Search results for: Quality Management

Authors: Juntae Kim, Jaeyoung Park, Kyoungkun Lee, Jong Tae Kim

Abstract:

The H.264/AVC standard is a highly efficient video codec providing high-quality videos at low bit-rates. As employing advanced techniques, the computational complexity has been increased. The complexity brings about the major problem in the implementation of a real-time encoder and decoder. Parallelism is the one of approaches which can be implemented by multi-core system. We analyze macroblock-level parallelism which ensures the same bit rate with high concurrency of processors. In order to reduce the encoding time, dynamic data partition based on macroblock region is proposed. The data partition has the advantages in load balancing and data communication overhead. Using the data partition, the encoder obtains more than 3.59x speed-up on a four-processor system. This work can be applied to other multimedia processing applications.

Keywords: H.264/AVC, video coding, thread-level parallelism, OpenMP, multimedia

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Authors: Konstantinos Sofianos, Michail Stefanidakis

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Nowadays, despite the great advances in technology, most educational frameworks lack a strong educational design basis. E-learning has become prevalent, but it faces various challenges such as student isolation and lack of quality in the learning process. An intelligent learning system provides a student with educational material according to their learning background and learning preferences. It records full information about the student, such as demographic information, learning styles, and academic performance. This information allows the system to be fully adapted to the student’s needs. In this paper, we propose a framework and an ontology for music education, consisting of the learner model and all elements of the learning process (learning objects, teaching methods, learning activities, assessment). This framework can be integrated into an intelligent learning system and used for music education in schools for the development of professional skills and beyond.

Keywords: Intelligent learning systems, e-learning, music education, ontology, semantic web.

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Authors: P. Mottaghizadeh, M. Bagheri

Abstract:

In the present paper, the three-dimensional temperature field of tool is determined during the machining and compared with experimental work on C45 workpiece using carbide cutting tool inserts. During the metal cutting operations, high temperature is generated in the tool cutting edge which influence on the rate of tool wear. Temperature is most important characteristic of machining processes; since many parameters such as cutting speed, surface quality and cutting forces depend on the temperature and high temperatures can cause high mechanical stresses which lead to early tool wear and reduce tool life. Therefore, considerable attention is paid to determine tool temperatures. The experiments are carried out for dry and orthogonal machining condition. The results show that the increase of tool temperature depends on depth of cut and especially cutting speed in high range of cutting conditions.

Keywords: Finite element method, Machining, Temperature measurement, Thermal fields

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Authors: Estrella C. Damaris, Ingrid A. Olais, Gloria P. Uicab

Abstract:

This study explores the relationship between the level of functionality and cognitive impairment in older adult women from the south-east of Mexico. It is a descriptive, cross-sectional study; performed with 172 participants in total who attended a health institute and live in Merida, Yucatan Mexico. After a non-probabilistic sampling, Barthel and Pfeiffer scales were applied. The results show statistically significant correlation between the cognitive impairment (Pfeiffer) and the levels of independence and function (Barthel) (r =0.489; p =0.001). Both determine a dependence level so they need either a little or a lot of help. Society needs that the older woman be healthy and that the professionals of mental health develop activities to prevent and rehabilitate because cognitive impairment and function are directly related with the quality of life.

Keywords: Functionality, cognition, routine activities, cognitive impairment.

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Authors: M. S. Abdelwahed, M. A. El-Baz, T. T. El-Midany

Abstract:

this paper aims to provide an approach to predict the performance of the product produced after multi-stages of manufacturing processes, as well as the assembly. Such approach aims to control and subsequently identify the relationship between the process inputs and outputs so that a process engineer can more accurately predict how the process output shall perform based on the system inputs. The approach is guided by a six-sigma methodology to obtain improved performance. In this paper a case study of the manufacture of a hermetic reciprocating compressor is presented. The application of artificial neural networks (ANNs) technique is introduced to improve performance prediction within this manufacturing environment. The results demonstrate that the approach predicts accurately and effectively.

Keywords: Artificial neural networks, Reciprocating compressor manufacturing, Performance prediction, Quality improvement

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Authors: Say Wei Foo, Qi Dong

Abstract:

In this paper, a novel feature-based image watermarking scheme is proposed. Zernike moments which have invariance properties are adopted in the scheme. In the proposed scheme, feature points are first extracted from host image and several circular patches centered on these points are generated. The patches are used as carriers of watermark information because they can be regenerated to locate watermark embedding positions even when watermarked images are severely distorted. Zernike transform is then applied to the patches to calculate local Zernike moments. Dither modulation is adopted to quantize the magnitudes of the Zernike moments followed by false alarm analysis. Experimental results show that quality degradation of watermarked image is visually transparent. The proposed scheme is very robust against image processing operations and geometric attacks.

Keywords: Image watermarking, Zernike moments, Featurepoint, Invariance, Robustness.

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Authors: Salam Saudagar, Ankit Kamboj, Niraj Mohan, Satgounda Patil, Nilesh Powar

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Task Assignment and Scheduling is a challenging Operations Research problem when there is a limited number of resources and comparatively higher number of tasks. The Cost Management team at Cummins needs to assign tasks based on a deadline and must prioritize some of the tasks as per business requirements. Moreover, there is a constraint on the resources that assignment of tasks should be done based on an individual skill level, that may vary for different tasks. Another constraint is for scheduling the tasks that should be evenly distributed in terms of number of working hours, which adds further complexity to this problem. The proposed greedy approach to solve assignment and scheduling problem first assigns the task based on management priority and then by the closest deadline. This is followed by an iterative selection of an available resource with the least allocated total working hours for a task, i.e. finding the local optimal choice for each task with the goal of determining the global optimum. The greedy approach task allocation is compared with a variant of Hungarian Algorithm, and it is observed that the proposed approach gives an equal allocation of working hours among the resources. The comparative study of the proposed approach is also done with manual task allocation and it is noted that the visibility of the task timeline has increased from 2 months to 6 months. An interactive dashboard app is created for the greedy assignment and scheduling approach and the tasks with more than 2 months horizon that were waiting in a queue without a delivery date initially are now analyzed effectively by the business with expected timelines for completion.

Keywords: Assignment, deadline, greedy approach, hungarian algorithm, operations research, scheduling.

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Authors: Chein-Shung Hwang, Ruei-Siang Fong

Abstract:

User-based Collaborative filtering (CF), one of the most prevailing and efficient recommendation techniques, provides personalized recommendations to users based on the opinions of other users. Although the CF technique has been successfully applied in various applications, it suffers from serious sparsity problems. The cloud-model approach addresses the sparsity problems by constructing the user-s global preference represented by a cloud eigenvector. The user-based CF approach works well with dense datasets while the cloud-model CF approach has a greater performance when the dataset is sparse. In this paper, we present a hybrid approach that integrates the predictions from both the user-based CF and the cloud-model CF approaches. The experimental results show that the proposed hybrid approach can ameliorate the sparsity problem and provide an improved prediction quality.

Keywords: Cloud model, Collaborative filtering, Hybridrecommender system

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Authors: Bhupeshwaran Mani, S. Radha, A. Jawahar, A. Sivasubramanian

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Here, we study the characteristic feature of conventional (ON-OFF keying) and soliton based transmission system. We consider 20Gbps transmission system implemented with Conventional Single Mode Fiber (C-SMF) to examine the role of Gaussian pulse which is the characteristic of conventional propagation and Hyperbolic-secant pulse which is the characteristic of soliton propagation in it. We note the influence of these pulses with respect to different dispersion lengths and soliton period in conventional and soliton system respectively and evaluate the system performance in terms of Quality factor. From the analysis, we could prove that the soliton pulse has the consistent performance even for long distance without dispersion compensation than the conventional system as it is robust to dispersion. For the length of transmission of 200Km, soliton system yielded Q of 33.958 while the conventional system totally exhausted with Q=0.

Keywords: Soliton, dispersion length, Soliton period, Return-tozero (RZ), Q-factor.

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Authors: S.I.Nikolaeva, Yu.V. Petrov, L.Ye.Skipnikova

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It has been shown that the solution of water shortage problem in Central Asia closely connected with inclusion of atmosphere water vapour into the system of response and water resources management. Some methods of water extraction from atmosphere have been discussed.

Keywords: potable water, water resources, water problems, water scarcity.

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Authors: Malka N. Halgamuge, Toong-Khuan Chan, Priyan Mendis

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Monitoring and automatic control of building environment is a crucial application of Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) in which maximizing network lifetime is a key challenge. Previous research into the performance of a network in a building environment has been concerned with radio propagation within a single floor. We investigate the link quality distribution to obtain full coverage of signal strength in a four-storey building environment, experimentally. Our results indicate that the transitional region is of particular concern in wireless sensor network since it accommodates high variance unreliable links. The transitional region in a multi-storey building is mainly due to the presence of reinforced concrete slabs at each storey and the fac┬©ade which obstructs the radio signal and introduces an additional absorption term to the path loss.

Keywords: Wireless sensor networks, radio propagation, building monitoring

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Authors: Bharti B. Parmar, Vivek J. Pandya

Abstract:

The issue of unintentional islanding detection of grid connected synchronous distributed generation (SDG) remains the most challenging task faced by the distributed generation (DG) industry as SDG is highly capable of prolonging an island. This paper gives an insight of anti-islanding detection techniques mainly applied for SDG. Different techniques conclude that it is challenging to point out a generic method for a distinct purpose as the application of particular practice depends on nature of the end use and system dependent elements. Also, the setup and operational cost affect the selection of anti-islanding technique to achieve minimal compromising between cost and system quality. A test bench is created in the MATLAB/Simulink^® to demonstrate the results of a 33 kV system. The results are highly satisfactory and they are according to the current practices.

Keywords: Synchronous distributed generation, islanding, point of common coupling, loss of grid.

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Authors: M. Bohlouli, M. Analoui

Abstract:

For complete support of Quality of Service, it is better that environment itself predicts resource requirements of a job by using special methods in the Grid computing. The exact and correct prediction causes exact matching of required resources with available resources. After the execution of each job, the used resources will be saved in the active database named "History". At first some of the attributes will be exploit from the main job and according to a defined similarity algorithm the most similar executed job will be exploited from "History" using statistic terms such as linear regression or average, resource requirements will be predicted. The new idea in this research is based on active database and centralized history maintenance. Implementation and testing of the proposed architecture results in accuracy percentage of 96.68% to predict CPU usage of jobs and 91.29% of memory usage and 89.80% of the band width usage.

Keywords: Active Database, Grid Computing, ResourceRequirement Prediction, Scheduling,

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Authors: S. Ali. Tajer, Babak H. Khalaj

Abstract:

This paper represents an investigation on how exploiting multiple transmit antennas by OFDM based wireless LAN subscribers can mitigate physical layer error rate. Then by comparing the Wireless LANs that utilize spatial diversity techniques with the conventional ones it will reveal how PHY and TCP throughputs behaviors are ameliorated. In the next step it will assess the same issues based on a cellular context operation which is mainly introduced as an innovated solution that beside a multi cell operation scenario benefits spatio-temporal signaling schemes as well. Presented simulations will shed light on the improved performance of the wide range and high quality wireless LAN services provided by the proposed approach.

Keywords: Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO), Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM), and WirelessLocal Area Network (WLAN).

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Authors: Sameerchand Pudaruth, Avinash Mantaye

Abstract:

E-learning refers to the specific kind of learning experienced within the domain of educational technology, which can be used in or out of the classroom. In this paper, we give an overview of an e-learning platform 'An Innovative Interactive and Online English Platform for Upper Primary Students' is an interactive web-based application which will serve as an aid to the primary school students in Mauritius. The objectives of this platform are to offer quality learning resources for the English subject at our primary level of education, encourage self-learning and hence promote e-learning. The platform developed consists of several interesting features, for example, the English Verb Conjugation tool, Negative Form tool, Interrogative Form tool and Close Test Generator. Thus, this learning platform will be useful at a time where our country is looking for an alternative to private tuition and also, looking forward to increase the pass rate.

Keywords: educational technology, e-learning, Mauritius.

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Authors: Solvita Kampuse, Kristaps Siljanis, Tatjana Rakcejeva, Irisa Murniece

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The aim of present experiment was to evaluate the influence of cultivar to quality parameters of dried potato chips and sticks produced in microwave-vacuum drier. The potatoes before drying were blanched in oil and water at 180ºC and at 85ºC respectively. The moisture content, crispiness, the colour (CIE L*a*b*), the content of ascorbic acid, total carotenoids and total fat content of dried potato chips and sticks was determined The highest ascorbic acid content, high content of carotenoids, low total fat content, low acrylamide content and good crispiness (low breaking force) especially for sticks was determined in the samples of Gundega cultivar.

Keywords: Potato, chips, sticks, vacuum-microwave, drying, cultivar, blanching.

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Authors: E. Mulliner, V. Maliene

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The concept of housing affordability is a contested issue, but a pressing and widespread problem for many countries. Simple ratio measures based on housing expenditure and income are habitually used to defined and assess housing affordability. However, conceptualising and measuring affordability in this manner focuses only on financial attributes and fails to deal with wider issues such as housing quality, location and access to services and facilities. The research is based on the notion that the housing affordability problem encompasses more than the financial costs of housing and a households ability to meet such costs and must address larger issues such as social and environmental sustainability and the welfare of households. Therefore, the need arises for a broad and more encompassing set of attributes by which housing affordability can be assessed. This paper presents a system of criteria by which the affordability of different housing locations could be assessed in a comprehensive and sustainable manner. Moreover, the paper explores the way in which such criteria could be measured.

Keywords: Affordable housing, attributes, housing affordability, sustainable communities

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Authors: Amir Gholami Pastaki, Ali Reza Sahab, Seyed Mehdi Sadeghi

Abstract:

LSP routing is among the prominent issues in MPLS networks traffic engineering. The objective of this routing is to increase number of the accepted requests while guaranteeing the quality of service (QoS). Requested bandwidth is the most important QoS criterion that is considered in literatures, and a various number of heuristic algorithms have been presented with that regards. Many of these algorithms prevent flows through bottlenecks of the network in order to perform load balancing, which impedes optimum operation of the network. Here, a modern routing algorithm is proposed as MIRAD: having a little information of the network topology, links residual bandwidth, and any knowledge of the prospective requests it provides every request with a maximum bandwidth as well as minimum end-to-end delay via uniform load distribution across the network. Simulation results of the proposed algorithm show a better efficiency in comparison with similar algorithms.

Keywords: new generation networks, QoS, traffic engineering, MPLS, QoS based routing, LSP

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Authors: Tunjo Perić, Marin Fatović

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In this paper a new methodology for vendor selection and supply quotas determination (VSSQD) is proposed. The problem of VSSQD is solved by the model that combines revised weighting method for determining the objective function coefficients, and a multiple objective linear programming (MOLP) method based on the cooperative game theory for VSSQD. The criteria used for VSSQD are: (1) purchase costs and (2) product quality supplied by individual vendors. The proposed methodology has been tested on the example of flour purchase for a bakery with two decision makers.

Keywords: Cooperative game theory, multiple objective linear programming, revised weighting method, vendor selection.

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Authors: Frantisek Bozek, Lenka Jesonkova, Jiri Dvorak, Milos Bozek, Eduard Bakos

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The contents of nitrates and nitrites were monitored in 15 ground water resources of a selected region earmarked for the emergency supply of population. The resources have been selected on the basis of previous assessment of natural conditions and the exploitation of territory in the infiltration area as well as the surroundings of water resources. The health risk analysis carried out in relation to nitrates and nitrites, which were found to be the most serious water contaminants, proved, that 14 resources met the health standards in relation to the assessed criterion and could be included in crisis plans. Water quality of ground resources may be assessed in the same way with regard to other contaminants.

Keywords: Drinking water, health risks, methemoglobinemia, nitrates, nitrites, water pollution.

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Authors: P. Heribanová, J. Polec, S. Ondrušová, M. Hosťovecký

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This paper discusses the cued speech recognition methods in videoconference. Cued speech is a specific gesture language that is used for communication between deaf people. We define the criteria for sentence intelligibility according to answers of testing subjects (deaf people). In our tests we use 30 sample videos coded by H.264 codec with various bit-rates and various speed of cued speech. Additionally, we define the criteria for consonant sign recognizability in single-handed finger alphabet (dactyl) analogically to acoustics. We use another 12 sample videos coded by H.264 codec with various bit-rates in four different video formats. To interpret the results we apply the standard scale for subjective video quality evaluation and the percentual evaluation of intelligibility as in acoustics. From the results we construct the minimum coded bit-rate recommendations for every spatial resolution.

Keywords: cued speech, inteligibility, logatom, video

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Authors: Nasser Ghassembaglou, Abdullah Bolek, Oktay Yilmaz, Ertan Oznergiz, Hikmet Kocabas, Safak Yilmaz

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Nanofibers are effective materials which have frequently been investigated to produce high quality air filters. As an environmental approach our aim is to achieve nanofibers by melting. In spun-bond systems extruder, spin-pump, nozzle package and attenuator are used. Molten polymer which flows from extruder is made steady by spin-pump. Regular melt passes through nozzle holes and forms fibers under high pressure. The fibers pulled from nozzle are shrunk to micron size by an attenuator; after solidification, they are collected on a conveyor. In this research different designs of attenuator system have been studied; and also CFD analysis has been done on these different designs. Afterwards, one of these designs tested and finally some optimizations have been done to reduce pressure loss and increase air velocity.

Keywords: Attenuator, nanofiber, spun-bond.

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Authors: Hechmi Saidi, Noureddine Hamdi

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The performance of Decode and Forward (DF) multihop Free Space Optical ( FSO) scheme deploying Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) configuration under Gamma-Gamma (GG) statistical distribution, that adopts M-ary Pulse Position Modulation (MPPM) coding, is investigated. We have extracted exact and estimated values of Symbol-Error Rates (SERs) respectively. A closed form formula related to the Probability Density Function (PDF) is expressed for our designed system. Thanks to the use of DF multihop MIMO FSO configuration and MPPM signaling, atmospheric turbulence is combatted; hence the transmitted signal quality is improved.

Keywords: FSO, MIMO, MIMO, multihop, DF, SER, GG channel.

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Authors: Mohd Fahmi Mohamad Amran, Riza Sulaiman, Saliyah Kahar, Suziyanti Marjudi, Muhammad FairuzAbd Rauf

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The extensive number of engineering drawing will be referred for planning process and the changes will produce a good engineering design to meet the demand in producing a new model. The advantage in reuse of engineering designs is to allow continuous product development to further improve the quality of product development, thus reduce the development costs. However, to retrieve the existing engineering drawing, it is time consuming, a complex process and are expose to errors. Engineering drawing file searching system will be proposed to solve this problem. It is essential for engineer and designer to have some sort of medium to enable them to search for drawing in the most effective way. This paper lays out the proposed research project under the area of information extraction in engineering drawing.

Keywords: Computer aided design, information extraction, engineering drawing, reuse design.

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Authors: Say Wei Foo, Qi Dong

Abstract:

Digital watermarking has become an important technique for copyright protection but its robustness against attacks remains a major problem. In this paper, we propose a normalizationbased robust image watermarking scheme. In the proposed scheme, original host image is first normalized to a standard form. Zernike transform is then applied to the normalized image to calculate Zernike moments. Dither modulation is adopted to quantize the magnitudes of Zernike moments according to the watermark bit stream. The watermark extracting method is a blind method. Security analysis and false alarm analysis are then performed. The quality degradation of watermarked image caused by the embedded watermark is visually transparent. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme has very high robustness against various image processing operations and geometric attacks.

Keywords: Image watermarking, Image normalization, Zernike moments, Robustness.

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Authors: Petri Kouvo, Aino Kainulainen, Kimmo Koivunen

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Separate collection system for recyclable wastes in the Helsinki region was ranked second best of European capitals. The collection system includes paper, cardboard, glass, metals and biowaste. Residual waste is collected and used in energy production. The collection system excluding paper is managed by the Helsinki Region Environmental Services HSY, a public organization owned by four municipalities (Helsinki, Espoo, Kauniainen and Vantaa). Paper collection is handled by the producer responsibility scheme. The efficiency of the collection system in the Helsinki region relies on a good coverage of door-to-door-collection. All properties with 10 or more dwelling units are required to source separate biowaste and cardboard. This covers about 75% of the population of the area. The obligation is extended to glass and metal in properties with 20 or more dwelling units. Other success factors include public awareness campaigns and a fee system that encourages recycling. As a result of waste management regulations for source separation of recyclables and biowaste, nearly 50 percent of recycling rate of household waste has been reached. For households and small and medium size enterprises, there is a sorting station fleet of five stations available. More than 50 percent of wastes received at sorting stations is utilized as material. The separate collection of plastic packaging in Finland will begin in 2016 within the producer responsibility scheme. HSY started supplementing the national bring point system with door-to-door-collection and pilot operations will begin in spring 2016. The result of plastic packages pilot project has been encouraging. Until the end of 2016, over 3500 apartment buildings have been joined the piloting, and more than 1800 tons of plastic packages have been collected separately. In the summer 2015 a novel partial flow digestion process combining digestion and tunnel composting was adopted for source separated household and commercial biowaste management. The product gas form digestion process is converted in to heat and electricity in piston engine and organic Rankine cycle process with very high overall efficiency. This paper describes the efficient collection system and discusses key success factors as well as main obstacles and lessons learned as well as the partial flow process for biowaste management.

Keywords: Biowaste, HSY, MSW, plastic packages, recycling, separate collection.

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Authors: Farjana Mumu, Jia Guozho

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Throughout the world, the Islamic way of banking and financing is increasing. The same trend is also visible in Pakistan, where the Islamic banking sector is increasing in size and volume each year. The question immediately arises as why the Pakistanis patronize the Islamic banking system? This study was carried out to find whether following the Islamic rules in finance is the main factor for such selection or whether other factors such as customer service, location, banking hour, physical facilities of the bank etc also have importance. The study was carried by distributing questionnaire and 200 responses were collected from the clients of Islamic banks. The result showed that the service quality and other factors are as important as following the Islamic rules for finance to retain old ustomers and catch new customers. The result is important and Islamic banks can take actions accordingly to look after both the factors

Keywords: Customers' perception, customer satisfaction, customer service, Islamic banking

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Authors: Abdel-Samad M. Ali

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Given the motivation of maps impact in enhancing the perception of the quality of life in a region, this work examines the use of spatial analytical techniques in exploring the role of space in shaping human development patterns in Assiut governorate. Variations of human development index (HDI) of the governorate-s villages, districts and cities are mapped using geographic information systems (GIS). Global and local spatial autocorrelation measures are employed to assess the levels of spatial dependency in the data and to map clusters of human development. Results show prominent disparities in HDI between regions of Assiut. Strong patterns of spatial association were found proving the presence of clusters on the distribution of HDI. Finally, the study indicates several "hot-spots" in the governorate to be area of more investigations to explore the attributes of such levels of human development. This is very important for accomplishing the development plan of poorest regions currently adopted in Egypt.

Keywords: Human development, Egypt, GIS, Spatial analysis.

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Authors: Kirsten Hoeper, Maike Kriependorf

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This paper firstly discusses the initial situation and problems. Afterward, it defines professional bureaucracies and shows their impact for the OR-work. The OR-center and its actors are shown. Finally, the paper provides the empiric design for detecting the target systems of the different work groups within the OR, the quality criteria in qualitative research and empirical results. It is shown that different groups have different targets in their daily work and that helps for a better understanding. More precisely, by detecting the target systems of these experts, we can ‘bridge’ the different points of view to create a common basis for the work in the OR. One of the aims was to find bridges to overcome separating factors. This paper describes the situation in Germany focusing the Hannover Medical School. It can be assumed that the results can be transferred to other countries using the DRG-System (Diagnosis Related Groups).

Keywords: Hospital, OR, professional bureaucracies, target systems.

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Authors: Christian Lauter, Corin Reuter, Shuang Wu, Thomas Troester

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Lightweight construction became more and more important over the last decades in several applications, e.g. in the automotive or aircraft sector. This is the result of economic and ecological constraints on the one hand and increasing safety and comfort requirements on the other hand. In the field of lightweight design, different approaches are used due to specific requirements towards the technical systems. The use of endless carbon fiber reinforced plastics (CFRP) offers the largest weight saving potential of sometimes more than 50% compared to conventional metal-constructions. However, there are very limited industrial applications because of the cost-intensive manufacturing of the fibers and production technologies. Other disadvantages of pure CFRP-structures affect the quality control or the damage resistance. One approach to meet these challenges is hybrid materials. This means CFRP and sheet metal are combined on a material level. Therefore, new opportunities for innovative process routes are realizable. Hybrid lightweight design results in lower costs due to an optimized material utilization and the possibility to integrate the structures in already existing production processes of automobile manufacturers. In recent and current research, the advantages of two-layered hybrid materials have been pointed out, i.e. the possibility to realize structures with tailored mechanical properties or to divide the curing cycle of the epoxy resin into two steps. Current research work at the Chair for Automotive Lightweight Design (LiA) at the Paderborn University focusses on production processes for fiber-metal-laminates. The aim of this work is the development and qualification of a large-scale production process for high-performance fiber-metal-laminates (FML) for industrial applications in the automotive or aircraft sector. Therefore, the prepreg-press-technology is used, in which pre-impregnated carbon fibers and sheet metals are formed and cured in a closed, heated mold. The investigations focus e.g. on the realization of short process chains and cycle times, on the reduction of time-consuming manual process steps, and the reduction of material costs. This paper gives an overview over the considerable steps of the production process in the beginning. Afterwards experimental results are discussed. This part concentrates on the influence of different process parameters on the mechanical properties, the laminate quality and the identification of process limits. Concluding the advantages of this technology compared to conventional FML-production-processes and other lightweight design approaches are carried out.

Keywords: Composite material, Fiber metal laminate, Lightweight construction, Prepreg press technology, Large-series production.

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