Search results for: reliability evaluation

Authors: Anant Kumar Singh, Sunil Jha, Pulak M. Pandey

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A novel nanofinishing process using improved ball end magnetorheological (MR) finishing tool was developed for finishing of flat as well as 3D surfaces of ferromagnetic and non ferromagnetic workpieces. In this process a magnetically controlled ball end of smart MR polishing fluid is generated at the tip surface of the tool which is used as a finishing medium and it is guided to follow the surface to be finished through computer controlled 3-axes motion controller. The experiments were performed on ferromagnetic workpiece surface in the developed MR finishing setup to study the effect of finishing time on final surface roughness. The performance of present finishing process on final finished surface roughness was studied. The surface morphology was observed under scanning electron microscopy and atomic force microscope. The final surface finish was obtained as low as 19.7 nm from the initial surface roughness of 142.9 nm. The outcome of newly developed finishing process can be found useful in its applications in aerospace, automotive, dies and molds manufacturing industries, semiconductor and optics machining etc.

Keywords: Ball end MR finishing tool, Magnetorheological finishing, Nanofinishing

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Authors: Benjamin D. Leiby, Darryl K. Ahner

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This study demonstrates an alternative stochastic imputation approach for large datasets when preferred commercial packages struggle to iterate due to numerical problems. A large country conflict dataset motivates the search to impute missing values well over a common threshold of 20% missingness. The methodology capitalizes on correlation while using model residuals to provide the uncertainty in estimating unknown values. Examination of the methodology provides insight toward choosing linear or nonlinear modeling terms. Static tolerances common in most packages are replaced with tailorable tolerances that exploit residuals to fit each data element. The methodology evaluation includes observing computation time, model fit, and the comparison of known  values to replaced values created through imputation. Overall, the country conflict dataset illustrates promise with modeling first-order interactions, while presenting a need for further refinement that mimics predictive mean matching.

Keywords: Correlation, country conflict, imputation, stochastic regression.

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Authors: Hind Bouami, Patrick Millot

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Medication dispensing system is a life-critical system whose failure may result in preventable adverse events leading to longer patient stays in hospitals or patient death. Automation has led to great improvements in life-critical systems as it increased safety, efficiency, and comfort. However, critical risks related to medical organization complexity and automated solutions integration can threaten drug dispensing security and performance. Knowledge about the system’s complexity aspects and human machine parameters to control for automated equipment’s security and performance will help operators to secure their automation process and to optimize their system’s reliability. In this context, this study aims to document the operator’s situation awareness about automation risks and parameters involved in automation security and performance. Our risk management approach has been deployed in the North Luxembourg hospital center’s pharmacy, which is equipped with automated drug dispensing systems since 2009. With more than 4 million euros of gains generated, North Luxembourg hospital center’s success story was enabled by the management commitment, pharmacy’s involvement in the implementation and improvement of the automation project, and the close collaboration between the pharmacy and Sinteco’s firm to implement the necessary innovation and organizational actions for automated solutions integration security and performance. An analysis of the actions implemented by the hospital and the parameters involved in automated equipment’s integration security and performance has been made. The parameters to control for automated equipment’s integration security and performance are human aspects (6.25%), technical aspects (50%), and human-machine interaction (43.75%). The implementation of an anthropocentric analysis system before automation would have prevented and optimized the control of risks related to automation.

Keywords: Automated drug delivery systems, hospitals, human-centered automated system, risk management.

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Authors: Justinian Anatory, N. Theethayi, R. Thottappillil, C. Mwase, N.H. Mvungi

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Power-line networks are widely used today for broadband data transmission. However, due to multipaths within the broadband power line communication (BPLC) systems owing to stochastic changes in the network load impedances, branches, etc., network or channel capacity performances are affected. This paper attempts to investigate the performance of typical medium voltage channels that uses Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) techniques with Quadrature Amplitude Modulation (QAM) sub carriers. It has been observed that when the load impedances are different from line characteristic impedance channel performance decreases. Also as the number of branches in the link between the transmitter and receiver increases a loss of 4dB/branch is found in the signal to noise ratio (SNR). The information presented in the paper could be useful for an appropriate design of the BPLC systems.

Keywords: Communication channel model, Power-line communication, Transfer function, Multipath, Branched network, OFDM, QAM, performance evaluation

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Authors: Li-Yeh Chuang, Yu-Jen Hou, Jr., Cheng-Hong Yang

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Single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) hold much promise as a basis for disease-gene association. However, research is limited by the cost of genotyping the tremendous number of SNPs. Therefore, it is important to identify a small subset of informative SNPs, the so-called tag SNPs. This subset consists of selected SNPs of the genotypes, and accurately represents the rest of the SNPs. Furthermore, an effective evaluation method is needed to evaluate prediction accuracy of a set of tag SNPs. In this paper, a genetic algorithm (GA) is applied to tag SNP problems, and the K-nearest neighbor (K-NN) serves as a prediction method of tag SNP selection. The experimental data used was taken from the HapMap project; it consists of genotype data rather than haplotype data. The proposed method consistently identified tag SNPs with considerably better prediction accuracy than methods from the literature. At the same time, the number of tag SNPs identified was smaller than the number of tag SNPs in the other methods. The run time of the proposed method was much shorter than the run time of the SVM/STSA method when the same accuracy was reached.

Keywords: Genetic Algorithm (GA), Genotype, Single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP), tag SNPs.

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Authors: Mohammed G. Montasser, Rehab Y. Zoweil

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There is no doubt that Internet technology is widely used by hotels and its demand is constantly booming. Hotels have largely adopted website information services through using different interactive tools, dimensions and attributes to achieve excellence in functionality and usability but these do not necessary equate with website effectiveness. One way to investigate the effectiveness of hotel website is from the perspective ofe-consumers. This exploratory research is to investigate the perceived importance of websites effectiveness of some selected independent small and medium-sized hotels (SMHs) located in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, from the perspective of Omanie-consumers by using non-random sampling method. From 400 questionnaire addressed to respondents in 27 organizations in Muscat the capital city of Oman, 173 are valid. Findings of this study assist SMHs management in Dubai with the reallocation of their resources and efforts in order to supportebusiness development and to sustain a competitive advantage.

Keywords: Dubai's SMHs, Hotel websites, Omani e-consumer perception, weight and performance evaluation.

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Authors: Rania A. Abul Seoud, Nahed H. Solouma, Abou-Baker M. Youssef, Yasser M. Kadah

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Due to the ever growing amount of publications about protein-protein interactions, information extraction from text is increasingly recognized as one of crucial technologies in bioinformatics. This paper presents a Protein Interaction Extraction System using a Link Grammar Parser from biomedical abstracts (PIELG). PIELG uses linkage given by the Link Grammar Parser to start a case based analysis of contents of various syntactic roles as well as their linguistically significant and meaningful combinations. The system uses phrasal-prepositional verbs patterns to overcome preposition combinations problems. The recall and precision are 74.4% and 62.65%, respectively. Experimental evaluations with two other state-of-the-art extraction systems indicate that PIELG system achieves better performance. For further evaluation, the system is augmented with a graphical package (Cytoscape) for extracting protein interaction information from sequence databases. The result shows that the performance is remarkably promising.

Keywords: Link Grammar Parser, Interaction extraction, protein-protein interaction, Natural language processing.

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Authors: Davide Pierattoni, Ivan Macor, Pier Luca Montessoro

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In the recent years multimedia traffic and in particular VoIP services are growing dramatically. We present a new algorithm to control the resource utilization and to optimize the voice codec selection during SIP call setup on behalf of the traffic condition estimated on the network path. The most suitable methodologies and the tools that perform realtime evaluation of the available bandwidth on a network path have been integrated with our proposed algorithm: this selects the best codec for a VoIP call in function of the instantaneous available bandwidth on the path. The algorithm does not require any explicit feedback from the network, and this makes it easily deployable over the Internet. We have also performed intensive tests on real network scenarios with a software prototype, verifying the algorithm efficiency with different network topologies and traffic patterns between two SIP PBXs. The promising results obtained during the experimental validation of the algorithm are now the basis for the extension towards a larger set of multimedia services and the integration of our methodology with existing PBX appliances.

Keywords: Integrated voice-data communication, computernetwork performance, resource optimization.

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Authors: M.R. Mustafa, M.H. Isa, R.B. Rezaur

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Prediction of highly non linear behavior of suspended sediment flow in rivers has prime importance in the field of water resources engineering. In this study the predictive performance of two Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) namely, the Radial Basis Function (RBF) Network and the Multi Layer Feed Forward (MLFF) Network have been compared. Time series data of daily suspended sediment discharge and water discharge at Pari River was used for training and testing the networks. A number of statistical parameters i.e. root mean square error (RMSE), mean absolute error (MAE), coefficient of efficiency (CE) and coefficient of determination (R2) were used for performance evaluation of the models. Both the models produced satisfactory results and showed a good agreement between the predicted and observed data. The RBF network model provided slightly better results than the MLFF network model in predicting suspended sediment discharge.

Keywords: ANN, discharge, modeling, prediction, suspendedsediment,

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Authors: Shiuh-Jer Huang, Su-Shean Chen, Sheam-Chyun Lin

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Two-wheel inverted pendulum robot (TWIPR) is designed with two-hub DC motors for human riding and motion control evaluation. In order to measure the tilt angle and angular velocity of the inverted pendulum robot, accelerometer and gyroscope sensors are chosen. The mobile robot’s moving position and velocity were estimated based on DC motor built in hall sensors. The control kernel of this electric mobile robot is designed with embedded Arduino Nano microprocessor. A handle bar was designed to work as steering mechanism. The intelligent model-free fuzzy sliding mode control (FSMC) was employed as the main control algorithm for this mobile robot motion monitoring with different control purpose adjustment. The intelligent controllers were designed for balance control, and moving speed control purposes of this robot under different operation conditions and the control performance were evaluated based on experimental results.

Keywords: Balance control, speed control, intelligent controller and two wheel inverted pendulum.

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Authors: Ali Payan

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The aim of this paper is to evaluate the performance of the faculties of Islamic Azad University of Zahedan Branch based on two-component (teaching and research) decision making units (DMUs) in data envelopment analysis (DEA). Nowadays it is obvious that most of the systems as DMUs do not act as a simple inputoutput structure. Instead, if they have been studied more delicately, they include network structure. University is such a network in which different sections i.e. teaching, research, students and office work as a parallel structure. They consume some inputs of university commonly and some others individually. Then, they produce both dependent and independent outputs. These DMUs are called two-component DMUs with network structure. In this paper, performance of the faculties of Zahedan branch is calculated by using relative efficiency model and also, a formula to compute relative efficiencies teaching and research components based on DEA are offered.

Keywords: Data envelopment analysis, faculties of Islamic Azad University of Zahedan branch, two-component DMUs.

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Authors: Milorad Pavlovic, Anna Manzato, Antonella Cecchi

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Cultural heritage conservation is a challenge for contemporary society. In recent decades, significant resources have been allocated for the conservation and restoration of architectural heritage. Historical buildings were restored, protected and reinforced with the intent to limit the risks of degradation or loss, due to phenomena of structural damage and to external factors such as differential settlements, earthquake effects, etc. The wide diffusion of historic masonry constructions in Italy, Europe and the Mediterranean area requires reliable tools for the evaluation of their structural safety. In this paper is presented a free modal analysis performed on a minor historical architecture located in the village of Bagno Grande, near the city of L’Aquila in Italy. The location is characterized by a complex urban context, seriously damaged by the earthquake of 2009. The aim of this work is to check the structural behavior of a masonry building characterized by several boundary conditions imposed by adjacent buildings and infrastructural facilities.

Keywords: FEM, masonry, minor historical architecture, modal analysis.

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Authors: Jovana Petrović, Ivana Lončarević, Vesna Tumbas Šaponjac, Biljana Pajin, Danica Zarić

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Pomace, a by-product from fruit processing industry is the potential source of valuable bioactive. Cookies are popular, ready to eat and low price foods; therefore, enrichment of these products is of great importance. In this work, bioactive compounds extracted from cherry pomace, encapsulated in soy and whey proteins, have been incorporated in cookies, replacing 10 (SP10 and WP10) and 15% of wheat flour (SP15 and WP15). Cookie geometry (diameter (D), thickness (T) and spread ratio (D/T)), cookie weight, cookie hardness and cookie surface colour were measured. Sensory characteristics are also examined. The results show that encapsulated cherry pomace bioactives have positively influenced the cookie mass. Diameter, redness (a* value) and cookie hardness increased. Sensory evaluation of cookies, revealed that up to 15% substitution of wheat flour with WP encapsulate produced acceptable cookies similar to the control (100% wheat flour) cookies.

Keywords: Cherry pomace, polyphenols, microencapsulation, cookies, physical characteristics.

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Authors: Seyed Abolhasan Naeini, Mohammad Hosseinzade

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Settlement and bearing capacity of a piled raft are the two important issues for the foundations of structures built on coastal areas from the geotechnical engineering point of view. Strip piled raft as a load carrying system can reduce the possible extensive consolidation settlements and improve bearing capacity of structures in soft ground. The aim of this research was to evaluate the efficiency of strip piled raft embedded in soft clay. The efficiency of bearing capacity of strip piled raft foundation has been evaluated numerically in two cases; in the first case, the cap is placed directly on the ground surface and in the second, the cap is placed above the ground. Regarding to the fact that the geotechnical parameters of the soft clay are considered at low level, low bearing capacity is expected. The length, diameter and axe-to-axe distance of piles were the parameters which varied in this study to find out how they affected the bearing capacity. Results indicate that increasing the length and the diameter of the piles increase the bearing capacity.

Keywords: Soft clay, Strip piled raft, Bearing capacity, Settlement.

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Authors: Zs. Kovács, Zs. J. Viharos, J. Kodácsy

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As a well-known conventional finishing process, the grinding is commonly used to manufacture seal mating surfaces and bearing surfaces, but is also creates twisted surfaces. The machined surfaces by turning or grinding usually have twist structure on the surfaces, which can convey lubricants such as conveyor screw. To avoid this phenomenon, have to use special techniques or machines, for example start-stop turning, tangential turning, ultrasonic protection or special toll geometries. All of these solutions have high cost and difficult usability. In this paper, we describe a system and summarize the results of the experimental research carried out mainly in the field of Magnetic Abrasive Polishing (MAP) and Magnetic Roller Burnishing (MRB). These technologies are simple and also green while able to produce twist-free surfaces. During the tests, C45 normalized steel was used as workpiece material which was machined by simple and Wiper geometrical turning inserts in a CNC turning lathe. After the turning, the MAP and MRB technologies can be used directly to reduce the twist of surfaces. The evaluation was completed by advanced measuring and IT equipment.

Keywords: Magnetism, finishing, polishing, roller burnishing, twist-free.

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Authors: Ali Dehghani, Mojtaba Hakimzadeh, Amir Habibi, Navid Mehdizadeh Afroozi

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In this paper an isolated wind-diesel hybrid power system has been considered for reactive power control study having an induction generator for wind power conversion and synchronous alternator with automatic voltage regulator (AVR) for diesel unit is presented. The dynamic voltage stability evaluation is dependent on small signal analysis considering a Static VAR Compensator (SVC) and IEEE type -I excitation system. It's shown that the variable reactive power source like SVC is crucial to meet the varying demand of reactive power by induction generator and load and to acquire an excellent voltage regulation of the system with minimum fluctuations. Integral square error (ISE) criterion can be used to evaluate the optimum setting of gain parameters. Finally the dynamic responses of the power systems considered with optimum gain setting will also be presented.

Keywords: SVC, Small Signal Stability, Reactive Power, Control, Hybrid System.

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Authors: H. S. Youm, S. G. Hong

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This paper presents the test results on 5 slab-column connection specimens with Ultra High Performance Fiber-Reinforced Concrete (UHPFRC) overlay including 1 control specimen to investigate retrofitting effect of UHPFRC overlay on the punching shear capacity. The test parameters were the thickness of the UHPFRC overlay and the amount of steel re-bars in it. All specimens failed in punching shear mode with abrupt failure aspect. The test results showed that by adding a thin layer of UHPFRC over the Reinforced Concrete (RC) substrates, considerable increases in global punching shear resistance up to 82% and structural rigidity were achieved. Furthermore, based on the cracking patterns the composite systems appeared to be governed by two failure modes: 1) diagonal shear failure in RC section and 2) debonding failure at the interface.

Keywords: Punching shear strength, retrofit, slab-column connection, UHPFRC, UHPFRC overlay.

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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: Wisuwat Plodpradista

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Tubular linear induction motor (TLIM) can be used as a capsule pump in a large pneumatic capsule pipeline (PCP) system. Parametric performance evaluation of the designed 1-meter diameter PCP-TLIM system yields encouraging results for practical implementation. The capsule thrust and speed inside the TLIM pump can be calculated from the combination of the PCP fluid mechanics and the TLIM equations. The TLIM equivalent circuits derived from those of the conventional three-phase induction motor are used as a model to predict the static test results of a small-scale PCP-TLIM system. In this paper, additional dynamic tests are performed on the same small-scale PCP-TLIM system with two capsules of different diameters. The behaviors of the capsule inside the pump are observed and analyzed. The dynamic performances from the dynamic tests are compared with the theoretical predictions based on the TLIM equivalent circuit model.

Keywords: Pneumatic capsule pipeline, Tubular linear induction motor

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Authors: Edjere Oghenekohwiroro, Asibor Irabor Godwin, Uwem Bassey

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This paper determines the presence and levels of phthalates in sachet and borehole water source in some parts of Delta State, Nigeria. Sachet and borehole water samples were collected from seven different water packaging facilities and level of phthalates determined using GC-MS instrumentation. Phthalates concentration in borehole samples varied from 0.00-0.01 (DMP), 0.06-0.20 (DEP), 0.10-0.98 (DBP), 0.21-0.36 (BEHP), 0.01-0.03 (DnOP) µg/L and (BBP) was not detectable; while sachet water varied from 0.03-0.95 (DMP), 0.16-12.45 (DEP), 0.57-3.38 (DBP), 0.00-0.03 (BBP), 0.08-0.31 (BEHP) and 0-0.03 (DnOP) µg/L. Phthalates concentration in the sachet water was higher than that of the corresponding boreholes sources and also showed significant difference (p < 0.05) between the two. Sources of these phthalate esters were the interaction between water molecules and plastic storage facilities. Although concentration of all phthalate esters analyzed were lower than the threshold limit value(TLV), over time storage of water samples in this medium can lead to substantial increase with negative effects on individuals consuming them.

Keywords: Phthalate esters, borehole, sachet water, sample extraction, gas chromatography, GC-MS.

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Authors: M. Delavar, A.A. Ghoreyshi, M. Jahanshahi, M. Irannejad

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This study investigates the capacity of granular activated carbon (GAC) for the storage of methane through the equilibrium adsorption. An experimental apparatus consist of a dual adsorption vessel was set up for the measurement of equilibrium adsorption of methane on GAC using volumetric technique (pressure decay). Experimental isotherms of methane adsorption were determined by the measurement of equilibrium uptake of methane in different pressures (0-50 bar) and temperatures (285.15-328.15°K). The experimental data was fitted to Freundlich and Langmuir equations to determine the model isotherm. The results show that the experimental data is equally well fitted by the both model isotherms. Using the experimental data obtained in different temperatures the isosteric heat of methane adsorption was also calculated by the Clausius-Clapeyron equation from the Sips isotherm model. Results of isosteric heat of adsorption show that decreasing temperature or increasing methane uptake by GAC decrease the isosteric heat of methane adsorption.

Keywords: Methane adsorption, Activated carbon, Modelisotherm, Isosteric heat

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Authors: Amdouni Hamida, Gammoudi Mohamed Mohsen

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In order to help the expert to validate association rules extracted from data, some quality measures are proposed in the literature. We distinguish two categories: objective and subjective measures. The first one depends on a fixed threshold and on data quality from which the rules are extracted. The second one consists on providing to the expert some tools in the objective to explore and visualize rules during the evaluation step. However, the number of extracted rules to validate remains high. Thus, the manually mining rules task is very hard. To solve this problem, we propose, in this paper, a semi-automatic method to assist the expert during the association rule's validation. Our method uses rule-based classification as follow: (i) We transform association rules into classification rules (classifiers), (ii) We use the generated classifiers for data classification. (iii) We visualize association rules with their quality classification to give an idea to the expert and to assist him during validation process.

Keywords: Association rules, Rule-based classification, Classification quality, Validation.

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Authors: M. Priscila Ramos, Omar O. Chisari, Juan Pablo Vila Martínez

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Current literature about trade liberalization of environmental goods and services (EGS) raises doubts about the extent of the triple win-win situation for trade, development and the environment. However, much of this literature does not consider the possibility that this agreement carries technological transmissions, either through trade or foreign direct investment. This paper presents a computable general equilibrium model calibrated for Argentina, where there are alternative technologies (one dirty and one clean according to carbon emissions) to produce the same goods. In this context, the trade liberalization of EGS allows to increase GDP, trade, reduce unemployment and improve the households welfare. However, the capital mobility appears as the key assumption to jointly reach the environmental target, when the positive scale effect generated by the increase in trade is offset by the change in the composition of production (composition and technical effects by the use of the clean alternative technology) and of consumption (composition effect by substitution of relatively lesspolluting imported goods).

Keywords: CGE modeling, CO2 emissions, composition effect, scale effect, technique effect, trade liberalization of EGS.

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Authors: Toufik Karech, Abderahmen Benseghir, Tayeb Bouzid

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This work presents a 2D numerical simulation of an earth dam to assess the behavior of its foundation after a treatment by stone columns. This treatment aims to improve the bearing capacity, to increase the mechanical properties of the soil, to accelerate the consolidation, to reduce the settlements and to eliminate the liquefaction phenomenon in case of seismic excitation. For the evaluation of the pore pressures, the position of the phreatic line and the flow network was defined, and a seepage analysis was performed with the software MIDAS Soil Works. The consolidation calculation is performed through a simulation of the actual construction stages of the dam. These analyzes were performed using the Mohr-Coulomb soil model and the results are compared with the actual measurements of settlement gauges implanted in the dam. An analysis of the bearing capacity was conducted to show the role of stone columns in improving the bearing capacity of the foundation.

Keywords: Earth dam, dam foundation, numerical simulation, stone columns, seepage analysis, consolidation, bearing capacity.

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Authors: A.Muthuramalingam, S.Himavathi

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Space Vector Modulation (SVM) is an optimum Pulse Width Modulation (PWM) technique for an inverter used in a variable frequency drive applications. It is computationally rigorous and hence limits the inverter switching frequency. Increase in switching frequency can be achieved using Neural Network (NN) based SVM, implemented on application specific chips. This paper proposes a neural network based SVM technique for a Voltage Source Inverter (VSI). The network proposed is independent of switching frequency. Different architectures are investigated keeping the total number of neurons constant. The performance of the inverter is compared for various switching frequencies for different architectures of NN based SVM. From the results obtained, the network with minimum resource and appropriate word length is identified. The bit precision required for this application is identified. The network with 8-bit precision is implemented in the IC XCV 400 and the results are presented. The performance of NN based general purpose SVM with higher bit precision is discussed.

Keywords: NN based SVM, FPGA Implementation, LayerMultiplexing, NN structure and Resource Reduction, PerformanceEvaluation

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Authors: Oh Hyeon Jeon, WooYoung Jung

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In this study, seepage analysis was performed by the level difference between upstream and downstream of weir structure for safety evaluation of weir structure against flooding. Monte Carlo Simulation method was employed by considering the probability distribution of the adjacent ground parameter, i.e., permeability coefficient of weir structure. Moreover, by using a commercially available finite element program (ABAQUS), modeling of the weir structure is carried out. Based on this model, the characteristic of water seepage during flooding was determined at each water level with consideration of the uncertainty of their corresponding permeability coefficient. Subsequently, fragility function could be constructed based on this response from numerical analysis; this fragility function results could be used to determine the weakness of weir structure subjected to flooding disaster. They can also be used as a reference data that can comprehensively predict the probability of failur,e and the degree of damage of a weir structure.

Keywords: Weir structure, seepage, flood disaster fragility, probabilistic risk assessment, Monte-Carlo Simulation, permeability coefficient.

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Authors: Campisi Domenico, Costa Roberta

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Intellectual capital measurement is a central aspect of knowledge management. The measurement and the evaluation of intangible assets play a key role in allowing an effective management of these assets as sources of competitiveness. For these reasons, managers and practitioners need conceptual and analytical tools taking into account the unique characteristics and economic significance of Intellectual Capital. Following this lead, we propose an efficiency and productivity analysis of Intellectual Capital, as a determinant factor of the company competitive advantage. The analysis is carried out by means of Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) and Malmquist Productivity Index (MPI). These techniques identify Bests Practice companies that have accomplished competitive advantage implementing successful strategies of Intellectual Capital management, and offer to inefficient companies development paths by means of benchmarking. The proposed methodology is employed on the Biotechnology industry in the period 2007-2010.

Keywords: Data Envelopment Analysis, Innovation, Intangible assets, Intellectual Capital, Malmquist Productivity Index.

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Authors: Samia Sadouki Chibani, Abdelkamel Tari

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Web service composition combines available services to provide new functionality. Given the number of available services with similar functionalities and different non functional aspects (QoS), the problem of finding a QoS-optimal web service composition is considered as an optimization problem belonging to NP-hard class. Thus, an optimal solution cannot be found by exact algorithms within a reasonable time. In this paper, a meta-heuristic bio-inspired is presented to address the QoS aware web service composition; it is based on Elephant Herding Optimization (EHO) algorithm, which is inspired by the herding behavior of elephant group. EHO is characterized by a process of dividing and combining the population to sub populations (clan); this process allows the exchange of information between local searches to move toward a global optimum. However, with Applying others evolutionary algorithms the problem of early stagnancy in a local optimum cannot be avoided. Compared with PSO, the results of experimental evaluation show that our proposition significantly outperforms the existing algorithm with better performance of the fitness value and a fast convergence.

Keywords: Elephant herding optimization, web service composition, bio-inspired algorithms, QoS optimization.

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Authors: Mujtaba Roshan, John A. Schormans

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Quality of Experience (QoE) drives churn in the broadband networks industry, and good QoE plays a large part in the retention of customers. QoE is known to be affected by the Quality of Service (QoS) factors packet loss probability (PLP), delay and delay jitter caused by the network. Earlier results have shown that the relationship between these QoS factors and QoE is non-linear, and may vary from application to application. We use the network emulator Netem as the basis for experimentation, and evaluate how QoE varies as we change the emulated QoS metrics. Focusing on Video-on-Demand, we discovered that the reported QoE may differ widely for users of different age groups, and that the most demanding age group (the youngest) can require an order of magnitude lower PLP to achieve the same QoE than is required by the most widely studied age group of users. We then used a bottleneck TCP model to evaluate the capacity cost of achieving an order of magnitude decrease in PLP, and found it be (almost always) a 3-fold increase in link capacity that was required.

Keywords: Quality of experience, quality of service, packet loss probability, network capacity.

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Authors: J. Uka, B. McKay, T. Minton, O. Adole, R. Lewis, S. J. Glanvill, L. Anguilano

Abstract:

Effective heat treatment conditions to obtain maximum aluminium swarf recycling are investigated in this work. Aluminium swarf briquettes underwent treatments at different temperatures and cooling times to investigate the improvements obtained in the recovery of aluminium metal. The main issue for the recovery of the metal from swarfs is to overcome the constraints due to the oxide layers present in high concentration in the swarfs since they have a high surface area. Briquettes supplied by Renishaw were heat treated at 650, 700, 750, 800 and 850 ℃ for 1-hour and then cooled at 2.3, 3.5 and 5 ℃/min. The resulting material was analysed using SEM EDX to observe the oxygen diffusion and aluminium coalescence at the boundary between adjacent swarfs. Preliminary results show that, swarf needs to be heat treated at a temperature of 850 ℃ and cooled down slowly at 2.3 ℃/min to have thin and discontinuous alumina layers between the adjacent swarf and consequently allowing aluminium coalescence. This has the potential to save energy and provide maximum financial profit in preparation of swarf briquettes for recycling.

Keywords: Aluminium, swarf, oxide layers, recycle, reuse.

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