Search results for: Turkey real estate sector

Authors: Ion Baş, Claudiu Zoicaş, Angela Ioniţâ

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In most of the cases, natural disasters lead to the necessity of evacuating people. The quality of evacuation management is dramatically improved by the use of information provided by decision support systems, which become indispensable in case of large scale evacuation operations. This paper presents a best practice case study. In November 2007, officers from the Emergency Situations Inspectorate “Crisana" of Bihor County from Romania participated to a cross-border evacuation exercise, when 700 people have been evacuated from Netherlands to Belgium. One of the main objectives of the exercise was the test of four different decision support systems. Afterwards, based on that experience, software system called TEVAC (Trans Border Evacuation) has been developed “in house" by the experts of this institution. This original software system was successfully tested in September 2008, during the deployment of the international exercise EU-HUROMEX 2008, the scenario involving real evacuation of 200 persons from Hungary to Romania. Based on the lessons learned and results, starting from April 2009, the TEVAC software is used by all Emergency Situations Inspectorates all over Romania.

Keywords: Emergency evacuation, Searching Features, TEVAC(Trans Border Evacuation) software system, User Interface Design.

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Authors: M.R. Mansoujian, N. Hedayat, M. Mashal, H, Kiamanesh

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Analytical investigation of the sedimentation processes in the river engineering and hydraulic structures is of vital importance as this can affect water supply for the cultivating lands in the command area. The reason being that gradual sediment formation behind the reservoir can reduce the nominal capacity of these dams. The aim of the present paper is to analytically investigate sedimentation process along the river course and behind the storage reservoirs in general and the Eastern Intake of the Dez Diversion weir in particular using the SHARC software. Results of the model indicated the water level at 115.97m whereas the real time measurement from the river cross section was 115.98 m which suggests a significantly close relation between them. The average transported sediment load in the river was measured at 0.25mm , from which it can be concluded that nearly 100% of the suspended loads in river are moving which suggests no sediment settling but indicates that almost all sediment loads enters into the intake. It was further showed the average sediment diameter entering the intake to be 0.293 mm which in turn suggests that about 85% of suspended sediments in the river entre the intake. Comparison of the results from the SHARC model with those obtained form the SSIIM software suggests quite similar outputs but distinguishing the SHARC model as more appropriate for the analysis of simpler problems than other model.

Keywords: SHARC, Eastern Intake, Dez Diversion Weir.

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Authors: František Šebek, Petr Kubík, Jindřich Petruška, Jiří Hůlka

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Present study is aimed on the cutting process of circular cross-section rods where the fracture is used to separate one rod into two pieces. Incorporating the phenomenological ductile fracture model into the explicit formulation of finite element method, the process can be analyzed without the necessity of realizing too many real experiments which could be expensive in case of repetitive testing in different conditions. In the present paper, the steel AISI 1045 was examined and the tensile tests of smooth and notched cylindrical bars were conducted together with biaxial testing of the notched tube specimens to calibrate material constants of selected phenomenological ductile fracture models. These were implemented into the Abaqus/Explicit through user subroutine VUMAT and used for cutting process simulation. As the calibration process is based on variables which cannot be obtained directly from experiments, numerical simulations of fracture tests are inevitable part of the calibration. Finally, experiments regarding the cutting process were carried out and predictive capability of selected fracture models is discussed. Concluding remarks then make the summary of gained experience both with the calibration and application of particular ductile fracture criteria.

Keywords: Ductile fracture, phenomenological criteria, cutting process, explicit formulation, AISI 1045 steel.

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Authors: Niousha Bagheri Khulenjani, Mohammad Saniee Abadeh

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Learning from very big datasets is a significant problem for most present data mining and machine learning algorithms. MicroRNA (miRNA) is one of the important big genomic and non-coding datasets presenting the genome sequences. In this paper, a hybrid method for the classification of the miRNA data is proposed. Due to the variety of cancers and high number of genes, analyzing the miRNA dataset has been a challenging problem for researchers. The number of features corresponding to the number of samples is high and the data suffer from being imbalanced. The feature selection method has been used to select features having more ability to distinguish classes and eliminating obscures features. Afterward, a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) classifier for classification of cancer types is utilized, which employs a Genetic Algorithm to highlight optimized hyper-parameters of CNN. In order to make the process of classification by CNN faster, Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) is recommended for calculating the mathematic equation in a parallel way. The proposed method is tested on a real-world dataset with 8,129 patients, 29 different types of tumors, and 1,046 miRNA biomarkers, taken from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) database.

Keywords: Cancer classification, feature selection, deep learning, genetic algorithm.

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Authors: Bibhya Sharma, Jito Vanualailai, Ravindra Rai

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This research paper designs a unique motion planner of multiple platoons of nonholonomic car-like robots as a feasible solution to the lane changing/merging maneuvers. The decentralized planner with a leaderless approach and a path-guidance principle derived from the Lyapunov-based control scheme generates collision free avoidance and safe merging maneuvers from multiple lanes to a single lane by deploying a split/merge strategy. The fixed obstacles are the markings and boundaries of the road lanes, while the moving obstacles are the robots themselves. Real and virtual road lane markings and the boundaries of road lanes are incorporated into a workspace to achieve the desired formation and configuration of the robots. Convergence of the robots to goal configurations and the repulsion of the robots from specified obstacles are achieved by suitable attractive and repulsive potential field functions, respectively. The results can be viewed as a significant contribution to the avoidance algorithm of the intelligent vehicle systems (IVS). Computer simulations highlight the effectiveness of the split/merge strategy and the acceleration-based controllers.

Keywords: Lane merging, Lyapunov-based control scheme, path-guidance principle, split/merge strategy.

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Authors: Emad E Abdallah, A.F. Otoom, ArwaSaqer, Ola Abu-Aisheh, Diana Omari, Ghadeer Salem

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As emails communications have no consistent authentication procedure to ensure the authenticity, we present an investigation analysis approach for detecting forged emails based on Random Forests and Naïve Bays classifiers. Instead of investigating the email headers, we use the body content to extract a unique writing style for all the possible suspects. Our approach consists of four main steps: (1) The cybercrime investigator extract different effective features including structural, lexical, linguistic, and syntactic evidence from previous emails for all the possible suspects, (2) The extracted features vectors are normalized to increase the accuracy rate. (3) The normalized features are then used to train the learning engine, (4) upon receiving the anonymous email (M); we apply the feature extraction process to produce a feature vector. Finally, using the machine learning classifiers the email is assigned to one of the suspects- whose writing style closely matches M. Experimental results on real data sets show the improved performance of the proposed method and the ability of identifying the authors with a very limited number of features.

Keywords: Digital investigation, cybercrimes, emails forensics, anonymous emails, writing style, and authorship analysis

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Authors: Giovanni Cicceri, Roberta Maisano, Nathalie Morey, Salvatore Distefano

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The main goal of this paper is to present a solution for a water purification system based on an Environmental Internet of Things (EIoT) platform to monitor and control water quality and machine learning (ML) models to support decision making and speed up the processes of purification of water. A real case study has been implemented by deploying an EIoT platform and a network of devices, called Gramb meters and belonging to the Gramb project, on wastewater purification systems located in Calabria, south of Italy. The data thus collected are used to control the wastewater quality, detect anomalies and predict the behaviour of the purification system. To this extent, three different statistical and machine learning models have been adopted and thus compared: Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA), Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) autoencoder, and Facebook Prophet (FP). The results demonstrated that the ML solution (LSTM) out-perform classical statistical approaches (ARIMA, FP), in terms of both accuracy, efficiency and effectiveness in monitoring and controlling the wastewater purification processes.

Keywords: EIoT, machine learning, anomaly detection, environment monitoring.

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Authors: Luis Fonseca, Filipe Cabral Pinto, Susana Sargento

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The increase of the world population, especially in large urban centers, has resulted in new challenges particularly with the control and optimization of public safety. Thus, in the present work, a solution is proposed for the prediction of criminal occurrences in a city based on historical data of incidents and demographic information. The entire research and implementation will be presented start with the data collection from its original source, the treatment and transformations applied to them, choice and the evaluation and implementation of the Machine Learning model up to the application layer. Classification models will be implemented to predict criminal risk for a given time interval and location. Machine Learning algorithms such as Random Forest, Neural Networks, K-Nearest Neighbors and Logistic Regression will be used to predict occurrences, and their performance will be compared according to the data processing and transformation used. The results show that the use of Machine Learning techniques helps to anticipate criminal occurrences, which contributed to the reinforcement of public security. Finally, the models were implemented on a platform that will provide an API to enable other entities to make requests for predictions in real-time. An application will also be presented where it is possible to show criminal predictions visually.

Keywords: Crime prediction, machine learning, public safety, smart city.

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Authors: Ghada Badr, Arwa Alturki

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The biological function of an RNA molecule depends on its structure. The objective of the alignment is finding the homology between two or more RNA secondary structures. Knowing the common functionalities between two RNA structures allows a better understanding and a discovery of other relationships between them. Besides, identifying non-coding RNAs -that is not translated into a protein- is a popular application in which RNA structural alignment is the first step A few methods for RNA structure-to-structure alignment have been developed. Most of these methods are partial structure-to-structure, sequence-to-structure, or structure-to-sequence alignment. Less attention is given in the literature to the use of efficient RNA structure representation and the structure-to-structure alignment methods are lacking. In this paper, we introduce an O(N2) Component-based Pairwise RNA Structure Alignment (CompPSA) algorithm, where structures are given as a component-based representation and where N is the maximum number of components in the two structures. The proposed algorithm compares the two RNA secondary structures based on their weighted component features rather than on their base-pair details. Extensive experiments are conducted illustrating the efficiency of the CompPSA algorithm when compared to other approaches and on different real and simulated datasets. The CompPSA algorithm shows an accurate similarity measure between components. The algorithm gives the flexibility for the user to align the two RNA structures based on their weighted features (position, full length, and/or stem length). Moreover, the algorithm proves scalability and efficiency in time and memory performance.

Keywords: Alignment, RNA secondary structure, pairwise, component-based, data mining.

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Authors: N. Khiati

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The present paper attempts to report on some findings that emerged out of a larger scale doctorate research into English language needs of a renowned Algerian company of Hydrocarbon industry. From a multifaceted English for specific purposes (ESP) research perspective, the paper considers the English needs of the finance/legal department staff in the midst of the conflicting needs perspectives involving both objective needs indicators (i.e., the pressure of globalised business) and the general negative attitudes among the administrative -mainly jurists- staff towards English (favouring a non-adaptation strategy). The researcher’s unearthing of the latter’s needs is an endeavour to concretise the concepts of unmet, or unconscious needs, among others. This is why, these initially uncovered hidden needs will be detailed questioning educational background, namely previous language of instruction; training experiences and expectations; as well as the actual communicative practices derived from the retrospective interviews and preliminary quantitative data of the questionnaire. Based on these rough clues suggesting real needs, the researcher will tentatively propose some implications for both pre-service and in-service training organisers as well as for educational policy makers in favour of an English course in legal English for the jurists mainly from pre-graduate phases to in-service training.

Keywords: English for specific purposes, ESP, legal and finance staff, needs analysis, unmet/unconscious needs, training implications.

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Authors: Isaac O. Asante, Yushi Jiang, Hailin Tao

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Livestreaming marketing, the new electronic commerce element, has become an optional marketing channel following the COVID-19 pandemic, and many sellers are leveraging the features presented by livestreaming to increase sales. This study was conducted to measure real-time observable interactions between consumers and sellers. Based on the affordance theory, this study conceptualized constructs representing the interactive features and examined how they drive consumers’ purchase willingness during livestreaming sessions using 1238 datasets from Amazon Live, following the manual observation of transaction records. Using structural equation modeling, the ordinary least square regression suggests that live viewers, new followers, live chats, and likes positively affect purchase willingness. The Sobel and Monte Carlo tests show that new followers, live chats, and likes significantly mediate the relationship between live viewers and purchase willingness. The study presents a way of measuring interactions in livestreaming commerce and proposes a way to manually gather data on consumer behaviors in livestreaming platforms when the application programming interface (API) of such platforms does not support data mining algorithms.

Keywords: Livestreaming marketing, live chats, live viewers, likes, new followers, purchase willingness.

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Authors: M. Orefice, V. Di Vito

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This paper provides a description of a Collision Avoidance algorithm that has been developed starting from the mathematical modeling of the flight of insects, in terms of spirals and conchospirals geometric paths. It is able to calculate a proper avoidance manoeuver aimed to prevent the infringement of a predefined distance threshold between ownship and the considered intruder, while minimizing the ownship trajectory deviation from the original path and in compliance with the aircraft performance limitations and dynamic constraints. The algorithm is designed in order to be suitable for real-time applications, so that it can be considered for the implementation in the most recent airborne automatic collision avoidance systems using the traffic data received through an ADS-B IN device. The presented approach is able to take into account the rules-of-the-air, due to the possibility to select, through specifically designed decision making logic based on the consideration of the encounter geometry, the direction of the calculated collision avoidance manoeuver that allows complying with the rules-of-the-air, as for instance the fundamental right of way rule. In the paper, the proposed collision avoidance algorithm is presented and its preliminary design and software implementation is described. The applicability of this method has been proved through preliminary simulation tests performed in a 2D environment considering single intruder encounter geometries, as reported and discussed in the paper.

Keywords: collision avoidance, RPAS, spiral geometry, ADS-B based application

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Authors: Panupong Chanplin, Kathaleeya Chanda., Wilailuk Mepracha

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The aims of this research were twofold: 1) to brand identity design of Creative Agriculture Community Enterprise, Bang Khonthi District, Samut Songkhram Province and 2) to study the level of tourist satisfaction towards brand identity design of Creative Agriculture Community Enterprise, Bang Khonthi District, Samut Songkhram Province. tourist satisfaction was measured using six criteria: clear brand positioning, likeable brand personality, memorable logo, attractive color palette, professional typography and on-brand supporting graphics. The researcher utilized a probability sampling method via simple random sampling. The sample consisted of 30 tourists in the Creative Agriculture Community Enterprise. Statistics utilized for data analysis were percentage, mean, and standard deviation. The results suggest that tourist had high levels of satisfaction towards all six criteria of the brand identity design that was designed to target them. This study proposes that specifically brand identity designed of Creative Agriculture Community Enterprise could also be implemented with other real media already available on the market.

Keywords: Satisfaction, brand identity, logo, creative agriculture community enterprise.

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Authors: Jun-Ho Park, Kwang-Woo Nam, Seung-Mo Hong, Tae-Heon Moon, Sang-Ho Lee, Youn-Taik Leem

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The aim of this study was to build ‘Ubi-Net’, a decision-making support system for systematic establishment in U-City planning. We have experienced various urban problems caused by high-density development and population concentrations in established urban areas. To address these problems, a U-Service contributes to the alleviation of urban problems by providing real-time information to citizens through network connections and related information. However, technology, devices, and information for consumers are required for systematic U-Service planning in towns and cities where there are many difficulties in this regard, and a lack of reference systems. Thus, this study suggests methods to support the establishment of sustainable planning by providing comprehensive information including IT technology, devices, news, and social networking services (SNS) to U-City planners through intelligent searches. In this study, we targeted Smart U-Parking Planning to solve parking problems in an ‘old’ city. Through this study, we sought to contribute to supporting advances in U-Space and the alleviation of urban problems.

Keywords: Design and decision support system, smart U-parking planning, social network analysis.

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Authors: Chiang-Ho Cheng, An-Shik Yang, Hong-Yih Cheng, Ming-Yu Lai

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This paper presents the design and fabrication of a novel piezoelectric actuator for a gas micro pump with check valve having the advantages of miniature size, light weight and low power consumption. The micro pump is designed to have eight major components, namely a stainless steel upper cover layer, a piezoelectric actuator, a stainless steel diaphragm, a PDMS chamber layer, two stainless steel channel layers with two valve seats, a PDMS check valve layer with two cantilever-type check valves and an acrylic substrate. A prototype of the gas micro pump, with a size of 52 mm × 50 mm × 5.0 mm, is fabricated by precise manufacturing. This device is designed to pump gases with the capability of performing the self-priming and bubble-tolerant work mode by maximizing the stroke volume of the membrane as well as the compression ratio via minimization of the dead volume of the micro pump chamber and channel. By experiment apparatus setup, we can get the real-time values of the flow rate of micro pump and the displacement of the piezoelectric actuator, simultaneously. The gas micro pump obtained higher output performance under the sinusoidal waveform of 250 Vpp. The micro pump achieved the maximum pumping rates of 1185 ml/min and back pressure of 7.14 kPa at the corresponding frequency of 120 and 50 Hz.

Keywords: PDMS, Check valve, Micro pump, Piezoelectric.

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Authors: C. Ardil

Abstract:

The purpose of this paper is to present fuzzy TOPSIS in an entropic fuzzy environment. Due to the ambiguous concepts often represented in decision data, exact values are insufficient to model real-life situations. In this paper, the rating of each alternative is defined in fuzzy linguistic terms, which can be expressed with triangular fuzzy numbers. The weight of each criterion is then derived from the decision matrix using the entropy weighting method. Next, a vertex method is proposed to calculate the distance between two triangular fuzzy numbers. According to the TOPSIS concept, a closeness coefficient is defined to determine the ranking order of all alternatives by simultaneously calculating the distances to both the fuzzy positive-ideal solution (FPIS) and the fuzzy negative-ideal solution (FNIS). Finally, an illustrative example of selecting stealth fighter aircraft is shown at the end of this article to highlight the procedure of the proposed method. Correlation analysis and validation analysis using TOPSIS, WSM, and WPM methods were performed to compare the ranking order of the alternatives.

Keywords: stealth fighter aircraft selection, fuzzy uncertainty theory (FUT), fuzzy entropic decision (FED), fuzzy linguistic variables, triangular fuzzy numbers, multiple criteria decision making analysis, MCDMA, TOPSIS, WSM, WPM

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Authors: Mitansha, Suzanne Wilkinson, Regan Potangaroa

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The built environment is designed, maintained, operated, and decommissioned by construction organisations, which play a significant role in providing physical resources and rebuilding infrastructures during major crises and disasters. It is evident that enhancing the resilience of construction organisations allows better responding ability and speedy recovery from disasters and acts as a boon for the nation in the face of significant disruptions. As individuals are the integral component of any organisation, hence, individual resilience is considered a critical aspect, which may boost organisational resilience of construction sector. It has been observed that individual resilience is indirectly supported by organisation’s citizenship behaviour, job performance, and career success. Not only this, it also tends to hold a directly proportional relation with job satisfaction, physical and emotional well-being affected by organisation’s work culture, whereas the resilience of organisation increases as a result of positive adaption, growth and collective learning of the employees as an entity. Moreover, indicators like situation awareness in staff and crisis related issues, effective vulnerability management, organisational leadership and culture ensured by approachable, encouraging and people-oriented leaders, are prominent for achieving organisational resilience. It, thus, becomes perceptible that both, organisational and individual resiliencies, have the potential to influence each other. Consequently, it arises a major question that how these characteristics are associated and tend to behave with respect to each other. The study, thus, aims to explore the overlapping dimensions of organisational and individual resilience to determine the impact boundaries. The research methodology of the paper would be based on systematic literature review specifically focused on the resilience of construction industry. This would provide a direct comparison of characteristics influencing individual and organisational resilience and will present the most significant indicators of individual resilience that can eventually help to enhance the resilience of construction organisations amidst any disaster or crisis.

Keywords: Construction industry, individual resilience, organisational resilience, overlapping dimension.

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Authors: Yuyun Wabula, B. J. Dewancker

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In the past decade, the social networking app has been growing very rapidly. Geolocation data is one of the important features of social media that can attach the user's location coordinate in the real world. This paper proposes the use of geolocation data from the Twitter social media application to gain knowledge about urban dynamics, especially on human mobility behavior. This paper aims to explore the relation between geolocation Twitter with the existence of people in the urban area. Firstly, the study will analyze the spread of people in the particular area, within the city using Twitter social media data. Secondly, we then match and categorize the existing place based on the same individuals visiting. Then, we combine the Twitter data from the tracking result and the questionnaire data to catch the Twitter user profile. To do that, we used the distribution frequency analysis to learn the visitors’ percentage. To validate the hypothesis, we compare it with the local population statistic data and land use mapping released by the city planning department of Makassar local government. The results show that there is the correlation between Twitter geolocation and questionnaire data. Thus, integration the Twitter data and survey data can reveal the profile of the social media users.

Keywords: Geolocation, Twitter, distribution analysis, human mobility.

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Authors: Sareh Rajabi, Taha Anjamrooz, Salwa Bheiry

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Sustainability of construction projects is an important issue to be addressed since the sector will continue to be developed in the coming years, especially in developing countries. Thus, it is significant to discover approaches and solutions for improving sustainability. Currently, the construction industry is the largest consumer of natural resources. This is the same in other countries in the Gulf region, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) has limited natural resources such as water, electricity, etc. Recently, the UAE has taken several actions in order to implement sustainable initiatives within its construction industry. Within the industry, the contractors’ role is significant in promoting sustainable development by taking the responsibility to minimize their negative impacts on the environment and society, and maximize their economic distribution. In this research, sustainability will be studied as an important key to bring competitive advantages to contracting organizations. The contractors should understand the need to improve their sustainable performance in order to expand their business competitiveness. Competitiveness at the construction project level refers to a contractor’s ability to compete for a project. There is less focus on how to improve contractors’ competitiveness by implementing sustainable construction practices. Based on an inclusive literature review on the relationship between sustainability performance and business competitiveness, this research will conduct a study of sustainable practice in the construction industry and the relationship between sustainability performance and business competitiveness in order to develop a framework for evaluating how contractors can improve their competitiveness in terms of more efficient processes, enhancements in productivity, and lower costs of compliance in order to reduce the initial project cost and obtain market opportunities in the UAE. The research findings will provide a framework that can be a useful guideline for contractors to develop their sustainability policy, strategy and practice for meeting the increased requirements for sustainable development in construction.

Keywords: Sustainable construction practice, sustainability, competitiveness, construction industry, contractors.

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Authors: Umber Iqbal, Shaleeza Sohail, Muhammad Younas Javed

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True integration of multimedia services over wired or wireless networks increase the productivity and effectiveness in today-s networks. IP Multimedia Subsystems are Next Generation Network architecture to provide the multimedia services over fixed or mobile networks. This paper proposes an extended SIP-based QoS Management architecture for IMS services over underlying IP access networks. To guarantee the end-to-end QoS for IMS services in interconnection backbone, SIP based proxy Modules are introduced to support the QoS provisioning and to reduce the handoff disruption time over IP access networks. In our approach these SIP Modules implement the combination of Diffserv and MPLS QoS mechanisms to assure the guaranteed QoS for real-time multimedia services. To guarantee QoS over access networks, SIP Modules make QoS resource reservations in advance to provide best QoS to IMS users over heterogeneous networks. To obtain more reliable multimedia services, our approach allows the use of SCTP protocol over SIP instead of UDP due to its multi-streaming feature. This architecture enables QoS provisioning for IMS roaming users to differentiate IMS network from other common IP networks for transmission of realtime multimedia services. To validate our approach simulation models are developed on short scale basis. The results show that our approach yields comparable performance for efficient delivery of IMS services over heterogeneous IP access networks.

Keywords: SIP-Based QoS Management Architecture, IPMultimedia Subsystems, IP Access Networks

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Authors: W. Munyoka, F. M. Manzira

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The purpose of this study is to analyze how varying alignment of e-Government policies in four countries in Sub-Saharan Africa Region, namely South Africa, Seychelles, Mauritius and Cape Verde lead to the success or failure of e-Government; and what should be done to ensure positive alignment that lead to e-Government project growth. In addition, the study aims to understand how various governments’ efforts in e-Government awareness campaign strategies, international cooperation, functional literacy and anticipated organizational change can influence implementation.

This study extensively explores contemporary research undertaken in the field of e-Government and explores the actual respective national ICT policies, strategies and implemented e-Government projects for in-depth comprehension of the status core. Data is analyzed qualitatively and quantitatively to reach a conclusion.

The study found that resounding successes in strategic e-Government alignment was achieved in Seychelles, Mauritius, South Africa and Cape Verde - (Ranked number 1 to 4 respectively).

The implications of the study is that policy makers in developing countries should put mechanisms in place for constant monitoring and evaluation of project implementation in line with ICT policies to ensure that e-Government projects reach maturity levels and do not die mid-way implementation as often noticed in many countries. The study recommends that countries within the region should make consented collaborative efforts and synergies with the private sector players and international donor agencies to achieve the implementation part of the set ICT policies.

Keywords: E-Government, ICT-Policy Alignment, Implementation, Sub-Saharan Africa.

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Authors: Ashiquer Rahman

Abstract:

The cutting edge knowledge mediation system called ‘ePLANETe’ provides a framework for building knowledge, tools, and methods for education, research, and sustainable practices, as well as the deliberative assessment support for Higher Education, Research Institutions, and elsewhere e.g., the collaborative learning and research on sustainability and biodiversity issues of territorial development sectors. The paper is to present the analytical perspective of the ‘ePLANETe’ concept and functionalities as an experimental platform for contributing to sustainability assessment. Now the ‘ePLANETe’ can be seen as experimentation of the challenges of “ICT for Green”. The digital technologies of ‘ePLANETe’ are exploited (i) to facilitate collaborative research, learning tools, and knowledge for sustainability challenges, and (ii) as deliberation support tools in pursuing of sustainability performance and practices in territorial governance, public policy, and business strategy, as well as in the higher education sectors itself. The paper investigates the dealing capacity of qualitative and quantitative assessment of agriculture sustainability through the stakeholder-based integrated assessment. Specifically, this paper focuses on integrating system methodologies with Deliberation Support Tools (DST) and INTEGRAAL method for collective assessment and decision-making in implementing regional plans. The report aims to identify the effective knowledge and tools to enable deliberations methodologies regarding practices on the sustainability of agriculture and biodiversity issues, societal responsibilities, and regional planning, concentrating on the question: “How to effectively mobilize resources (knowledge, tools, and methods) from different sources and at different scales regarding on agriculture and biodiversity issues to address sustainability challenges” that will create the scope for qualitative and quantitative assessments of sustainability as a new landmark of the agriculture sector.

Keywords: Biodiversity, Deliberation Support Tools, INTEGRAAL, stakeholder.

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Authors: Gaoyong Luo

Abstract:

The approach based on the wavelet transform has been widely used for image denoising due to its multi-resolution nature, its ability to produce high levels of noise reduction and the low level of distortion introduced. However, by removing noise, high frequency components belonging to edges are also removed, which leads to blurring the signal features. This paper proposes a new method of image noise reduction based on local variance and edge analysis. The analysis is performed by dividing an image into 32 x 32 pixel blocks, and transforming the data into wavelet domain. Fast lifting wavelet spatial-frequency decomposition and reconstruction is developed with the advantages of being computationally efficient and boundary effects minimized. The adaptive thresholding by local variance estimation and edge strength measurement can effectively reduce image noise while preserve the features of the original image corresponding to the boundaries of the objects. Experimental results demonstrate that the method performs well for images contaminated by natural and artificial noise, and is suitable to be adapted for different class of images and type of noises. The proposed algorithm provides a potential solution with parallel computation for real time or embedded system application.

Keywords: Edge strength, Fast lifting wavelet, Image denoising, Local variance.

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Authors: S. M. Ali, A. Salam Khan, A. U. Khan, M. Tariq, M. S. Hussain, B. A. Abbasi, I. Hussain, U. Farid

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Environment and surrounding plays a pivotal rule in structuring life-style of the consumers. Living standards intern effect the energy consumption of the consumers. In smart grid paradigm, climate drifts, weather parameter and green environmental directly relates to the energy profiles of the various consumers, such as residential, commercial and industrial. Considering above factors helps policy in shaping utility load curves and optimal management of demand and supply. Thus, there is a pressing need to develop correlation models of load and weather parameters and critical analysis of the factors effecting energy profiles of smart grid consumers. In this paper, we elaborated various environment and weather parameter factors effecting demand of consumers. Moreover, we developed correlation models, such as Pearson, Spearman, and Kendall, an inter-relation between dependent (load) parameter and independent (weather) parameters. Furthermore, we validated our discussion with real-time data of Texas State. The numerical simulations proved the effective relation of climatic drifts with energy consumption of smart grid consumers.

Keywords: Climatic drifts, correlation analysis, energy consumption, smart grid, weather parameter.

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Authors: H. Bentarzi, A. Zitouni

Abstract:

The reliability of the power grid depends on the successful operation of thousands of protective relays. The failure of one relay to operate as intended may lead the entire power grid to blackout. In fact, major power system failures during transient disturbances may be caused by unnecessary protective relay tripping rather than by the failure of a relay to operate. Adequate relay testing provides a first defense against false trips of the relay and hence improves power grid stability and prevents catastrophic bulk power system failures. The goal of this research project is to design and enhance the relay tester using a technology such as Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) card NI 7851. A PC based tester framework has been developed using Simulink power system model for generating signals under different conditions (faults or transient disturbances) and LabVIEW for developing the graphical user interface and configuring the FPGA. Besides, the interface system has been developed for outputting and amplifying the signals without distortion. These signals should be like the generated ones by the real power system and large enough for testing the relay’s functionality. The signals generated that have been displayed on the scope are satisfactory. Furthermore, the proposed testing system can be used for improving the performance of protective relay.

Keywords: Amplifier class D, FPGA, protective relay, tester.

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Authors: Amna Batool

Abstract:

Agile methodology is the current most popular technique in software development projects. Agile methods in software development bring optimistic impact on software performances, quality and customer satisfaction. There are some organizations and small-medium enterprises adopting agile into their local software development projects as well as in distributed software development projects. Adopting agile methods in local software development projects is valuable. However, agile global software deployment needs an attention. There are different key challenges in agile global software development that need to resolve and enhance the global software development cycles. The proposed systematic literature review investigates all key challenges of agile in global software development. Moreover, a quantitative methodology (an actual survey) targeted to present a real case scenario of these particular key challenges faced by one of the software houses that is BestWeb Malaysia. The outcomes of systematic literature and the results of quantitative methodology are compared with each other to evaluate if the key challenges pointed out in systematic review still exist. The proposed research and its exploratory results can assist small medium enterprises to avoid these challenges by adopting the best practices in their global software development projects. Moreover, it is helpful for novice researchers to get valuable information altogether.

Keywords: Agile software development, ASD challenges, agile global software development. challenges in agile global software development.

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Authors: R. Talebi, A. Abdel-Dayem, J. Johnson

Abstract:

Three-dimensional reconstruction of small objects has been one of the most challenging problems over the last decade. Computer graphics researchers and photography professionals have been working on improving 3D reconstruction algorithms to fit the high demands of various real life applications. Medical sciences, animation industry, virtual reality, pattern recognition, tourism industry, and reverse engineering are common fields where 3D reconstruction of objects plays a vital role. Both lack of accuracy and high computational cost are the major challenges facing successful 3D reconstruction. Fringe projection has emerged as a promising 3D reconstruction direction that combines low computational cost to both high precision and high resolution. It employs digital projection, structured light systems and phase analysis on fringed pictures. Research studies have shown that the system has acceptable performance, and moreover it is insensitive to ambient light. This paper presents an overview of fringe projection approaches. It also presents an experimental study and implementation of a simple fringe projection system. We tested our system using two objects with different materials and levels of details. Experimental results have shown that, while our system is simple, it produces acceptable results.

Keywords: Digital fringe projection, 3D reconstruction, phase unwrapping, phase shifting.

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Authors: Neeraj Nehra, R. B. Patel, V. K. Bhat

Abstract:

Use of the Internet and the World-Wide-Web (WWW) has become widespread in recent years and mobile agent technology has proliferated at an equally rapid rate. In this scenario load balancing becomes important for P2P systems. Beside P2P systems can be highly heterogeneous, i.e., they may consists of peers that range from old desktops to powerful servers connected to internet through high-bandwidth lines. There are various loads balancing policies came into picture. Primitive one is Message Passing Interface (MPI). Its wide availability and portability make it an attractive choice; however the communication requirements are sometimes inefficient when implementing the primitives provided by MPI. In this scenario we use the concept of mobile agent because Mobile agent (MA) based approach have the merits of high flexibility, efficiency, low network traffic, less communication latency as well as highly asynchronous. In this study we present decentralized load balancing scheme using mobile agent technology in which when a node is overloaded, task migrates to less utilized nodes so as to share the workload. However, the decision of which nodes receive migrating task is made in real-time by defining certain load balancing policies. These policies are executed on PMADE (A Platform for Mobile Agent Distribution and Execution) in decentralized manner using JuxtaNet and various load balancing metrics are discussed.

Keywords: Mobile Agents, Agent host, Agent Submitter, PMADE.

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Authors: Raif Parlakkaya, Mustafa Nihat Demirci, Mehmet Nuri Salur

Abstract:

Environmental pollution has detrimental effects on the quality of our life and its scope has reached such an extent that measures are being taken both at the national and international levels to reduce, prevent and mitigate its impact on social, economic and political spheres. Therefore, awareness of environmental problems has been increasing among stakeholders and accordingly among companies. It is seen that corporate reporting is expanding beyond environmental performance. Primary purpose of publishing an environmental report is to provide specific audiences with useful, meaningful information. This paper is intended to analyze the extent and qualification of environmental disclosures of Turkish publicly quoted firms and see how it varies from one sector to another. The data for the study were collected from annual activity reports of companies, listed on the corporate governance index (BIST-XKURY) of Istanbul Stock Exchange. Content analysis was the research methodology used to measure the extent of environmental disclosure. Accordingly, 2015 annual activity reports of companies that carry out business in some particular fields were acquired from Capital Market Board, websites of Public Disclosure Platform and companies’ own websites. These reports were categorized into five main aspects: Environmental policies, environmental management systems, environmental protection and conservation activities, environmental awareness and information on environmental lawsuits. Subsequently, each component was divided into several variables related to what each firm is supposed to disclose about environmental information. In this context, the nature and scope of the information disclosed on each item were assessed according to five different ways (N.I: No Information; G.E.: General Explanations; Q.E.: Qualitative Detailed Explanations; N.E.: Quantitative (numerical) Detailed Explanations; Q.&N.E.: Both Qualitative and Quantitative Explanations).

Keywords: Environmental accounting, disclosure, corporate governance, content analysis.

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Authors: Soofiyan Atar, Adil Shaikh, Sahil Rajpurkar, Pragnesh Bhalala, Aniket Desai, Irfan Siddavatam

Abstract:

Deep reinforcement learning (deep RL) algorithms leverage the symbolic power of complex controllers by automating it by mapping sensory inputs to low-level actions. Deep RL eliminates the complex robot dynamics with minimal engineering. Deep RL provides high-risk involvement by directly implementing it in real-world scenarios and also high sensitivity towards hyperparameters. Tuning of hyperparameters on a pneumatic quadruped robot becomes very expensive through trial-and-error learning. This paper presents an automated learning control for a pneumatic quadruped robot using sample efficient deep Q learning, enabling minimal tuning and very few trials to learn the neural network. Long training hours may degrade the pneumatic cylinder due to jerk actions originated through stochastic weights. We applied this method to the pneumatic quadruped robot, which resulted in a hopping gait. In our process, we eliminated the use of a simulator and acquired a stable gait. This approach evolves so that the resultant gait matures more sturdy towards any stochastic changes in the environment. We further show that our algorithm performed very well as compared to programmed gait using robot dynamics.

Keywords: model-based reinforcement learning, gait stability, supervised learning, pneumatic quadruped

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