Search results for: Local re-clustering

Authors: Mohamed A. Azab

Abstract:

Over the early years of the 21st century, cities throughout the Middle East, particularly in the Gulf region have expanded more rapidly than ever before. Given the presence of a large volume of high-rise buildings allover the region, the local authority aims to set a new standard for sustainable development; with an integrated approach to maintain a balance between economy, quality, environmental protection and safety of life. In the very near future, as mandatory requirements, sustainability will be the criteria that should be included in all building projects. It is well known in the building sustainability topics that structural design engineers do not have a key role in this matter. In addition, the LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) has looked almost exclusively on the environmental components and materials specifications. The objective of this paper is to focus and establish groundwork for sustainability techniques and applications related to the RC high-rise buildings design, from the structural point of view. A set of recommendations related to local conditions, structural modeling and analysis is given, and some helpful suggestions for structural design team work are addressed. This paper attempts to help structural engineers in identifying the building sustainability design, in order to meet local needs and achieve alternative solutions at an early stage of project design.

Keywords: Building, Design, High-rise, Middle East, Structural, Sustainability.

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Authors: Sung-Hae Jun, Kyung-Whan Oh

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Statistical learning theory was developed by Vapnik. It is a learning theory based on Vapnik-Chervonenkis dimension. It also has been used in learning models as good analytical tools. In general, a learning theory has had several problems. Some of them are local optima and over-fitting problems. As well, statistical learning theory has same problems because the kernel type, kernel parameters, and regularization constant C are determined subjectively by the art of researchers. So, we propose an evolutionary statistical learning theory to settle the problems of original statistical learning theory. Combining evolutionary computing into statistical learning theory, our theory is constructed. We verify improved performances of an evolutionary statistical learning theory using data sets from KDD cup.

Keywords: Evolutionary computing, Local optima, Over-fitting, Statistical learning theory

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Authors: F. Fabeil Noor, Roslinah Mahmud, Janice L. H. Nga, Rasid Mail

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In Malaysia, particularly in Sabah, the government has been promoting entrepreneurship among rural people to encourage them to earn their living by making good use of the diverse natural resources and local cultures of Sabah. Nevertheless, despite the government’s aim to encourage more local community in rural area to involve in entrepreneurship, the involvement of community in entrepreneurial activity is still low. It is crucial to identify the factors stimulate (or prevent) the involvement of rural community in Sabah in entrepreneurial activity. Therefore, this study tries to investigate the personal and contextual factors that may have impact on decision to start a business among the local community in Mantanani Island. In addition, this study also aims to identify the perceived benefits they receive from entrepreneurial activity. A structured face-to-face interview was conducted with 61 local communities in Mantanani Island. Data analysis revealed that passion, personal skills and self-confidence are the significant internal factors to entrepreneurial activity, whereas access to finance, labour and infrastructure are the significant external factors that are found to influence entrepreneurship. In terms of perceived rewards they received from taking up small business, it was found that respondents are predominantly agreed that entrepreneurship offers financial benefit than non-financial. In addition, this study also offers several suggestions for entrepreneurship development in Mantanani Island and it is hoped that this study may help the related agency to develop effective support policies in order to encourage more people in rural area to involve in entrepreneurship.

Keywords: Entrepreneurship, motivation, perceived rewards, rural community.

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Authors: S. B. Liu, K. M. Ng, H. L. Ong

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This paper presents a new heuristic algorithm for the classical symmetric traveling salesman problem (TSP). The idea of the algorithm is to cut a TSP tour into overlapped blocks and then each block is improved separately. It is conjectured that the chance of improving a good solution by moving a node to a position far away from its original one is small. By doing intensive search in each block, it is possible to further improve a TSP tour that cannot be improved by other local search methods. To test the performance of the proposed algorithm, computational experiments are carried out based on benchmark problem instances. The computational results show that algorithm proposed in this paper is efficient for solving the TSPs.

Keywords: Local search, overlapped neighborhood, travelingsalesman problem.

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Authors: Ibrahim A. El rube, Mohamed T. El Sonni, Soha S. Saleh

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the cursive nature of the Arabic writing makes it difficult to accurately segment characters or even deal with the whole word efficiently. Therefore, in this paper, a printed Arabic sub-word recognition system is proposed. The suggested algorithm utilizes geometrical moments as descriptors for the separated sub-words. Three types of moments are investigated and applied to the printed sub-word images after dividing each image into multiple parts using windowing. Since moments are global descriptors, the windowing mechanism allows the moments to be applied to local regions of the sub-word. The local-global mixture of the proposed scheme increases the discrimination power of the moments while keeping the simplicity and ease of use of moments.

Keywords: Arabic sub-word recognition, windowing, aspectratio, moments.

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Authors: Hala S. Mekawy

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Affordable housing delivery for low and lower middle income families is a prominent problem in many developing countries; governments alone are unable to address this challenge due to diverse financial and regulatory constraints, and the private sector's contribution is rare and assists only middle-income households even when institutional and legal reforms are conducted to persuade it to go down market. Also, the market-enabling policy measures advocated by the World Bank since the early nineties have been strongly criticized and proven to be inappropriate to developing country contexts, where it is highly unlikely that the formal private sector can reach low income population. In addition to governments and private developers, affordable housing delivery systems involve an intricate network of relationships between a diverse range of actors. Collaboration between them was proven to be vital, and hence, an approach towards partnership schemes for affordable housing delivery has emerged. The basic premise of this paper is that addressing housing affordability challenges in Egypt demands direct public support, as markets and market actors alone would never succeed in delivering decent affordable housing to low and lower middle income groups. It argues that this support would ideally be through local level partnership schemes, with a leading decentralized local government role, and partners being identified according to specific local conditions. It attempts to identify major attributes that would ensure the fulfillment of the goals of such schemes in the Egyptian context. This is based upon evidence from diversified worldwide experiences, in addition to the main outcomes of a questionnaire that was conducted to specialists and chief actors in the field.

Keywords: Affordable housing, partnership schemes.

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Authors: Amandeep Singh Dhaliwal

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Networking solutions, particularly wireless local area networks have revolutionized the technological advancement. Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs) have gained a lot of popularity as they provide location-independent network access between computing devices. There are a number of access methods used in Wireless Networks among which DCF and PCF are the fundamental access methods. This paper emphasizes on the impact of DCF and PCF access mechanisms on the performance of the IEEE 802.11a, 802.11b and 802.11g standards. On the basis of various parameters viz. throughput, delay, load etc performance is evaluated between these three standards using above mentioned access mechanisms. Analysis revealed a superior throughput performance with low delays for 802.11g standard as compared to 802.11 a/b standard using both DCF and PCF access methods.

Keywords: DCF, IEEE, PCF, WLAN.

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Authors: Salinee Thumronglaohapun

Abstract:

The proper number and appropriate locations of service centers can save cost, raise revenue and gain more satisfaction from customers. Establishing service centers is high-cost and difficult to relocate. In long-term planning periods, several factors may affect the service. One of the most critical factors is uncertain demand of customers. The opened service centers need to be capable of serving customers and making a profit although the demand in each period is changed. In this work, the capacitated location-allocation problem with stochastic demand is considered. A mathematical model is formulated to determine suitable locations of service centers and their allocation to maximize total profit for multiple planning periods. Two heuristic methods, a local search and genetic algorithm, are used to solve this problem. For the local search, five different chances to choose each type of moves are applied. For the genetic algorithm, three different replacement strategies are considered. The results of applying each method to solve numerical examples are compared. Both methods reach to the same best found solution in most examples but the genetic algorithm provides better solutions in some cases.

Keywords: Location-allocation problem, stochastic demand, local search, genetic algorithm.

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Authors: Gheorghe Galben, Daniel N. Aloi

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Recently, the Spherical Motion Models (SMM-s) have been introduced [1]. These new models have been developed for 3D local landmark-base Autonomous Navigation (AN). This paper is revealing new arguments and experimental results to support the SMM-s characteristics. The accuracy and the robustness in performing a specific task are the main concerns of the new investigations. To analyze their performances of the SMM-s, the most powerful tools of estimation theory, the extended Kalman filter (EKF) and unscented Kalman filter (UKF), which give the best estimations in noisy environments, have been employed. The Monte Carlo validation implementations used to test the stability and robustness of the models have been employed as well.

Keywords: Autonomous navigation, extended kalman filter, unscented kalman filter, localization algorithms.

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Authors: Frank Emmert Streib, Matthias Dehmer, Jing Liu, Max Mühlhauser

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In this paper we present a method for gene ranking from DNA microarray data. More precisely, we calculate the correlation networks, which are unweighted and undirected graphs, from microarray data of cervical cancer whereas each network represents a tissue of a certain tumor stage and each node in the network represents a gene. From these networks we extract one tree for each gene by a local decomposition of the correlation network. The interpretation of a tree is that it represents the n-nearest neighbor genes on the n-th level of a tree, measured by the Dijkstra distance, and, hence, gives the local embedding of a gene within the correlation network. For the obtained trees we measure the pairwise similarity between trees rooted by the same gene from normal to cancerous tissues. This evaluates the modification of the tree topology due to progression of the tumor. Finally, we rank the obtained similarity values from all tissue comparisons and select the top ranked genes. For these genes the local neighborhood in the correlation networks changes most between normal and cancerous tissues. As a result we find that the top ranked genes are candidates suspected to be involved in tumor growth and, hence, indicates that our method captures essential information from the underlying DNA microarray data of cervical cancer.

Keywords: Graph similarity, DNA microarray data, cancer.

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Authors: M. H. Sedaghat, A. Zamani, S. Morshedi, R. Janamiri, M. Safdari, I. Mahdavi, A. Hosseini, A. Hatampour

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Although lots of experiments have been done in enhanced oil recovery, the number of experiments which consider the effects of local and global heterogeneity on efficiency of enhanced oil recovery based on the polymer-surfactant flooding is low and rarely done. In this research, we have done numerous experiments of water flooding and polymer-surfactant flooding on a five spot glass micromodel in different conditions such as different positions of layers. In these experiments, five different micromodels with three different pore structures are designed. Three models with different layer orientation, one homogenous model and one heterogeneous model are designed. In order to import the effect of heterogeneity of porous media, three types of pore structures are distributed accidentally and with equal ratio throughout heterogeneous micromodel network according to random normal distribution. The results show that maximum EOR recovery factor will happen in a situation where the layers are orthogonal to the path of mainstream and the minimum EOR recovery factor will happen in a situation where the model is heterogeneous. This experiments show that in polymer-surfactant flooding, with increase of angles of layers the EOR recovery factor will increase and this recovery factor is strongly affected by local heterogeneity around the injection zone.

Keywords: Layered Reservoir, Micromodel, Local Heterogeneity, Polymer-Surfactant Flooding, Enhanced Oil Recovery.

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Authors: Panpan Xu, Shulin Sui, Zongjie Du

Abstract:

Genetic algorithm is widely used in optimization problems for its excellent global search capabilities and highly parallel processing capabilities; but, it converges prematurely and has a poor local optimization capability in actual operation. Simulated annealing algorithm can avoid the search process falling into local optimum. A hybrid genetic algorithm based on simulated annealing is designed by combining the advantages of genetic algorithm and simulated annealing algorithm. The numerical experiment represents the hybrid genetic algorithm can be applied to solve the function optimization problems efficiently.

Keywords: Genetic algorithm, Simulated annealing, Hybrid genetic algorithm, Function optimization.

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Authors: M. Nahid, A. Bajit, A. Tamtaoui, E. H. Bouyakhf

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To model the human visual system (HVS) in the region of interest, we propose a new objective metric evaluation adapted to wavelet foveation-based image compression quality measurement, which exploits a foveation setup filter implementation technique in the DWT domain, based especially on the point and region of fixation of the human eye. This model is then used to predict the visible divergences between an original and compressed image with respect to this region field and yields an adapted and local measure error by removing all peripheral errors. The technique, which we call foveation wavelet visible difference prediction (FWVDP), is demonstrated on a number of noisy images all of which have the same local peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR), but visibly different errors. We show that the FWVDP reliably predicts the fixation areas of interest where error is masked, due to high image contrast, and the areas where the error is visible, due to low image contrast. The paper also suggests ways in which the FWVDP can be used to determine a visually optimal quantization strategy for foveation-based wavelet coefficients and to produce a quantitative local measure of image quality.

Keywords: Human Visual System, Image Quality, ImageCompression, foveation wavelet, region of interest ROI.

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Authors: Garima Gupta, Daya Gupta

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Virtually all existing networked system management tools use a Manager/Agent paradigm. That is, distributed agents are deployed on managed devices to collect local information and report it back to some management unit. Even those that use standard protocols such as SNMP fall into this model. Using standard protocol has the advantage of interoperability among devices from different vendors. However, it may not be able to provide customized information that is of interest to satisfy specific management needs. In this dissertation work, different approaches are used to collect information regarding the devices attached to a Local Area Network. An SNMP aware application is being developed that will manage the discovery procedure and will be used as data collector.

Keywords: ICMP Scanner, Network Discovery, NetworkManagement, SNMP Scanner.

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Authors: Weichang Du

Abstract:

This paper proposes a new of cloud computing for individual computer users to share applications in distributed communities, called community-based personal cloud computing (CPCC). The paper also presents a prototype design and implementation of CPCC. The users of CPCC are able to share their computing applications with other users of the community. Any member of the community is able to execute remote applications shared by other members. The remote applications behave in the same way as their local counterparts, allowing the user to enter input, receive output as well as providing the access to the local data of the user. CPCC provides a peer-to-peer (P2P) environment where each peer provides applications which can be used by the other peers that are connected CPCC.

Keywords: applications, cloud computing, services, software.

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Authors: Eda Gök

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Peridynamics is a new modeling concept of non-local interactions for solid structures. The formulations of Peridynamic (PD) theory are based on integral equations rather than differential equations. Through, undefined equations of associated problems are avoided. PD theory might be defined as continuum version of molecular dynamics. The medium is usually modeled with mass particles bonded together. Particles interact with each other directly across finite distances through central forces named as bonds. The main assumption of this theory is that the body is composed of material points which interact with other material points within a finite distance. Although, PD theory developed for discontinuities, it gives good results for structures which have no discontinuities. In this paper, displacement control of the isotropic plate under the effect of tensile and bending loading has been investigated by means of PD theory. A MATLAB code is generated to create PD bonds and corresponding surface correction factors. Using generated MATLAB code the geometry of the specimen is generated, and the code is implemented in Finite Element Software. The results obtained from non-local continuum theory are compared with the Finite Element Analysis results and analytical solution. The results show good agreement.

Keywords: Flexural loading, non-local continuum mechanics, Peridynamic theory, solid structures, tensile loading.

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Authors: Z. Goosen, E. J. Cilliers

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Social sustainability, as an independent perspective of sustainable development, has gained some acknowledgement, becoming an important aspect in sustainable urban planning internationally. However, limited research aiming at promoting social sustainability within urban areas exists within the South African context. This is mainly due to the different perspectives of sustainable development (e.g., Environmental, Economic, and Social) not being equally prioritized by policy makers and supported by implementation strategies, guidelines, and planning frameworks. The enhancement of social sustainability within urban areas relies on urban dweller satisfaction and the quality of urban life. Inclusive cities with high-quality public spaces are proposed within this research through implementing the third place theory. Third places are introduced as any place other than our homes (first place) and work (second place) and have become an integrated part of sustainable urban planning. As Third Places consist of every place 'in between', the approach has taken on a large role of the everyday life of city residents, and the importance of planning for such places can only be measured through identifying and highlighting the social sustainability benefits thereof. The aim of this research paper is to introduce third place planning within the urban area to ultimately enhance social sustainability. Selected background planning approaches influencing the planning of third places will briefly be touched on, as the focus will be placed on the social sustainability benefits provided through third place planning within an urban setting. The study will commence by defining and introducing the concept of third places within urban areas as well as a discussion on social sustainability, acting as one of the three perspectives of sustainable development. This will gain the researcher an improved understanding on social sustainability in order for the study to flow into an integrated discussion of the benefits Third places provide in terms of social sustainability and the impact it has on improved quality of life within urban areas. Finally, a visual case study comparison of local and international examples of third places identified will be illustrated. These international case studies will contribute towards the conclusion of this study where a local gap analysis will be formulated, based on local third place evidence and international best practices in order to formulate a strategic planning framework on improving social sustainability through third place planning within the local South African context.

Keywords: Planning benefits, social sustainability, third places, urban area.

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Authors: Aurelian Octavian Ciucâ, Ioan Bitir-Istrate, Mircea Scripcariu

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The rapidly increasing costs of power line extensions and fossil fuel, combined with the desire to reduce carbon dioxide emissions pushed the development of hybrid power system suited for remote locations, the purpose in mind being that of autonomous local power systems. The paper presents the suggested solution for a “high penetration" hybrid power system, it being determined by the location of the settlement and its “zero policy" on carbon dioxide emissions. The paper focuses on the technical solution and the power flow management algorithm of the system, taking into consideration local conditions of development.

Keywords: Renewable energy, hybrid power system, wind turbine, photovoltaic panels, bio-diesel cogeneration, bio-fuel.

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Authors: Endri Rama, Genci Capi, Shigenori Kawahara

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The mobile robot ability to navigate autonomously in its environment is very important. Even though the advances in technology, robot self-localization and goal directed navigation in complex environments are still challenging tasks. In this article, we propose a novel method for robot navigation based on rat’s brain signals (Local Field Potentials). It has been well known that rats accurately and rapidly navigate in a complex space by localizing themselves in reference to the surrounding environmental cues. As the first step to incorporate the rat’s navigation strategy into the robot control, we analyzed the rats’ strategies while it navigates in a multiple Y-maze, and recorded Local Field Potentials (LFPs) simultaneously from three brain regions. Next, we processed the LFPs, and the extracted features were used as an input in the artificial neural network to predict the rat’s next location, especially in the decision-making moment, in Y-junctions. We developed an algorithm by which the robot learned to imitate the rat’s decision-making by mapping the rat’s brain signals into its own actions. Finally, the robot learned to integrate the internal states as well as external sensors in order to localize and navigate in the complex environment.

Keywords: Brain machine interface, decision-making, local field potentials, mobile robot, navigation, neural network, rat, signal processing.

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Authors: Layal Al Ait, Eduardo Corel, Kifah Tout, Burkhard Morgenstern

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Background: Dialign is a DNA/Protein alignment tool for performing pairwise and multiple pairwise alignments through the comparison of gap-free segments (fragments) between sequence pairs. An alignment of two sequences is a chain of fragments, i.e local gap-free pairwise alignments, with the highest total score. METHOD: A new approach is defined in this article which relies on the concept of using three-dimensional fragments – i.e. local threeway alignments -- in the alignment process instead of twodimensional ones. These three-dimensional fragments are gap-free alignments constituting of equal-length segments belonging to three distinct sequences. RESULTS: The obtained results showed good improvments over the performance of DIALIGN.

Keywords: DIALIGN, Multiple sequence alignment, Threedimensional fragments.

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Authors: V. M. Mmbengwa, J. R. M. Mabuso, C. P. Du Plooy, S. Laurrie, H. D. van Schalkwyk

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Sweet potato products are necessary for the provision of essential nutrients in every household, regardless of their poverty status. Their consumption appears to be highly influenced by socioeconomic factors, such as malnutrition, food insecurity and unemployment. Therefore, market availability is crucial for these cultivars to resolve some of the socio-economic factors. The aim of the study was to investigate market availability of sweet potato cultivars in the North West Province. In this study, both qualitative and quantitative research methodologies were used. Qualitative methodology was used to explain the quantitative outcomes of the variables. On the other hand, quantitative results were used to test the hypothesis. The study used SPSS software to analyse the data. Crosstabulation and Chi-square statistics were used to obtain the descriptive and inferential analyses, respectively. The study found that the Blesbok cultivar is dominating the markets of the North West Province, with the Monate cultivar dominating in the Bojanala Platinum (75%) and Dr Ruth Segomotsi Mompati (25%) districts. It is also found that a unit increase in the supply of sweet potato cultivars in both local and district municipal markets is accompanied by a reduced demand of 28% and 33% at district and local markets, respectively. All these results were found to be significant at p<0.05. The results further revealed that in four out of nine local municipality markets, the Blesbok cultivar seems to be solely available in those four local municipal markets of North West Province. It can be concluded that Blesbok, relative to other cultivars, is the most commercialised sweet potato variety and that consumers across this Province are highly aware of it. For other cultivars to assume market prominence in this Province, a well-designed marketing campaign for creating awareness may be required. This campaign may be based on nutritional advantages of different cultivars, of which Blesbok is relatively inferior, compared to orange-fleshed sweet potato varieties.

Keywords: Cultivar, malnutrition, markets, sweet potato.

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Authors: Artur Saraiva, Moritz von Schwedler, Emília Fernandes

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In recent years, the organic sector has increased significantly. However, with the ‘conventionalization’ of these products, it has been questioned whether these products have been losing their original vision. Accordingly, this research based on 31 phenomenological interviews with committed organic consumers in urban and rural areas of Portugal, aims to analyse how ethical motivations and ecological awareness are related to organic food consumption. The content thematic analysis highlights aspects related to society and environmental concerns. On an individual level, the importance of internal coherence, peace of mind and balance that these consumers find in the consumption of local organic products was stressed. For these consumers, local organic products consumption made for significant changes in their lives, aiding in the establishment of a green identity, and involves a certain philosophy of life. This vision of an organic lifestyle is grounded in a political and ecological perspective, beyond the usual organic definition, as a ‘post-organic era’. The paper contributes to better understand how an ideological environmental discourse allows highlighting the relationship between consumers’ environmental concerns and the politics of food, resulting in a possible transition to new sustainable consumption practices.

Keywords: Organic consumption, localism, content thematic analysis, pro-environmental discourse, political consumption, Portugal.

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Authors: Abdel-Reza Hatamlou, Mohammad Reza Meybodi

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In this paper we present a hybrid search algorithm for solving constraint satisfaction and optimization problems. This algorithm combines ideas of two basic approaches: complete and incomplete algorithms which also known as systematic search and local search algorithms. Different characteristics of systematic search and local search methods are complementary. Therefore we have tried to get the advantages of both approaches in the presented algorithm. The major advantage of presented algorithm is finding partial sound solution for complicated problems which their complete solution could not be found in a reasonable time. This algorithm results are compared with other algorithms using the well known n-queens problem.

Keywords: Constraint Satisfaction Problem, Hybrid SearchAlgorithm.

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Authors: Glenda Minguito, Jenith Banluta

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One of the critical aspects of humanitarian operations is the distribution of relief goods to an affected community. The common assumption is that relief goods are prepositioned during disasters which are not applicable in developing countries like the Philippines. During disasters, the on-the-ground government agencies and responders have to procure, sort, weigh and pack the relief goods. There is a need to review the relief goods preparation as it seriously affects the delivery of necessary aid for human survival. This study also identifies the ideal location of the assembly hub to minimize the distance to the affected community. This paper reveals that location and resources are dependent on the type of disasters encountered at the local level. The Center-of-Gravity method and Multiple Activity Chart were applied in the analysis.

Keywords: Humanitarian supply chain, location decision, resource allocation, local level.

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Authors: Mahdad M’hamed, Belaidi Idir

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This paper develops a meshless approach, called Element Free Galerkin (EFG) method, which is based on the weak form Moving Least Squares (MLS) of the partial differential governing equations and employs the interpolation to construct the meshless shape functions. The variation weak form is used in the EFG where the trial and test functions are approximated bye the MLS approximation. Since the shape functions constructed by this discretization have the weight function property based on the randomly distributed points, the essential boundary conditions can be implemented easily. The local weak form of the partial differential governing equations is obtained by the weighted residual method within the simple local quadrature domain. The spline function with high continuity is used as the weight function. The presently developed EFG method is a truly meshless method, as it does not require the mesh, either for the construction of the shape functions, or for the integration of the local weak form. Several numerical examples of two-dimensional static structural analysis are presented to illustrate the performance of the present EFG method. They show that the EFG method is highly efficient for the implementation and highly accurate for the computation. The present method is used to analyze the static deflection of beams and plate hole

Keywords: Numerical computation, element-free Galerkin, moving least squares, meshless methods.

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Authors: Mukesh Kumar Shah, Tushar Gupta

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An Upgraded Cuckoo Search Algorithm is proposed here to solve optimization problems based on the improvements made in the earlier versions of Cuckoo Search Algorithm. Short comings of the earlier versions like slow convergence, trap in local optima improved in the proposed version by random initialization of solution by suggesting an Improved Lambda Iteration Relaxation method, Random Gaussian Distribution Walk to improve local search and further proposing Greedy Selection to accelerate to optimized solution quickly and by “Study Nearby Strategy” to improve global search performance by avoiding trapping to local optima. It is further proposed to generate better solution by Crossover Operation. The proposed strategy used in algorithm shows superiority in terms of high convergence speed over several classical algorithms. Three standard algorithms were tested on a 6-generator standard test system and the results are presented which clearly demonstrate its superiority over other established algorithms. The algorithm is also capable of handling higher unit systems.

Keywords: Economic dispatch, Gaussian selection operator, prohibited operating zones, ramp rate limits, upgraded cuckoo search.

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Authors: Jagabondhu Hazra, Avinash Sinha

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Economic dispatch problem is an optimization problem where objective function is highly non linear, non-convex, non-differentiable and may have multiple local minima. Therefore, classical optimization methods may not converge or get trapped to any local minima. This paper presents a comparative study of four different evolutionary algorithms i.e. genetic algorithm, bacteria foraging optimization, ant colony optimization and particle swarm optimization for solving the economic dispatch problem. All the methods are tested on IEEE 30 bus test system. Simulation results are presented to show the comparative performance of these methods.

Keywords: Ant colony optimization, bacteria foraging optimization, economic dispatch, evolutionary algorithm, genetic algorithm, particle swarm optimization.

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Authors: Mohsen Torabi, Nader Karimi, Kaili Zhang

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This work aims to provide a comprehensive study on the heat transfer and entropy generation rates of a horizontal channel partially filled with a porous medium which experiences internal heat generation or consumption due to exothermic or endothermic chemical reaction. The focus has been given to the local thermal non-equilibrium (LTNE) model. The LTNE approach helps us to deliver more accurate data regarding temperature distribution within the system and accordingly to provide more accurate Nusselt number and entropy generation rates. Darcy-Brinkman model is used for the momentum equations, and constant heat flux is assumed for boundary conditions for both upper and lower surfaces. Analytical solutions have been provided for both velocity and temperature fields. By incorporating the investigated velocity and temperature formulas into the provided fundamental equations for the entropy generation, both local and total entropy generation rates are plotted for a number of cases. Bifurcation phenomena regarding temperature distribution and interface heat flux ratio are observed. It has been found that the exothermicity or endothermicity characteristic of the channel does have a considerable impact on the temperature fields and entropy generation rates.

Keywords: Entropy generation, exothermicity, endothermicity, forced convection, local thermal non-equilibrium, analytical modeling.

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Authors: Yusuke Uchiyama, Hidetoshi Konno

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We have investigated statistical properties of the defect turbulence in 1D CGLE wherein many body interaction is involved between local depressing wave (LDW) and local standing wave (LSW). It is shown that the counting number fluctuation of LDW is subject to the sub-Poisson statistics (SUBP). The physical origin of the SUBP can be ascribed to pair extinction of LDWs based on the master equation approach. It is also shown that the probability density function (pdf) of inter-LDW distance can be identified by the hyper gamma distribution. Assuming a superstatistics of the exponential distribution (Poisson configuration), a plausible explanation is given. It is shown further that the pdf of amplitude of LDW has a fattail. The underlying mechanism of its fluctuation is examined by introducing a generalized fractional Poisson configuration.

Keywords: sub-Poisson statistics, hyper gamma distribution, fractional Poisson configuration.

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Authors: Kleanthis Prekas, Maria Rangoussi, Savvas Vassiliadis, George Prekas

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Intelligent tutoring systems constitute an evolution of computer-aided educational software. We present here the modules of an intelligent tutoring system for Automatic Control, developed in our department. Through the software application developed,students can perform complete automatic control laboratory experiments, either over the departmental local area network or over the Internet. Monitoring of access to the system (local as well as international), along with student performance statistics, has yielded strongly encouraging results (as of fall 2004), despite the advanced technical content of the presented paradigm, thus showing the potential of the system developed for education and for training.

Keywords: Automatic control, tutoring system, Internet access, laboratory experiments.

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