Search results for: main controlling factors

Authors: Yves Lacroix, Van Van Than, Didier Leandri, Pierre Liardet

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The western Tombolo of the Giens peninsula in southern France, known as Almanarre beach, is subject to coastal erosion. We are trying to use computer simulation in order to propose solutions to stop this erosion. Our aim was first to determine the main factors for this erosion and successfully apply a coupled hydrosedimentological numerical model based on observations and measurements that have been performed on the site for decades. We have gathered all available information and data about waves, winds, currents, tides, bathymetry, coastal line, and sediments concerning the site. These have been divided into two sets: one devoted to calibrating a numerical model using Mike 21 software, the other to serve as a reference in order to numerically compare the present situation to what it could be if we implemented different types of underwater constructions. This paper presents the first part of the study: selecting and melting different sources into a coherent data basis, identifying the main erosion factors, and calibrating the coupled software model against the selected reference period. Our results bring calibration of the numerical model with good fitting coefficients. They also show that the winter South-Western storm events conjugated to depressive weather conditions constitute a major factor of erosion, mainly due to wave impact in the northern part of the Almanarre beach. Together, current and wind impact is shown negligible.

Keywords: Almanarre beach, coastal erosion, hydro-sedimentological, numerical model.

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Authors: Renkai Wang, Tingcun Wei

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In this paper, a digital control algorithm based on delta-operator is presented for high-frequency digitally-controlled DC-DC switching converters. The stability and the controlling accuracy of the DC-DC switching converters are improved by using the digital control algorithm based on delta-operator without increasing the hardware circuit scale. The design method of voltage compensator in delta-domain using PID (Proportion-Integration- Differentiation) control is given in this paper, and the simulation results based on Simulink platform are provided, which have verified the theoretical analysis results very well. It can be concluded that, the presented control algorithm based on delta-operator has better stability and controlling accuracy, and easier hardware implementation than the existed control algorithms based on z-operator, therefore it can be used for the voltage compensator design in high-frequency digitally- controlled DC-DC switching converters.

Keywords: Digitally-controlled DC-DC switching converter, finite word length, control algorithm based on delta-operator, high-frequency, stability.

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Authors: Seema Chopra, R. Mitra, Vijay Kumar

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In this paper, a neural network tuned fuzzy controller is proposed for controlling Multi-Input Multi-Output (MIMO) systems. For the convenience of analysis, the structure of MIMO fuzzy controller is divided into single input single-output (SISO) controllers for controlling each degree of freedom. Secondly, according to the characteristics of the system-s dynamics coupling, an appropriate coupling fuzzy controller is incorporated to improve the performance. The simulation analysis on a two-level mass–spring MIMO vibration system is carried out and results show the effectiveness of the proposed fuzzy controller. The performance though improved, the computational time and memory used is comparatively higher, because it has four fuzzy reasoning blocks and number may increase in case of other MIMO system. Then a fuzzy neural network is designed from a set of input-output training data to reduce the computing burden during implementation. This control strategy can not only simplify the implementation problem of fuzzy control, but also reduce computational time and consume less memory.

Keywords: Fuzzy Control, Neural Network, MIMO System, Optimization of Membership functions.

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Authors: S. Choodoung, U. Smutkupt

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This study systemizes processes and methods in wooden furniture design that contains uniqueness in function and aesthetics. The study was done by research and analysis for designer-s consideration factors that affect function and production. Therefore, the study result indicates that such factors are design process (planning for design, product specifications, concept design, product architecture, industrial design, production), design evaluation as well as wooden furniture design dependent factors i.e. art (art style; furniture history, form), functionality (the strength and durability, area place, using), material (appropriate to function, wood mechanical properties), joints, cost, safety, and social responsibility. Specifically, all aforementioned factors affect good design. Resulting from direct experience gained through user-s usage, the designer must design the wooden furniture systemically and effectively. As a result, this study selected dinning armchair as a case study with all involving factors and all design process stated in this study.

Keywords: Furniture Design, Function Design, Aesthetic, Wooden Furniture.

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Authors: Y. Rathiranee, D. M. Semasinghe

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This study attempts to identify the factors influencing on women empowerment of rural area in Sri Lanka through micro finance services. Data were collected from one hundred (100) rural women involving self-employment activities through a questionnaire using direct personal interviews. Judgment and Convenience Random sampling technique was used to select the sample size from three Divisional Secretariat divisions of Kandawalai, Poonakari and Karachchi in Kilinochchi District. The factor analysis was performed on fourteen (14) variables for screening and reducing the variables to identify the influencing factors on empowerment. Multiple regression analysis was used to identify the relationship between the three empowerment factors and the impact of micro finance on overall empowerment of rural women. The result of this study summarized the variables into three factors namely decision making, freedom to mobility and family support and which are positively associated with empowerment. In addition to this the value of adjusted R2 is 0.248 indicates that all the variables extracted can be explained 24.8% of the variation in the women empowerment through microfinance. Independent variables of these three factors have positive correlation with women empowerment as well as significant values at 5 percent level.

Keywords: Influencing factors, Micro finance, rural women and women empowerment.

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Authors: Amer A. Dheedan

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Operational safety of critical systems, such as nuclear power plants, industrial chemical processes and means of transportation, is a major concern for system engineers and operators. A means to assure that is on-line safety monitors that deliver three safety tasks; fault detection and diagnosis, alarm annunciation and fault controlling. While current monitors deliver these tasks, benefits and limitations in their approaches have at the same time been highlighted. Drawing from those benefits, this paper develops a distributed monitor based on semi-independent agents, i.e. a multiagent system, and monitoring knowledge derived from a safety assessment model of the monitored system. Agents are deployed hierarchically and provided with knowledge portions and collaboration protocols to reason and integrate over the operational conditions of the components of the monitored system. The monitor aims to address limitations arising from the large-scale, complicated behaviour and distributed nature of monitored systems and deliver the aforementioned three monitoring tasks effectively.

Keywords: Alarm annunciation, fault controlling, fault detection and diagnosis

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Authors: Chiara Mansanta, Daniela Sani

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This paper studies the concept of intrapreneurship discovery for innovation and technology development related to the manufacturing industries set up in the center of Italy, in Marche Region. The study underlined the key drivers of the innovation process and the main factors that influence innovation. Starting from a literature study on open innovation, this paper examines the role of human capital to support company’s development. The empirical part of the study is based on a survey to 151 manufacturing companies that represent the 34% of that universe at the regional level. The survey underlined the main KPI’s that influence companies in their decision processes; then tools for these decision processes are presented.

Keywords: Business model, decision making, intrapreneurship discovery, open innovation, standard methodology.

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Authors: J. Urbánek Jiří, Krahulec Josef, Johanidesová Jitka, F. Urbánek Jiří

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This paper deals with using of prevailing operation system MS Office (SmartArt...) for mathematical models, using DYVELOP (Dynamic Vector Logistics of Processes) method. It serves for crisis situations investigation and modelling within the organizations of critical infrastructure. In first part of paper, it will be introduced entities, operators, and actors of DYVELOP method. It uses just three operators of Boolean algebra and four types of the entities: the Environments, the Process Systems, the Cases, and the Controlling. The Process Systems (PrS) have five “brothers”: Management PrS, Transformation PrS, Logistic PrS, Event PrS and Operation PrS. The Cases have three “sisters”: Process Cell Case, Use Case, and Activity Case. They all need for the controlling of their functions special Ctrl actors, except ENV – it can do without Ctrl. Model´s maps are named the Blazons and they are able mathematically - graphically express the relationships among entities, actors and processes. In second part of this paper, the rich blazons of DYVELOP method will be used for the discovering and modelling of the cycling cases and their phases. The blazons need live PowerPoint presentation for better comprehension of this paper mission. The crisis management of energetic crisis infrastructure organization is obliged to use the cycles for successful coping of crisis situations. Several times cycling of these cases is necessary condition for the encompassment for both emergency events and the mitigation of organization´s damages. Uninterrupted and continuous cycling process brings for crisis management fruitfulness and it is good indicator and controlling actor of organizational continuity and its sustainable development advanced possibilities. The research reliable rules are derived for the safety and reliable continuity of energetic critical infrastructure organization in the crisis situation.

Keywords: Blazons, computational assistance, DYVELOP method, critical infrastructure.

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Authors: Siti Murniningsih, Evi Anggraheni

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Various infrastructures such as dams, flood control dams and reservoirs have been developed in the 19th century until the 20th century. These infrastructures are very effective in controlling the river flows and in preventing inundation in the urban area prone to flooding. Flooding in the urban area often brings large impact, affecting every aspect of life and also environment. Ciliwung is one of the rivers allegedly contributes to the flooding problems in Jakarta; various engineering work has been done in Ciliwung river to help controlling the flooding. One of the engineering work is to build Ciawi Dam and Sukamahi Dam. In this research, author is doing the flood calculation with Nakayasu Method, while the previous flooding in that case study is computed using Level Pool Routine. The effectiveness of these dams can be identified by using flood simulation of existing condition and compare it to the flood simulation after the dam construction. The final goal of this study is to determine the effectiveness of flood mitigation infrastructure located at upstream area in reducing the volume of flooding in Jakarta.

Keywords: Effectiveness, flood simulation, infrastructure flooding, level pool routine.

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Authors: Elif Alaybeyoğlu, Y. Esra Albayrak

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Marketing establishes a communication network between producers and consumers. Nowadays, marketing approach is customer-focused and products are directly oriented to meet customer needs. Marketing, which is a long process, needs organization and management. Therefore strategic marketing planning becomes more and more important in today’s competitive conditions. Main focus of this paper is to evaluate pricing strategies and select the best pricing strategy solution while considering internal and external factors influencing the company’s pricing decisions associated with new product development. To reflect the decision maker’s subjective preference information and to determine the weight vector of factors (attributes), the fuzzy linear programming technique for multidimensional analysis of preference (LINMAP) under intuitionistic fuzzy (IF) environments is used.

Keywords: IF Sets, LINMAP, MAGDM, Marketing.

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Authors: Seyed Hossein Iranmanesh, Zahra Mokhtari

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Estimation time and cost of work completion in a project and follow up them during execution are contributors to success or fail of a project, and is very important for project management team. Delivering on time and within budgeted cost needs to well managing and controlling the projects. To dealing with complex task of controlling and modifying the baseline project schedule during execution, earned value management systems have been set up and widely used to measure and communicate the real physical progress of a project. But it often fails to predict the total duration of the project. In this paper data mining techniques is used predicting the total project duration in term of Time Estimate At Completion-EAC (t). For this purpose, we have used a project with 90 activities, it has updated day by day. Then, it is used regular indexes in literature and applied Earned Duration Method to calculate time estimate at completion and set these as input data for prediction and specifying the major parameters among them using Clem software. By using data mining, the effective parameters on EAC and the relationship between them could be extracted and it is very useful to manage a project with minimum delay risks. As we state, this could be a simple, safe and applicable method in prediction the completion time of a project during execution.

Keywords: Data Mining Techniques, Earned Duration Method, Earned Value, Estimate At Completion.

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Authors: Unnop Panpuang

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The objectives of this project are to study on the work efficiency of the employees, sorted by their profiles, and to study on the relation between job attributes and work efficiency of employees of Suan Sunandha Rajabhat University. The samples used for this study are 292 employees. The statistics used in this study are frequencies, standard deviations, One-way ANOVA and Pearson’s correlation coefficient. Majority of respondent were male with an undergraduate degree, married and lives together. The average age of respondents was between 31-41 years old, married and the educational background are higher than bachelor’s degree. The job attribute is correlated to the work efficiency with the statistical significance level of.o1. This concurs with the predetermined hypothesis. The correlation between the two main factors is in the moderate level. All the categories of job attributes such as the variety of skills, job clarity, job importance, freedom to do work are considered separately.

Keywords: Employees, Job Attributes, Work Efficiency.

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Authors: A. Elbaz, K. Spang

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Infrastructure projects are often subjected to delays and cost overruns and mistakenly described as unsuccessful projects. These projects have many peculiarities such as public attention, impact on the environment, subjected to special regulations, etc. They also deal with several stakeholders with different motivations and face unique risks. With this in mind we need to reconsider our approach to manage them, define their success factors and implement these success factors. Infrastructure projects are not only lacking a unified meaning of project success or a definition of success factors, but also a clear method to implement these factors. This paper investigates this gap and introduces a concept to implement success factors in an efficient way, taking into consideration the specific characteristics of infrastructure projects. This concept consists of six enablers such as project organization, project team, project management workflow, contract management, communication and knowledge transfer and project documentations. These enablers allow other success factors to be efficiently implemented in projects. In conclusion, this paper provides project managers as well as company managers with a tool to define and implement success factors efficiently in their projects, along with upgrading their assets for the coming projects. This tool consists of processes and validated checklists to ensure the best use of company resources and knowledge. Due to the special features of infrastructure projects this tool will be tested in the German infrastructure market. However, it is meant to be adaptable to other markets and industries.

Keywords: Infrastructure projects, enablers, project success, success factors, transportation projects.

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Authors: Valeri Arghutashvili, Mari Gogochuri

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Tourism industry development is one of the key priorities in Georgia, as it has positive influence on economic activities. Its contribution is very important for the different regions, as well as for the national economy. Benefits of the tourism industry include new jobs, service development, and increasing tax revenues, etc. The main aim of this research is to review and analyze the potential of the Georgian tourism industry with its long-term strategy and current challenges. To plan activities in a long-term development, it is required to evaluate several factors on the regional and on the national level. Factors include activities, transportation, services, lodging facilities, infrastructure and institutions. The major research contributions are practical estimates about regional tourism development which plays an important role in the integration process with global markets.

Keywords: Regional tourism, tourism industry, tourism in Georgia, tourism benefits.

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Authors: Ana Paula Lisboa Sohn, Filipa Dionísio Vieria, Nelson Casarotto, Idaulo José Cunha

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This paper aims at identifying and analyzing the knowledge transmission channels in textile and clothing clusters located in Brazil and in Europe. Primary data was obtained through interviews with key individuals. The collection of primary data was carried out based on a questionnaire with ten categories of indicators of knowledge transmission. Secondary data was also collected through a literature review and through international organizations sites. Similarities related to the use of the main transmission channels of knowledge are observed in all cases. The main similarities are: influence of suppliers of machinery, equipment and raw materials; imitation of products and best practices; training promoted by technical institutions and businesses; and cluster companies being open to acquire new knowledge. The main differences lie in the relationship between companies, where in Europe the intensity of this relationship is bigger when compared to Brazil. The differences also occur in importance and frequency of the relationship with the government, with the cultural environment, and with the activities of research and development. It is also found factors that reduce the importance of geographical proximity in transmission of knowledge, and in generating trust and the establishment of collaborative behavior.

Keywords: Industrial clusters, interorganizational learning, knowledge transmission channels, textile and clothing industry.

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Authors: Roslina Ibrahim, Azizah Jaafar

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Educational games (EG) seem to have lots of potential due to digital games popularity and preferences of our younger generations of learners. However, most studies focus on game design and its effectiveness while little has been known about the factors that can affect users to accept or to reject EG for their learning. User acceptance research try to understand the determinants of information systems (IS) adoption among users by investigating both systems factors and users factors. Upon the lack of knowledge on acceptance factors for educational games, we seek to understand the issue. This study proposed a model of acceptance factors based on Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT). We use original model (performance expectancy, effort expectancy and social influence) together with two new determinants (learning opportunities and enjoyment). We will also investigate the effect of gender and gaming experience that moderate the proposed factors.

Keywords: educational games, games acceptance, user acceptance model, UTAUT

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Authors: Zhuang He, Andrei Kotousov

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All current experimental methods for determination of stress intensity factors are based on the assumption that the state of stress near the crack tip is plane stress. Therefore, these methods rely on strain and displacement measurements made outside the near crack tip region affected by the three-dimensional effects or by process zone. In this paper, we develop and validate an experimental procedure for the evaluation of stress intensity factors from the measurements of the out-of-plane displacements in the surface area controlled by 3D effects. The evaluation of stress intensity factors is possible when the process zone is sufficiently small, and the displacement field generated by the 3D effects is fully encapsulated by K-dominance region.

Keywords: Digital image correlation, stress intensity factors, three-dimensional effects, transverse displacement.

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Authors: Jaideep Motwani, Asli Yagmur Akbulut

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Using a methodology grounded in business process change theory, we investigate the critical success factors that affect ERP implementation success in United States and India. Specifically, we examine the ERP implementation at two case study companies, one in each country. Our findings suggest that certain factors that affect the success of ERP implementations are not culturally bound, whereas some critical success factors depend on the national culture of the country in which the system is being implemented. We believe that the understanding of these critical success factors will deepen the understanding of ERP implementations and will help avoid implementation mistakes, thereby increasing the rate of success in culturally different contexts. Implications of the findings and future research directions for both academicians and practitioners are also discussed.

Keywords: Critical Success Factors, Culture, Enterprise Resource Planning Systems, India, United States

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Authors: Mahshid Kakouei, Mina Kakouei, Kumaran Suberamanian, Sabzali Musa Kahn, Afshin Jahangirzadeh, Shatirah Akib

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Human always tried to create a suitable situation for their life according to environmental conditions. In fact, geography has an important role in the shape of our living area. Iran also as a four-season country has different climate type: hot and humid, hot and dry, mid and humid, and cold; therefore, we can find different architecture styles in Iran. Gilan-s traditional architecture is a suitable sample of sustainable construction in Iran. Because the main factors of every dwelling are the climatic, social, economic and cultural effects which demonstrate the interaction between environment and people settlement. This paper was determined the interaction between environmental factors and the rural dwellings in the Gilan province. Also, traditional village (city) of Masouleh as a rare sample of rural and sustainable architecture was introduced.

Keywords: Masouleh, Traditional architecture, vernacular materials, sustainable architecture.

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Authors: Abdel Aziz, Hadia H.

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Since the 1980s, banks and financial service institutions have been running in an endless race of innovation to cope with the advancing technology, the fierce competition, and the more sophisticated and demanding customers. In order to guide their innovation efforts, several researches were conducted to identify the success and failure factors of new financial services. These mainly included organizational factors, marketplace factors and new service development process factors. They almost all emphasized the importance of customer and market orientation as a response to the highly perceptual and intangible characteristics of financial services. However, they deemphasized the critical characteristics of high involvement of risk and close correlation with the economic conditions, a factor that heavily contributed to the Global financial Crisis of 2008. This paper reviews the success and failure factors of new financial services. It then adds new perspectives emerging from the analysis of the role of innovation in the global financial crisis.

Keywords: Financial innovation, global financial crisis, lessons learned from global financial crisis, success factors in financial innovation.

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Authors: G. Erkomaishvili, M. Kobalava, T. Lazariashvili, N. Damenia

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Current state of foreign direct investment (FDI) in Georgia is analyzed and evaluated in the paper, the existing legislative background for regulating investments and stimulating policies to attract investments are shown. It is noted that in developing countries encouragement of investment activity, support and implementation are of the most important tasks, implying a consistent investment policy, investor-friendly tax regime and the legal system, reducing administrative barriers and restrictions, fare competitive conditions and business development infrastructure. The work deals with the determining factor of FDIs and the main directions of stimulation, as well as prospective industries where new investments are needed. Contributing and hindering factors and stimulating measures are analyzed. As a result of the research, the direct and indirect factors attracting FDI have been identified. Facilitating factors to FDI inflow are as follows: simplicity of starting business, geopolitical location, low taxes, access to credit, ease of ownership registration, natural resources, low burden of regulations, low level of corruption and low crime rates. Hindering factors to FDI inflow are as follows: small market, lack of policy for attracting investments, low qualification of the workforce (despite the large number of unemployed people it is difficult to find workers with necessary special skills and qualifications), high interest rates, instability of national currency exchange rate, presence of conflict zones within the country and so forth.

Keywords: Foreign direct investment, investment attracting policies, investor, reinvestment.

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Authors: Shyue-Ran Li, Kuohsiang Chen

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The study explored varied types of human smiles and extracted most of the key factors affecting the smiles. These key factors then were converted into a set of control points which could serve to satisfy the needs for creation of facial expression for 3D animators and be further applied to the face simulation for robots in the future. First, hundreds of human smile pictures were collected and analyzed to identify the key factors for face expression. Then, the factors were converted into a set of control points and sizing parameters calculated proportionally. Finally, two different faces were constructed for validating the parameters via the process of simulating smiles of the same type as the original one.

Keywords: 3D animation, facial expression, numerical, robot, smile parameter.

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Authors: Kaveh Mohammad Cyrus, Shadi Sanagoo

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MABENA model is a complementary model in comparison with traditional models such as HCMS, CMS and etc. New factors, which have effects on preparation of strategic plans and their sequential order in MABENA model is the platform of presented road map in this paper.Study review shows, factors such as emerging new critical success factors for strategic planning, improvement of international strategic models, increasing the maturity of companies and emerging new needs leading to design a new model which can be responsible for new critical factors and solve the limitations of previous strategic management models. Preparation of strategic planning need more factors than introduced in traditional models. The needed factors includes determining future Critical Success Factors and competencies, defining key processes, determining the maturity of the processes, considering all aspects of the external environment etc. Description of aforementioned requirements, the outcomes and their order is developing and presenting the MABENA model-s road map in this paper. This study presents a road map for strategic planning of the Iranian organizations.

Keywords: Competitive Advantage, Process Maturity, StrategicPlanning, Strategic potential

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Authors: Amit Sachan

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The purpose of this paper is to acquire the remote electrical parameters like Voltage, Current, and Frequency from Smart grid and send these real time values over GSM network using GSM Modem/phone along with temperature at power station. This project is also designed to protect the electrical circuitry by operating an Electromagnetic Relay. The Relay can be used to operate a Circuit Breaker to switch off the main electrical supply. User can send commands in the form of SMS messages to read the remote electrical parameters. This system also can automatically send the real time electrical parameters periodically (based on time settings) in the form of SMS. This system also send SMS alerts whenever the Circuit Breaker trips or whenever the Voltage or Current exceeds the predefined limits.

Keywords: GSM Modem, Initialization of ADC module of microcontroller, PIC-C compiler for Embedded C programming, PIC kit 2 programmer for dumping code into Micro controller, Express SCH for Circuit design, Proteus for hardware simulation.

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Authors: Somtop Keawchuer

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The objective of this research was to study the factors related to the satisfaction of consumers who purchased a Toyota SUV Fortuner. This paper was a survey data which collected 400 samples from 65 car dealerships. The survey was conducted mainly in Bangkok, Thailand. The statistics utilized in this paper included percentage, mean, standard deviation and Pearson Product-Moment. The findings revealed that the majority of respondent were male with an undergraduate degree, married and live together. The average income of the respondents was between 20,001 - 30,000 baht. Most of them worked for private companies. Most of them had a family with the average of 4 members. The hypotheses testing revealed that the factors of marketing mix in terms of product (ability, gas mileage, and safety) were related to overall satisfaction at the medium level. However, the findings also revealed that the factors of marketing mix in terms of product (image), price, and promotion, and service center were related to the overall satisfaction at the low level.

Keywords: Car Consumers, Factors related, Overall Satisfaction.

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Authors: Marília Guterres Ferreira, Raul Sidnei Wazlawick

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As seen in literature, about 70% of the improvement initiatives fail, and a significant number do not even get started. This paper analyses the problem of failing initiatives on Software Process Improvement (SPI), and proposes good practices supported by motivational tools that can help minimizing failures. It elaborates on the hypothesis that human factors are poorly addressed by deployers, especially because implementation guides usually emphasize only technical factors. This research was conducted with SPI deployers and analyses 32 SPI initiatives. The results indicate that although human factors are not commonly highlighted in guidelines, the successful initiatives usually address human factors implicitly. This research shows that practices based on human factors indeed perform a crucial role on successful implantations of SPI, proposes change management as a theoretical framework to introduce those practices in the SPI context and suggests some motivational tools based on SPI deployers experience to support it.

Keywords: Change management, human factors, motivation, software process improvement.

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Authors: Zoran Veršić, Josip Galić, Marin Binički, Lucija Stepinac

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With the current increase in CO2 emissions and global warming, the sustainability of both existing and new solutions must be assessed on a wide scale. As the implementation of closed cavity façades (CCF) is on the rise, various factors must be included in the analysis of new types of CCF. This paper aims to cover the relevant factors included in the sustainability assessment of new types of CCF. Several mathematical models are being used to describe the physical behavior of CCF. Depending on the type of CCF, they cover the main factors which affect the durability of the façade: thermal behavior of various elements in the façade, stress and deflection of the glass panels, pressure and the moisture control in the cavity. CCF itself represents a complex system in which all mentioned factors must be considered mutually. Still, the façade is only an envelope of a more complex system, the building. Choice of the façade dictates the heat loss and the heat gain, thermal comfort of inner space, natural lighting, and ventilation. Annual energy consumption for heating, cooling, lighting, and maintenance costs will present the operational advantages or disadvantages of the chosen façade system in economic and environmental aspects. Still, the only operational viewpoint is not all-inclusive. As the building codes constantly demand higher energy efficiency as well as transfer to renewable energy sources, the ratio of embodied and lifetime operational energy footprint of buildings is changing. With the drop in operational energy CO2 emissions, embodied energy emissions present a larger and larger share in the lifecycle emissions of the building. Taking all into account, the sustainability assessment of a façade, as well as other major building elements, should include all mentioned factors during the lifecycle of an element. The challenge of such an approach is a timescale. Depending on the climatic conditions on the building site, the expected lifetime of a glazed façade can exceed 25 years. In such a timespan, some of the factors can be estimated more precisely than the others. However, the ones depending on the socio-economic conditions are more likely to be harder to predict than the natural ones like the climatic load. This work recognizes and summarizes the relevant factors needed for the assessment of a new type of CCF, considering the entire lifetime of a façade element in an environmental aspect.

Keywords: Assessment, closed cavity façade, life cycle, sustainability.

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Authors: Balimu Mwiya, Mundia Muya, Chabota Kaliba, Peter Mukalula

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Factors affecting construction unit cost vary depending on a country’s political, economic, social and technological inclinations. Factors affecting construction costs have been studied from various perspectives. Analysis of cost factors requires an appreciation of a country’s practices. Identified cost factors provide an indication of a country’s construction economic strata. The purpose of this paper is to identify the essential factors that affect unit cost estimation and their breakdown using artificial neural networks. Twenty five (25) identified cost factors in road construction were subjected to a questionnaire survey and employing SPSS factor analysis the factors were reduced to eight. The 8 factors were analysed using neural network (NN) to determine the proportionate breakdown of the cost factors in a given construction unit rate. NN predicted that political environment accounted 44% of the unit rate followed by contractor capacity at 22% and financial delays, project feasibility and overhead & profit each at 11%. Project location, material availability and corruption perception index had minimal impact on the unit cost from the training data provided. Quantified cost factors can be incorporated in unit cost estimation models (UCEM) to produce more accurate estimates. This can create improvements in the cost estimation of infrastructure projects and establish a benchmark standard to assist the process of alignment of work practises and training of new staff, permitting the on-going development of best practises in cost estimation to become more effective.

Keywords: Construction cost factors, neural networks, roadworks, Zambian Construction Industry.

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Authors: N. P. Tsephe, S. D. Eyono Obono

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Rural tourism has many economical, environmental, and socio-cultural benefits. However, the development of rural tourism compared to urban tourism is also faced with several challenges added to the disadvantages of rural tourism. The aim of this study is to design a model of the factors affecting the motivations of rural tourists, in an attempt to improve the understanding of rural tourism motivation for the development of that form of tourism. The proposed model is based on a sound theoretical framework. It was designed following a literature review of tourism motivation theoretical frameworks and of rural tourism motivation factors. The tourism motivation theoretical framework that fitted to the best all rural tourism motivation factors was then chosen as the basis for the proposed model. This study hence found that the push and pull tourism motivation framework and the inner and outer directed values theory are the most adequate theoretical frameworks for the modeling of rural tourism motivation.

Keywords: Motivation factors, rural tourism, tourism motivation theories.

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Authors: A. S. P.Kanojia, B. Dr.V.K.Chandrakar

Abstract:

Static synchronous compensator (STATCOM) is a shunt connected voltage source converter (VSC), which can affect rapid control of reactive flow in the transmission line by controlling the generated a.c. voltage. The main aim of the paper is to design a power system installed with a Static synchronous compensator (STATCOM) and demonstrates the application of the linearised Phillips-heffron model in analyzing the damping effect of the STATCOM to improve power system oscillation stability. The proposed PI controller is designed to coordinate two control inputs: Voltage of the injection bus and capacitor voltage of the STATCOM, to improve the Dynamic stability of a SMIB system .The power oscillations damping (POD) control and power system stabilizer (PSS) and their coordinated action with proposed controllers are tested. The simulation result shows that the proposed damping controllers provide satisfactory performance in terms of improvements of dynamic stability of the system.

Keywords: Damping oscillations, FACTS, STATCOM, dynamic stability, PSS, POD, Coordination.

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