linear combination of cosinen functions. This approximation helps us analyze the system performance easily. Both multilane straight-road conditions and curved-road conditions with various radius of curvature are taken into account. The condition of a small car communicating with a big truck, i.e., there is a vertical mounting height difference between the emitter and the receiver, is also considered. Our results show that the performance of the system meets the requirement of aforementioned ITS applications in terms of the communication area.

Keywords: Dedicated short-range communication (DSRC), infrared communication, intervehicle communication, intelligent transportation system (ITS).

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Authors: Nor Azlina Ab. Aziz, Kamarulzaman Ab. Aziz, Wan Zakiah Wan Ismail

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Coverage is one of the main research interests in wireless sensor networks (WSN), it is used to determine the quality of service (QoS) of the networks. Therefore this paper aims to review the common strategies use in solving coverage problem in WSN. The strategies studied are used during deployment phase where the coverage is calculated based on the placement of the sensors on the region of interest (ROI). The strategies reviewed are categorized into three groups based on the approaches used, namely; force based, grid based or computational geometry based approach.

Keywords: Computational geometry, coverage, Delaunay triangulation, force, grid, Voronoi diagram, wireless sensor networks.

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Authors: M. Schukat, M.P. Cullen, D. O'Beirne

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This paper describes a UDP over IP based, server-oriented redundant host configuration protocol (RHCP) that can be used by collaborating embedded systems in an ad-hoc network to acquire a dynamic IP address. The service is provided by a single network device at a time and will be dynamically reassigned to one of the other network clients if the primary provider fails. The protocol also allows all participating clients to monitor the dynamic makeup of the network over time. So far the algorithm has been implemented and tested on an 8-bit embedded system architecture with a 10Mbit Ethernet interface.

Keywords: Ad-Hoc Networks, Collaborating Embedded Systems, Dynamic Host Configuration, Redundancy.

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Authors: Candy P. Schulze, Michael Brieke, Prof. Peter Nyhuis

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The building of a factory can be a strategic investment owing to its long service life. An evaluation that only focuses, for example, on payments for the building, the technical equipment of the factory, and the personnel for the enterprise is – considering the complexity of the system factory – not sufficient for this long-term view. The success of an investment is secured, among other things, by the attainment of nonmonetary goals, too, like transformability. Such aspects are not considered in traditional investment calculations like the net present value method. This paper closes this gap with the enhanced economic evaluation (EWR) for factory planning. The procedure and the first results of an application in a project are presented.

Keywords: economic efficiency, holistic evaluation, factory planning

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Authors: Hsiu-Yuan Wang, Shwu-Huey Wang

Abstract:

This study proposes and tests a rescapturing elements of perceived gain and loss that, by perceived value of medical tourism products, influencintention of potential customers. Data from 301 usable qwere tested against the research model using the structmodeling approach. The results indicated that perceivedkey predictor of customer intentions. As for benefimedical quality, service quality and enjoyment wcomponents that significantly influenced the perceptiRegarding sacrifice, the effects of perceived risk on pewere significant. The findings can provide insights intohow destination countries can make medical tourism a wfor themselves and international patients.KeywordsMedical tourism, perceived valueintention.

Keywords: Medical tourism, perceived valueintention.

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Authors: Jenny K. Ubaque, Edward P. Guillen, Juan S. Solórzano, Leonardo J. Ramírez

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The health care must be a right for people around the world, but in order to guarantee the access to all, it is necessary to overcome geographical barriers. Telemedicine take advantage of Information Communication Technologies to deploy health care services around the world. To achieve those goals, it is necessary to use existing last mile solution to create access for home users, which is why is necessary to establish the channel characteristics for those kinds of services. This paper presents an analysis of network performance of last mile solution for the use of IPTV broadcasting with the application of streaming for telemedicine apps.

Keywords: Telemedicine, IPTV, GPON, ADSL2+, COAXIAL, Jumbogram.

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Authors: Wan-Yu Liu

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To respond to the Kyoto Protocol, the policy of Payment for Environmental Service (PES), which was entitled “Plain Landscape Afforestation Program (PLAP)", was certified by Executive Yuan in Taiwan on 31 August 2001 and has been implementing for six years since 1 January 2002. Although the PLAP has received a lot of positive comments, there are still many difficulties during the process of implementation, such as insufficient technology for afforestation, private landowners- low interests in participating in PLAP, insufficient subsidies, and so on, which are potential threats that hinder the PLAP from moving forward in future. In this paper, selecting Ping-Tung County in Taiwan as a sample region and targeting those private landowners with and without intention to participate in the PLAP, respectively, we conduct an empirical analysis based on the Logit model to investigate the factors that determine whether those private landowners join the PLAP, so as to realize the incentive effects of the PLAP upon the personal decision on afforestation. The possible factors that might determine private landowner-s participation in the PLAP include landowner-s characteristics, cropland characteristics, as well as policy factors. Among them, the policy factors include afforestation subsidy amount (+), duration of afforestation subsidy (+), the rules on adjoining and adjacent areas (+), and so on, which do not reach the remarkable level in statistics though, but the directions of variable signs are consistent with the intuition behind the policy. As for the landowners- characteristics, each of age (+), education level (–), and annual household income (+) variables reaches 10% of the remarkable level in statistics; as for the cropland characteristics, each of cropland area (+), cropland price (–), and the number of cropland parcels (–) reaches 1% of the remarkable level in statistics. In light of the above, the cropland characteristics are the dominate factor that determines the probability of landowner-s participation in the PLAP. In the Logit model established by this paper, the probability of correctly estimating nonparticipants is 98%, the probability of correctly estimating the participants is 71.8%, and the probability for the overall estimation is 95%. In addition, Hosmer-Lemeshow test and omnibus test also revealed that the Logit model in this paper may provide fine goodness of fit and good predictive power in forecasting private landowners- participation in this program. The empirical result of this paper expects to help the implementation of the afforestation programs in Taiwan.

Keywords: Forestry policy, logit, afforestation subsidy, afforestation policy.

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Authors: Qian Liu, Steve Furber

Abstract:

To explore how the brain may recognise objects in its general,accurate and energy-efficient manner, this paper proposes the use of a neuromorphic hardware system formed from a Dynamic Video Sensor (DVS) silicon retina in concert with the SpiNNaker real-time Spiking Neural Network (SNN) simulator. As a first step in the exploration on this platform a recognition system for dynamic hand postures is developed, enabling the study of the methods used in the visual pathways of the brain. Inspired by the behaviours of the primary visual cortex, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are modelled using both linear perceptrons and spiking Leaky Integrate-and-Fire (LIF) neurons. In this study’s largest configuration using these approaches, a network of 74,210 neurons and 15,216,512 synapses is created and operated in real-time using 290 SpiNNaker processor cores in parallel and with 93.0% accuracy. A smaller network using only 1/10th of the resources is also created, again operating in real-time, and it is able to recognise the postures with an accuracy of around 86.4% - only 6.6% lower than the much larger system. The recognition rate of the smaller network developed on this neuromorphic system is sufficient for a successful hand posture recognition system, and demonstrates a much improved cost to performance trade-off in its approach.

Keywords: Spiking neural network (SNN), convolutional neural network (CNN), posture recognition, neuromorphic system.

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Authors: Tayeb Lardjane, Rabah Messaci

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We consider a network of two M/M/1 parallel queues having the same poisonnian arrival stream with rate λ. Upon his arrival to the system a customer heads to the shortest queue and stays until being served. If the two queues have the same length, an arriving customer chooses one of the two queues with the same probability. Each duration of service in the two queues is an exponential random variable with rate μ and no jockeying is permitted between the two queues. A new numerical method, based on linear programming and convex optimization, is performed for the computation of the steady state solution of the system.

Keywords: Steady state solution, matrix formulation, convex set, shortest queue, linear programming.

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Authors: A. Gutiérrez, A. Castillo, J. M. Gómez, J. M. Gutiérrez, A. García-Cabot

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Road signs are the elements of roads with a lot of influence in driver-s behavior. So that signals can fulfill its function, they must overcome visibility and durability requirements, particularly needed at night, when the coefficient of retroreflection becomes a decisive factor in ensuring road safety. Accepting that the visibility of the signage has implications for people-s safety, we understand the importance to fulfill its function: to foster the highest standards of service and safety in drivers. The usual conditions of perception of any sign are determined by: age of the driver, reflective material, luminosity, vehicle speed and emplacement. In this way, this paper evaluates the different signals to increase the safety road.

Keywords: Luminosity, orientation, retroreflection, traffic signs.

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Authors: Krešimir Fertalj, Mladen Matejaš

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In turbulent modern economy, the companies need to properly manage their business processes. Well-defined and stable business processes ensure security of crucial data and applications, and provide a quality product or service to the end customer. On the other side, constant changes on the market, new regulatory provisions, and emerging new technologies require the need of issuing prompt and effective changes of business process. In this article, we explore the use of agile principles in working with business process management (BPM) solutions. We deal with difficulties in BPM development cycle, review the benefits of using agility, and choose the basic agile principles that ensure the success of a BPM project.

Keywords: Agile development, BPM environment, Kanban, SCRUM, XP.

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Authors: Irina Astrova, Arne Koschel, Thole Schneider, Johannes Westhuis, Jürgen Westerkamp

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The main purpose of this paper was to find a simple solution for load balancing and fault tolerance in OSGi. The challenge was to implement a highly available web application such as a shopping cart system with load balancing and fault tolerance, without having to change the core of OSGi.

Keywords: Fault tolerance, load balancing, OSGi, shopping cart system.

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Authors: Muhammad T. Alam, Zheng Da Wu

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In this research, we propose a weighted class based queuing (WCBQ) mechanism to provide class differentiation and to reduce the load for the IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem) presence server (PS). The tasks of admission controller for the PS are demonstrated. Analysis and simulation models are developed to quantify the performance of WCBQ scheme. An optimized dropping time frame has been developed based on which some of the preexisting messages are dropped from the PS-buffer. Cost functions are developed and simulation comparison has been performed with FCFS (First Come First Served) scheme. The results show that the PS benefits significantly from the proposed queuing and dropping algorithm (WCBQ) during heavy traffic.

Keywords: Admission control, presence, queuing.

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Authors: Norazah Mohd Suki, Norbayah Mohd Suki

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This study aims to identify cellular phone users- shopping motivating factors towards online shopping. 100 university students located in Klang Valley, Malaysia were involved as the respondents. They were required to complete a set of questionnaire and had to own a cellular phone in order to be selected as sample in this study. Three from five proposed hypotheses were supported: purchasing information, shopping utilities and service quality. As a result, marketers and retailers should concentrate more on the less important factors in order to encourage and create willingness of the consumers to purchase online. Recommendation for future research is also presented.

Keywords: Motivation, Online Shopping, Purchasing.

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Authors: O. C. Nosiri, V. E. Idigo, C. O. Ohaneme, K. A. Akpado

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Coverage and capacity performance in a cellular network determines the system potentials. If the coverage radius is limited, end users suffer poor service quality, if the system capacity reduces, fewer subscribers will be accommodated. This paper investigated the performance effects of the noise rise caused by the spurious emission from a co-located jammer involving downlink frequency of CDMA2000 and uplink frequency of WCDMA operating at 1.9GHz. Measurements were carried out to evaluate the impact on the coverage radius and the system capacity.

Keywords: Capacity, Co-location, Coverage, Noise rise.

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Authors: Karen Puren, Ernst Drewes, Vera Roos

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This paper explores the sense of place in the Vredefort Dome World Heritage site, South Africa, as an essential input for the formulation of spatial planning proposals for the area. Intangible aspects such as personal and symbolic meanings of sites are currently not integrated in spatial planning in South Africa. This may have a detrimental effect on local inhabitants who have a long history with the site and built up a strong place identity. Involving local inhabitants at an early stage of the planning process and incorporating their attitudes and opinions in future intervention in the area, may also contribute to the acceptance of the legitimacy of future policy. An interdisciplinary and mixed-method research approach was followed in this study in order to identify possible ways to anchor spatial planning proposals in the identity of the place. In essence, the qualitative study revealed that inhabitants reflect a deep and personal relationship with and within the area, which contributes significantly to their sense of emotional security and selfidentity. Results include a strong conservation-orientated attitude with regard to the natural rural character of the site, especially in the inner core.

Keywords: Place identity, Sense of Place, Spatial Planning, Vredefort Dome World Heritage Site.

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Authors: Sarah Vuningoma, Maria Rosa Lorini, Wallace Chigona

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The potential of mobile phones is evident in their ability to address isolation and loneliness, support the improvement of interpersonal relations, and contribute to the facilitation of assimilation processes. Mobile phones can play a role in facilitating the integration of refugees into a new environment. This study aims to evaluate the impact of mobile phone use on helping refugees navigate the challenges posed by cultural differences in the host country. Semi-structured interviews were employed to collect data for the study, involving a sample size of 27 participants. Participants in the study were refugees based in South Africa, and thematic analysis was the chosen method for data analysis. The research highlights the numerous challenges faced by refugees in their host nation, including a lack of local cultural skills, the separation of family and friends from their countries of origin, hurdles in acquiring legal documentation, and the complexities of assimilating into the unfamiliar community. The use of mobile phones by refugees comes with several advantages, such as the advancement of language and cultural understanding, seamless integration into the host country, streamlined communication, and the exploration of diverse opportunities. Concurrently, mobile phones allow refugees in South Africa to manage the impact of culture shock.

Keywords: Mobile phones, culture shock, refugees, South Africa.

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Authors: Justyna Rybicka, Ashutosh Tiwari, Shane Enticott

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In the age of automation and computation aiding manufacturing, it is clear that manufacturing systems have become more complex than ever before. Although technological advances provide the capability to gain more value with fewer resources, sometimes utilisation of the manufacturing capabilities available to organisations is difficult to achieve. Flexible manufacturing systems (FMS) provide a unique capability to manufacturing organisations where there is a need for product range diversification by providing line efficiency through production flexibility. This is very valuable in trend driven production set-ups or niche volume production requirements. Although FMS provides flexible and efficient facilities, its optimal set-up is key in achieving production performance. As many variables are interlinked due to the flexibility provided by the FMS, analytical calculations are not always sufficient to predict the FMS’ performance. Simulation modelling is capable of capturing the complexity and constraints associated with FMS. This paper demonstrates how discrete event simulation (DES) can address complexity in an FMS to optimise the production line performance. A case study of an automotive FMS is presented. The DES model demonstrates different configuration options depending on prioritising objectives: utilisation and throughput. Additionally, this paper provides insight into understanding the impact of system set-up constraints on the FMS performance and demonstrates the exploration into the optimal production set-up.

Keywords: Automotive, capacity performance, discrete event simulation, flexible manufacturing system.

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Authors: P.S.Prakash, S.Selvan

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Over the past several years, there has been a considerable amount of research within the field of Quality of Service (QoS) support for distributed multimedia systems. One of the key issues in providing end-to-end QoS guarantees in packet networks is determining a feasible path that satisfies a number of QoS constraints. The problem of finding a feasible path is NPComplete if number of constraints is more than two and cannot be exactly solved in polynomial time. We proposed Feasible Path Selection Algorithm (FPSA) that addresses issues with pertain to finding a feasible path subject to delay and cost constraints and it offers higher success rate in finding feasible paths.

Keywords: feasible path, multiple constraints, path selection, QoS routing

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Authors: Moudar H. A. Zgoul, Amin Al Zamer

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Adhesive materials and adhesion have been the focal point of multiple research works related to numerous applications, particularly, aerospace, and aviation industries. To enhance the properties of conventional adhesive materials, additives have been introduced to the mix in order to enhance their mechanical and physical properties by creating a hybrid adhesive material. The evaluation of the mechanical properties of such hybrid adhesive materials is thus of an essential requirement for the purpose of properly modeling their behavior accurately. This paper presents an approach/tool to simulate the behavior such hybrid adhesives in a way that will allow researchers to better understand their behavior while in service.

Keywords: Adhesive materials, analysis, hybrid adhesives, mechanical properties, simulation.

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