Search results for: evaluation measures

Authors: Ambika Roy Bardhan

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Kolkata, the City of Joy, is a greying metropolis not only in respect of its concrete jungle but also because of the largest population of 60-plus residents that it shelters among all other cities in India. Declining birth and death rates and a negative growth of population indicate that the city has reached the last stage of demographic transition. Thus, the obvious consequence has been the ageing of its population. With this background, the present paper attempts to study the demographic and socio-economic status of the elderly population in Kolkata. Analysis and findings have been based on secondary data obtained from Census of India of various years, Sample Registration System Reports and reports by HelpAge India. Findings show that the elderly population is increasing continuously. With respect to gender, the male elderly outnumbers the female elderly population. The percentage of households having one elderly member is more in the city due to the emergence of the nuclear families and erosion of joint family system. With respect to socio-economic status, those elderly who are the heads of the family are lower in percentages than those in the other age groups. Also, male elderly as head of the family are greater in percentage than female elderly. Elderly in the category of currently married records the highest percentage followed by widowed, never married and lastly, separated or divorced. Male elderly outnumber the female elderly as currently married, while female elderly outnumbers the male elderly in the category of widowed. In terms of living status, the percentage of elderly who are living alone is highest in Kolkata and the reason for staying alone as no support from children also happens to be highest in this city. The literacy rate and higher level of education is higher among the male than female elderly. Higher percentages of female elderly have been found to be with disability. Disability in movement and multiple disabilities have been found to be more common among the elderly population in Kolkata. Percentages of male literate pensioners are highest than other categories. Also, in terms of levels of education male elderly who are graduate and above other than technical degree are the highest receivers of pension. Also, in terms of working status, elderly as non-workers are higher in percentages with the population of elderly females outnumbering the males. The old age dependency ratio in the city is increasing continuously and the ratio is higher among females than male. Thus, it can be stated that Kolkata is witnessing continuous and rapid ageing of its population. Increasing dependency ratio is likely to create pressure on the working population, available civic, social and health amenities. This requires intervention in the form of planning, formulation and implementation of laws, policies, programs and measures to safeguard and improve the conditions of the elderly in Kolkata.

Keywords: Demographic, Elderly, Population, Socio-economic.

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Authors: Gaurav Bhanjana, Ganga Ram Chaudhary, Sandeep Kumar, Neeraj Dilbaghi

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Main sources of endocrine disrupting compounds in the ecosystem are hormones, pesticides, phthalates, flame retardants, dioxins, personal-care products, coplanar polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), bisphenol A, and parabens. These endocrine disrupting compounds are responsible for learning disabilities, brain development problems, deformations of the body, cancer, reproductive abnormalities in females and decreased sperm count in human males. Although discharge of these chemical compounds into the environment cannot be stopped, yet their amount can be retarded through proper evaluation and detection techniques. The available techniques for determination of these endocrine disrupting compounds mainly include high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC), mass spectroscopy (MS) and gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC–MS). These techniques are accurate and reliable but have certain limitations like need of skilled personnel, time consuming, interference and requirement of pretreatment steps. Moreover, these techniques are laboratory bound and sample is required in large amount for analysis. In view of above facts, new methods for detection of endocrine disrupting compounds should be devised that promise high specificity, ultra sensitivity, cost effective, efficient and easy-to-operate procedure. Nowadays, electrochemical sensors/biosensors modified with nanomaterials are gaining high attention among researchers. Bioelement present in this system makes the developed sensors selective towards analyte of interest. Nanomaterials provide large surface area, high electron communication feature, enhanced catalytic activity and possibilities of chemical modifications. In most of the cases, nanomaterials also serve as an electron mediator or electrocatalyst for some analytes.

Keywords: Sensors, endocrine disruptors, nanoparticles, electrochemical, microscopy.

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Authors: Yehjune Heo

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As biometric systems become widely deployed, the security of identification systems can be easily attacked by various spoof materials. This paper contributes to finding a reliable and practical anti-spoofing method using Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) based on the types of loss functions and optimizers. The types of CNNs used in this paper include AlexNet, VGGNet, and ResNet. By using various loss functions including Cross-Entropy, Center Loss, Cosine Proximity, and Hinge Loss, and various loss optimizers which include Adam, SGD, RMSProp, Adadelta, Adagrad, and Nadam, we obtained significant performance changes. We realize that choosing the correct loss function for each model is crucial since different loss functions lead to different errors on the same evaluation. By using a subset of the Livdet 2017 database, we validate our approach to compare the generalization power. It is important to note that we use a subset of LiveDet and the database is the same across all training and testing for each model. This way, we can compare the performance, in terms of generalization, for the unseen data across all different models. The best CNN (AlexNet) with the appropriate loss function and optimizers result in more than 3% of performance gain over the other CNN models with the default loss function and optimizer. In addition to the highest generalization performance, this paper also contains the models with high accuracy associated with parameters and mean average error rates to find the model that consumes the least memory and computation time for training and testing. Although AlexNet has less complexity over other CNN models, it is proven to be very efficient. For practical anti-spoofing systems, the deployed version should use a small amount of memory and should run very fast with high anti-spoofing performance. For our deployed version on smartphones, additional processing steps, such as quantization and pruning algorithms, have been applied in our final model.

Keywords: Anti-spoofing, CNN, fingerprint recognition, loss function, optimizer.

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Authors: Ljubica Dokić, Ivana Nikolić, Dragana Šoronja–Simović, Zita Šereš, Biljana Pajin, Nils Juul, Nikola Maravić

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The possibility of application the dietary fibers in production of crackers was observed in this work, as well as their influence on rheological and textural properties on the dough for crackers and influence on sensory properties of obtained crackers. Three different dietary fibers, oat, potato and pea fibers, replaced 10% of wheat flour. Long fermentation process and baking test method were used for crackers production. The changes of dough for crackers were observed by rheological methods of determination the viscoelastic dough properties and by textural measurements. Sensory quality of obtained crackers was described using quantity descriptive method (QDA) by trained members of descriptive panel. Additional analysis of crackers surface was performed by videometer. Based on rheological determination, viscoelastic properties of dough for crackers were reduced by application of dietary fibers. Manipulation of dough with 10% of potato fiber was disabled, thus the recipe modification included increase in water content at 35%. Dough compliance to constant stress for samples with dietary fibers decreased, due to more rigid and stiffer dough consistency compared to control sample. Also, hardness of dough for these samples increased and dough extensibility decreased. Sensory properties of final products, crackers, were reduced compared to control sample. Application of dietary fibers affected mostly hardness, structure and crispness of the crackers. Observed crackers were low marked for flavor and taste, due to influence of fibers specific aroma. The sample with 10% of potato fibers and increased water content was the most adaptable to applied stresses and to production process. Also this sample was close to control sample without dietary fibers by evaluation of sensory properties and by results of videometer method.

Keywords: Crackers, dietary fibers, rheology, sensory properties.

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Authors: Víctor D. Rodríguez, Edith P. Estupiñán, Juan C. Martínez

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The evolution in mobile broadband technologies has allowed to increase the download rates in users considering the current services. The evaluation of technical parameters at the link level is of vital importance to validate the quality and veracity of the connection, thus avoiding large losses of data, time and productivity. Some of these failures may occur between the eNodeB (Evolved Node B) and the user equipment (UE), so the link between the end device and the base station can be observed. LTE (Long Term Evolution) is considered one of the IP-oriented mobile broadband technologies that work stably for data and VoIP (Voice Over IP) for those devices that have that feature. This research presents a technical analysis of the connection and channeling processes between UE and eNodeB with the TAC (Tracking Area Code) variables, and analysis of performance variables (Throughput, Signal to Interference and Noise Ratio (SINR)). Three measurement scenarios were proposed in the city of Bogotá using QualiPoc, where two operators were evaluated (Operator 1 and Operator 2). Once the data were obtained, an analysis of the variables was performed determining that the data obtained in transmission modes vary depending on the parameters BLER (Block Error Rate), performance and SNR (Signal-to-Noise Ratio). In the case of both operators, differences in transmission modes are detected and this is reflected in the quality of the signal. In addition, due to the fact that both operators work in different frequencies, it can be seen that Operator 1, despite having spectrum in Band 7 (2600 MHz), together with Operator 2, is reassigning to another frequency, a lower band, which is AWS (1700 MHz), but the difference in signal quality with respect to the establishment with data by the provider Operator 2 and the difference found in the transmission modes determined by the eNodeB in Operator 1 is remarkable.

Keywords: BLER, LTE, Network, Qualipoc, SNR.

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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: Mohammadreza Salek Faramarzi, Touraj Taghikhany

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In this paper, seismic fragility assessment of a recently developed hybrid structural system, known as the strongback system (SBS) is investigated. In this system, to mitigate the occurrence of the soft-story mechanism and improve the distribution of story drifts over the height of the structure, an elastic vertical truss is formed. The strengthened members of the braced span are designed to remain substantially elastic during levels of excitation where soft-story mechanisms are likely to occur and impose a nearly uniform story drift distribution. Due to the distinctive characteristics of near-field ground motions, it seems to be necessary to study the effect of these records on seismic performance of the SBS. To this end, a set of 56 near-field ground motion records suggested by FEMA P695 methodology is used. For fragility assessment, nonlinear dynamic analyses are carried out in OpenSEES based on the recommended procedure in HAZUS technical manual. Four damage states including slight, moderate, extensive, and complete damage (collapse) are considered. To evaluate each damage state, inter-story drift ratio and floor acceleration are implemented as engineering demand parameters. Further, to extend the evaluation of the collapse state of the system, a different collapse criterion suggested in FEMA P695 is applied. It is concluded that SBS can significantly increase the collapse capacity and consequently decrease the collapse risk of the structure during its life time. Comparing the observing mean annual frequency (MAF) of exceedance of each damage state against the allowable values presented in performance-based design methods, it is found that using the elastic vertical truss, improves the structural response effectively.

Keywords: Strongback System, Near-fault, Seismic fragility, Uncertainty, IDA, Probabilistic performance assessment.

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Authors: I. Oikonomou, I. Lappa, D. Daferera, C. Kanakis, L. Kiokakis, K. Skordilis, A. Avramouli, E. Kalli, C. Pappas, P. A. Tarantilis, E. Skotti

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Grape seeds are waste products of wineries and often referred to as an important agricultural and industrial waste product with the potential to be used in pharmaceutical, food, and cosmetic applications. In this study, grape seed oil from traditional Ionian varieties was examined for the determination of the quality and the characteristics of each variety. Initially, the fatty acid methyl ester (FAME) profiles were analyzed using Gas Chromatography-Mass Spectrometry, after transesterification. Furthermore, other quality parameters of the grape seed oils were determined by Spectroscopy techniques, UV-Vis and Raman included. Moreover, the antioxidant capacity of the oil was measured by 2,2'-azino-bis-3-ethylbenzothiazoline-6-sulfonic acid (ABTS) and 2,2-Diphenyl-1-picrylhydrazyl (DPPH) assays and their antioxidant capacity expressed in Trolox equivalents. K and ΔΚ indices were measured in 232, 268, 270 nm, as an oil quality index. The results indicate that the air-dried grape seed total oil content ranged from 5.26 to 8.77% w/w, which is in accordance with the other grape seed varieties tested in similar studies. The composition of grape seed oil is predominated with linoleic and oleic fatty acids, with the linoleic fatty acid ranging from 53.68 to 69.95% and both the linoleic and oleic fatty acids totaling 78-82% of FAMEs, which is analogous to the fatty acid composition of safflower oil. The antioxidant assays ABTS and DPPH scored high, exhibiting that the oils have potential in the cosmetic and culinary businesses. Above that, our results demonstrate that Ionian grape seed oils have prospects that can go further than cosmetic or culinary use, into the pharmaceuticals industry. Finally, the reclamation of grape seeds from wineries waste stream is in accordance with the bio-economy strategic framework and contributes to environmental protection.

Keywords: Antioxidant capacity, fatty acid methyl esters, grape seed oil, GC-MS.

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Authors: Peng Hao Wang, Garam Kim, Ronald Sterkenburg

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The applications of composite materials within the aviation industry has been increasing at a rapid pace.  However, the growing applications of composite materials have also led to growing demand for more tooling to support its manufacturing processes. Tooling and tooling maintenance represents a large portion of the composite manufacturing process and cost. Therefore, the industry’s adaptability to new techniques for fabricating high quality tools quickly and inexpensively will play a crucial role in composite material’s growing popularity in the aviation industry. One popular tool fabrication technique currently being developed involves additive manufacturing such as 3D printing. Although additive manufacturing and 3D printing are not entirely new concepts, the technique has been gaining popularity due to its ability to quickly fabricate components, maintain low material waste, and low cost. In this study, a team of Purdue University School of Aviation and Transportation Technology (SATT) faculty and students investigated the effectiveness of a 3D printed composite compression mold. A 3D printed composite compression mold was fabricated by 3D scanning a steel valve cover of an aircraft reciprocating engine. The 3D printed composite compression mold was used to fabricate carbon fiber versions of the aircraft reciprocating engine valve cover. The 3D printed composite compression mold was evaluated for its performance, durability, and dimensional stability while the fabricated carbon fiber valve covers were evaluated for its accuracy and quality. The results and data gathered from this study will determine the effectiveness of the 3D printed composite compression mold in a mass production environment and provide valuable information for future understanding, improvements, and design considerations of 3D printed composite molds.

Keywords: Additive manufacturing, carbon fiber, composite tooling, molds.

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Authors: Adel A. Ghoneim

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In most existing buildings in hot climate, cooling loads lead to high primary energy consumption and consequently high CO2 emissions. These can be substantially decreased with integrated renewable energy systems. Kuwait is characterized by its dry hot long summer and short warm winter. Kuwait receives annual total radiation more than 5280 MJ/m2 with approximately 3347 h of sunshine. Solar energy systems consist of PV modules and parabolic trough collectors are considered to satisfy electricity consumption, domestic water heating, and cooling loads of an existing building. This paper presents the results of an extensive program of energy conservation and energy generation using integrated photovoltaic (PV) modules and Parabolic Trough Collectors (PTC). The program conducted on an existing institutional building intending to convert it into a Net-Zero Energy Building (NZEB) or near net Zero Energy Building (nNZEB). The program consists of two phases; the first phase is concerned with energy auditing and energy conservation measures at minimum cost and the second phase considers the installation of photovoltaic modules and parabolic trough collectors. The 2-storey building under consideration is the Applied Sciences Department at the College of Technological Studies, Kuwait. Single effect lithium bromide water absorption chillers are implemented to provide air conditioning load to the building. A numerical model is developed to evaluate the performance of parabolic trough collectors in Kuwait climate. Transient simulation program (TRNSYS) is adapted to simulate the performance of different solar system components. In addition, a numerical model is developed to assess the environmental impacts of building integrated renewable energy systems. Results indicate that efficient energy conservation can play an important role in converting the existing buildings into NZEBs as it saves a significant portion of annual energy consumption of the building. The first phase results in an energy conservation of about 28% of the building consumption. In the second phase, the integrated PV completely covers the lighting and equipment loads of the building. On the other hand, parabolic trough collectors of optimum area of 765 m2 can satisfy a significant portion of the cooling load, i.e about73% of the total building cooling load. The annual avoided CO2 emission is evaluated at the optimum conditions to assess the environmental impacts of renewable energy systems. The total annual avoided CO2 emission is about 680 metric ton/year which confirms the environmental impacts of these systems in Kuwait.

Keywords: Building integrated renewable systems, Net-Zero Energy Building, solar fraction, avoided CO2 emission.

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Authors: Amit Kr. Happy

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This paper is motivated by the importance of multi-sensor image fusion with specific focus on Infrared (IR) and Visible image (VI) fusion for various applications including military reconnaissance. Image fusion can be defined as the process of combining two or more source images into a single composite image with extended information content that improves visual perception or feature extraction. These images can be from different modalities like Visible camera & IR Thermal Imager. While visible images are captured by reflected radiations in the visible spectrum, the thermal images are formed from thermal radiation (IR) that may be reflected or self-emitted. A digital color camera captures the visible source image and a thermal IR camera acquires the thermal source image. In this paper, some image fusion algorithms based upon Multi-Scale Transform (MST) and region-based selection rule with consistency verification have been proposed and presented. This research includes implementation of the proposed image fusion algorithm in MATLAB along with a comparative analysis to decide the optimum number of levels for MST and the coefficient fusion rule. The results are presented, and several commonly used evaluation metrics are used to assess the suggested method's validity. Experiments show that the proposed approach is capable of producing good fusion results. While deploying our image fusion algorithm approaches, we observe several challenges from the popular image fusion methods. While high computational cost and complex processing steps of image fusion algorithms provide accurate fused results, but they also make it hard to become deployed in system and applications that require real-time operation, high flexibility and low computation ability. So, the methods presented in this paper offer good results with minimum time complexity.

Keywords: Image fusion, IR thermal imager, multi-sensor, Multi-Scale Transform.

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Authors: Hamidullah Binol, Abdullah Bal

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Nowadays, food safety is a great public concern; therefore, robust and effective techniques are required for detecting the safety situation of goods. Hyperspectral Imaging (HSI) is an attractive material for researchers to inspect food quality and safety estimation such as meat quality assessment, automated poultry carcass inspection, quality evaluation of fish, bruise detection of apples, quality analysis and grading of citrus fruits, bruise detection of strawberry, visualization of sugar distribution of melons, measuring ripening of tomatoes, defect detection of pickling cucumber, and classification of wheat kernels. HSI can be used to concurrently collect large amounts of spatial and spectral data on the objects being observed. This technique yields with exceptional detection skills, which otherwise cannot be achieved with either imaging or spectroscopy alone. This paper presents a nonlinear technique based on kernel Fukunaga-Koontz transform (KFKT) for detection of fat content in ground meat using HSI. The KFKT which is the nonlinear version of FKT is one of the most effective techniques for solving problems involving two-pattern nature. The conventional FKT method has been improved with kernel machines for increasing the nonlinear discrimination ability and capturing higher order of statistics of data. The proposed approach in this paper aims to segment the fat content of the ground meat by regarding the fat as target class which is tried to be separated from the remaining classes (as clutter). We have applied the KFKT on visible and nearinfrared (VNIR) hyperspectral images of ground meat to determine fat percentage. The experimental studies indicate that the proposed technique produces high detection performance for fat ratio in ground meat.

Keywords: Food (Ground meat) inspection, Fukunaga-Koontz transform, hyperspectral imaging, kernel methods.

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Authors: Sinarwati Mohamad Suhaili, Naomie Salim, Mohamad Nazim Jambli

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Sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) models augmented with attention mechanisms are increasingly important in automated customer service. These models, adept at recognizing complex relationships between input and output sequences, are essential for optimizing chatbot responses. Central to these mechanisms are neural attention weights that determine the model’s focus during sequence generation. Despite their widespread use, there remains a gap in the comparative analysis of different attention weighting functions within seq2seq models, particularly in the context of chatbots utilizing the Customer Support Twitter (CST) dataset. This study addresses this gap by evaluating four distinct attention-scoring functions—dot, multiplicative/general, additive, and an extended multiplicative function with a tanh activation parameter — in neural generative seq2seq models. Using the CST dataset, these models were trained and evaluated over 10 epochs with the AdamW optimizer. Evaluation criteria included validation loss and BLEU scores implemented under both greedy and beam search strategies with a beam size of k = 3. Results indicate that the model with the tanh-augmented multiplicative function significantly outperforms its counterparts, achieving the lowest validation loss (1.136484) and the highest BLEU scores (0.438926 under greedy search, 0.443000 under beam search, k = 3). These findings emphasize the crucial influence of selecting an appropriate attention-scoring function to enhance the performance of seq2seq models for chatbots, particularly highlighting the model integrating tanh activation as a promising approach to improving chatbot quality in customer support contexts.

Keywords: Attention weight, chatbot, encoder-decoder, neural generative attention, score function, sequence-to-sequence.

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Authors: Cathy SW. Chow, Kristina Shin, Faming Wang, B. C. L. So

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During some dynamic giant puppet performances, an ergonomically designed load carrier system is necessary for the puppeteers to carry a giant puppet body’s heavy load with minimum muscle stress. A load carrier (i.e. prototype) was designed with two small wheels on the foot; and a hybrid spring device on the knee in order to assist the sliding and knee bending movements respectively. Thus, the purpose of this study was to evaluate the effect of three load carriers including two other commercially available load mounting systems, Tepex and SuitX, and the prototype. Ten male participants were recruited for the experiment. Surface electromyography (sEMG) was used to collect the participants’ muscle activities during forward moving and bouncing and with and without load of 11.1 kg that was 60 cm above the shoulder. Five bilateral muscles including the lumbar erector spinae (LES), rectus femoris (RF), bicep femoris (BF), tibialis anterior (TA), and gastrocnemius (GM) were selected for data collection. During forward moving task, the sEMG data showed smallest muscle activities by Tepex harness which exhibited consistently the lowest, compared with the prototype and SuitX which were significantly higher on left LES 68.99% and 64.99%, right LES 26.57% and 82.45%; left RF 87.71% and 47.61%, right RF 143.57% and 24.28%; left BF 80.21% and 22.23%, right BF 96.02% and 21.83%; right TA 6.32% and 4.47%; left GM 5.89% and 12.35% respectively. The result above reflected mobility was highly restricted by tested exoskeleton devices. On the other hand, the sEMG data from bouncing task showed the smallest muscle activities by prototype which exhibited consistently the lowest, compared with the Tepex harness and SuitX which were significantly lower on lLES 6.65% and 104.93, rLES 23.56% and 92.19%; lBF 33.21% and 93.26% and rBF 24.70% and 81.16%; lTA 46.51% and 191.02%; rTA 12.75% and 125.76%; IGM 31.54% and 68.36%; rGM 95.95% and 96.43% respectively.

Keywords: Exoskeleton, load carriage aid, giant puppet performers, electromyography.

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Authors: L. Melzerová, T. Janda, M. Šejnoha, J. Šejnoha

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Two finite element (FEM) models are presented in this paper to address the random nature of the response of glued timber structures made of wood segments with variable elastic moduli evaluated from 3600 indentation measurements. This total database served to create the same number of ensembles as was the number of segments in the tested beam. Statistics of these ensembles were then assigned to given segments of beams and the Latin Hypercube Sampling (LHS) method was called to perform 100 simulations resulting into the ensemble of 100 deflections subjected to statistical evaluation. Here, a detailed geometrical arrangement of individual segments in the laminated beam was considered in the construction of two-dimensional FEM model subjected to in fourpoint bending to comply with the laboratory tests. Since laboratory measurements of local elastic moduli may in general suffer from a significant experimental error, it appears advantageous to exploit the full scale measurements of timber beams, i.e. deflections, to improve their prior distributions with the help of the Bayesian statistical method. This, however, requires an efficient computational model when simulating the laboratory tests numerically. To this end, a simplified model based on Mindlin’s beam theory was established. The improved posterior distributions show that the most significant change of the Young’s modulus distribution takes place in laminae in the most strained zones, i.e. in the top and bottom layers within the beam center region. Posterior distributions of moduli of elasticity were subsequently utilized in the 2D FEM model and compared with the original simulations.

Keywords: Bayesian inference, FEM, four point bending test, laminated timber, parameter estimation, prior and posterior distribution, Young’s modulus.

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Authors: C. Ardil

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In this paper, the comparison of composite programming and compromise programming for the aircraft selection problem is discussed using the multiple criteria decision analysis method. The decision making process requires the prior definition and fulfillment of certain factors, especially when it comes to complex areas such as aircraft selection problems. The proposed technique gives more efficient results by extending the composite programming and compromise programming, which are widely used in modeling multiple criteria decisions. The proposed model is applied to a practical decision problem for evaluating and selecting aircraft problems.A selection of aircraft was made based on the proposed approach developed in the field of multiple criteria decision making. The model presented is solved by using the following methods: composite programming, and compromise programming. The importance values of the weight coefficients of the criteria are calculated using the mean weight method. The evaluation and ranking of aircraft are carried out using the composite programming and compromise programming methods. In order to determine the stability of the model and the ability to apply the developed composite programming and compromise programming approach, the paper analyzes its sensitivity, which involves changing the value of the coefficient λ and q in the first part. The second part of the sensitivity analysis relates to the application of different multiple criteria decision making methods, composite programming and compromise programming. In addition, in the third part of the sensitivity analysis, the Spearman correlation coefficient of the ranks obtained was calculated which confirms the applicability of all the proposed approaches.

Keywords: composite programming, compromise programming, additive weighted model, multiplicative weighted model, multiple criteria decision making analysis, MCDMA, aircraft selection

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Authors: Md. Z. Alam, Amal A. Elgharbawy, Muhammad Moniruzzaman, Nassereldeen A. Kabbashi, Parveen Jamal

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The enzymatic hydrolysis of lignocellulosic biomass is one of the obstacles in the process of sugar production, due to the presence of lignin that protects the cellulose molecules against cellulases. Although the pretreatment of lignocellulose in ionic liquid (IL) system has been receiving a lot of interest; however, it requires IL removal with an anti-solvent in order to proceed with the enzymatic hydrolysis. At this point, introducing a compatible cellulase enzyme seems more efficient in this process. A cellulase enzyme that was produced by Trichoderma reesei on palm kernel cake (PKC) exhibited a promising stability in several ILs. The enzyme called PKC-Cel was tested for its optimum pH and temperature as well as its molecular weight. One among evaluated ILs, 1,3-diethylimidazolium dimethyl phosphate [DEMIM] DMP was applied in this study. Evaluation of six factors was executed in Stat-Ease Design Expert V.9, definitive screening design, which are IL/ buffer ratio, temperature, hydrolysis retention time, biomass loading, cellulase loading and empty fruit bunches (EFB) particle size. According to the obtained data, IL-enzyme system shows the highest sugar concentration at 70 °C, 27 hours, 10% IL-buffer, 35% biomass loading, 60 Units/g cellulase and 200 μm particle size. As concluded from the obtained data, not only the PKC-Cel was stable in the presence of the IL, also it was actually stable at a higher temperature than its optimum one. The reducing sugar obtained was 53.468±4.58 g/L which was equivalent to 0.3055 g reducing sugar/g EFB. This approach opens an insight for more studies in order to understand the actual effect of ILs on cellulases and their interactions in the aqueous system. It could also benefit in an efficient production of bioethanol from lignocellulosic biomass.

Keywords: Cellulase, hydrolysis, lignocellulose, pretreatment, stability.

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Authors: Thella Babu Rao, A. Gopala Krishna

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This investigation presents the formulation of kerf (width of slit) and optimal control parameter settings of wire electrochemical discharge machining which results minimum possible kerf while machining Al7075/SiCp MMCs. WEDM is proved its efficiency and effectiveness to cut the hard ceramic reinforced MMCs within the permissible budget. Among the distinct performance measures of WEDM process, kerf is an important performance characteristic which determines the dimensional accuracy of the machined component while producing high precision components. The lack of available of the machinability information such advanced MMCs result the more experimentation in the manufacturing industries. Therefore, extensive experimental investigations are essential to provide the database of effect of various control parameters on the kerf while machining such advanced MMCs in WEDM. Literature reviled the significance some of the electrical parameters which are prominent on kerf for machining distinct conventional materials. However, the significance of reinforced particulate size and volume fraction on kerf is highlighted in this work while machining MMCs along with the machining parameters of pulse-on time, pulse-off time and wire tension. Usually, the dimensional tolerances of machined components are decided at the design stage and a machinist pay attention to produce the required dimensional tolerances by setting appropriate machining control variables. However, it is highly difficult to determine the optimal machining settings for such advanced materials on the shop floor. Therefore, in the view of precision of cut, kerf (cutting width) is considered as the measure of performance for the model. It was found from the literature that, the machining conditions of higher fractions of large size SiCp resulting less kerf where as high values of pulse-on time result in a high kerf. A response surface model is used to predict the relative significance of various control variables on kerf. Consequently, a powerful artificial intelligence called genetic algorithms (GA) is used to determine the best combination of the control variable settings. In the next step the conformation test was conducted for the optimal parameter settings and found good agreement between the GA kerf and measured kerf. Hence, it is clearly reveal that the effectiveness and accuracy of the developed model and program to analyze the kerf and to determine its optimal process parameters. The results obtained in this work states that, the resulted optimized parameters are capable of machining the Al7075/SiCp MMCs more efficiently and with better dimensional accuracy.

Keywords: Al7075SiCP MMC, kerf, WEDM, optimization.

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Authors: Ahmed A. Hassan

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The agriculture industry in Somalia employs a large portion of the country's workforce. Somalia has been known for its production and notable agriculture for many years, the key sector that fuels the country's economy. Due to decades of civil conflict, poor administration, neglect, and a string of natural calamities, the Somali agricultural industry has suffered significant damage. The irrigation systems in Juba and Shabelle, the two major rivers, have failed and deteriorated. Crop output has decreased because of ongoing drought, poor agricultural techniques, desertification, and the exodus of rural people to neighboring nations. With pandemic levels of hunger and malnutrition brought on by climate change, Somalia has become one of the world's most food-insecure countries. Additionally, there is strong evidence that climate change, particularly in Somalia and other East African nations, has exacerbated civil wars across Africa. The El Nino/Southern Oscillation, which results in drier and warmer weather in tropical regions, may have contributed to numerous civil wars. Additionally, an increase in temperature is believed to raise the risk of internal armed conflict in sub-Saharan African nations. This paper examines Somalia's present extension programs, lists the challenges the nation's agricultural industry faces, and discusses the effects of climate change. Improvement measures are advised based on the analysis presented in the paper. This article's major goals are to highlight the serious challenges that Somali farmers face and to offer potential solutions for achieving sustainable agriculture and food security through the worst of climate change. Farmers, legislators, decision-makers, and academics may find the material in this article useful in developing credible plans, and policies, and in establishing research and extension programs. With improved extension systems, management, encouraging public investments, and an enabling climate, Somalia's agricultural industry can increase its resilience, the quality of life for its population, and the safety and added value of its goods. Offshore and coastal fisheries can contribute more to sector growth and return to and surpass their amazing pre-war output and export levels.

Keywords: Sustainable agriculture, innovation, land use, climate change, farm management, drought management, resilience, agri-business, agri-extension, farmer field schools, agricultural development.

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Authors: Asif Ekbal, Sivaji Bandyopadhyay

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Named Entity Recognition (NER) aims to classify each word of a document into predefined target named entity classes and is now-a-days considered to be fundamental for many Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks such as information retrieval, machine translation, information extraction, question answering systems and others. This paper reports about the development of a NER system for Bengali and Hindi using Support Vector Machine (SVM). Though this state of the art machine learning technique has been widely applied to NER in several well-studied languages, the use of this technique to Indian languages (ILs) is very new. The system makes use of the different contextual information of the words along with the variety of features that are helpful in predicting the four different named (NE) classes, such as Person name, Location name, Organization name and Miscellaneous name. We have used the annotated corpora of 122,467 tokens of Bengali and 502,974 tokens of Hindi tagged with the twelve different NE classes 1, defined as part of the IJCNLP-08 NER Shared Task for South and South East Asian Languages (SSEAL) 2. In addition, we have manually annotated 150K wordforms of the Bengali news corpus, developed from the web-archive of a leading Bengali newspaper. We have also developed an unsupervised algorithm in order to generate the lexical context patterns from a part of the unlabeled Bengali news corpus. Lexical patterns have been used as the features of SVM in order to improve the system performance. The NER system has been tested with the gold standard test sets of 35K, and 60K tokens for Bengali, and Hindi, respectively. Evaluation results have demonstrated the recall, precision, and f-score values of 88.61%, 80.12%, and 84.15%, respectively, for Bengali and 80.23%, 74.34%, and 77.17%, respectively, for Hindi. Results show the improvement in the f-score by 5.13% with the use of context patterns. Statistical analysis, ANOVA is also performed to compare the performance of the proposed NER system with that of the existing HMM based system for both the languages.

Keywords: Named Entity (NE), Named Entity Recognition (NER), Support Vector Machine (SVM), Bengali, Hindi.

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Authors: Dheyaa Hussein, Peter Armstrong

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The phenomenon of visual disorder is prominent in contemporary townscapes. This paper provides a theoretical framework for the assessment of visual consistency in townscape in order to achieve more favourable outcomes for users. In this paper, visual consistency refers to the amount of similarity between adjacent components of townscape. The paper investigates parameters which relate to visual consistency in townscape, explores the relationships between them and highlights their significance. The paper uses arithmetic methods from outside the domain of urban design to enable the establishment of an objective approach of assessment which considers subjective indicators including users’ preferences. These methods involve the standard of deviation, colour distance and the distance between points. The paper identifies urban space as a key representative of the visual parameters of townscape. It focuses on its two components, geometry and colour in the evaluation of the visual consistency of townscape. Accordingly, this article proposes four measurements. The first quantifies the number of vertices, which are points in the three-dimensional space that are connected, by lines, to represent the appearance of elements. The second evaluates the visual surroundings of urban space through assessing the location of their vertices. The last two measurements calculate the visual similarity in both vertices and colour in townscape by the calculation of their variation using methods including standard of deviation and colour difference. The proposed quantitative assessment is based on users’ preferences towards these measurements. The paper offers a theoretical basis for a practical tool which can alter the current understanding of architectural form and its application in urban space. This tool is currently under development. The proposed method underpins expert subjective assessment and permits the establishment of a unified framework which adds to creativity by the achievement of a higher level of consistency and satisfaction among the citizens of evolving townscapes.

Keywords: Townscape, Urban Design, Visual Assessment, Visual Consistency.

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Authors: L. C. Ansanelli, P. Alfredini

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The article presents the evaluation of the effectiveness of two groins located at Gonzaguinha and Milionários Beaches, situated on the southeast coast of Brazil. The effectiveness of these coastal defense structures is evaluated in terms of sedimentary dynamics, which is one of the most important environmental processes to be assessed in coastal engineering studies. The applied method is based on the implementation of the Delft3D numerical model system tools. Delft3D-WAVE module was used for waves modelling, Delft3D-FLOW for hydrodynamic modelling and Delft3D-SED for sediment transport modelling. The calibration of the models was carried out in a way that the simulations adequately represent the region studied, evaluating improvements in the model elements with the use of statistical comparisons of similarity between the results and waves, currents and tides data recorded in the study area. Analysis of the maximum wave heights was carried to select the months with higher accumulated energy to implement these conditions in the engineering scenarios. The engineering studies were performed for two scenarios: 1) numerical simulation of the area considering only the two existing groins; 2) conception of breakwaters coupled at the ends of the existing groins, resulting in two “T” shaped structures. The sediment model showed that, for the simulated period, the area is affected by erosive processes and that the existing groins have little effectiveness in defending the coast in question. The implemented T structures showed some effectiveness in protecting the beaches against erosion and provided the recovery of the portion directly covered by it on the Milionários Beach. In order to complement this study, it is suggested the conception of further engineering scenarios that might recover other areas of the studied region.

Keywords: Coastal engineering, coastal erosion, Sao Vicente Bay, Delft3D, coastal engineering works.

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Authors: Vilas P. Mahatme, K. K. Bhoyar

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Nowadays, education cannot be imagined without digital technologies. It broadens the horizons of teaching learning processes. Several universities are offering online courses. For evaluation purpose, e-examination systems are being widely adopted in academic environments. Multiple-choice tests are extremely popular. Moving away from traditional examinations to e-examination, Moodle as Learning Management Systems (LMS) is being used. Moodle logs every click that students make for attempting and navigational purposes in e-examination. Data mining has been applied in various domains including retail sales, bioinformatics. In recent years, there has been increasing interest in the use of data mining in e-learning environment. It has been applied to discover, extract, and evaluate parameters related to student’s learning performance. The combination of data mining and e-learning is still in its babyhood. Log data generated by the students during online examination can be used to discover knowledge with the help of data mining techniques. In web based applications, number of right and wrong answers of the test result is not sufficient to assess and evaluate the student’s performance. So, assessment techniques must be intelligent enough. If student cannot answer the question asked by the instructor then some easier question can be asked. Otherwise, more difficult question can be post on similar topic. To do so, it is necessary to identify difficulty level of the questions. Proposed work concentrate on the same issue. Data mining techniques in specific clustering is used in this work. This method decide difficulty levels of the question and categories them as tough, easy or moderate and later this will be served to the desire students based on their performance. Proposed experiment categories the question set and also group the students based on their performance in examination. This will help the instructor to guide the students more specifically. In short mined knowledge helps to support, guide, facilitate and enhance learning as a whole.

Keywords: Data mining, e-examination, e-learning, moodle.

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Authors: Beata Ślusarczyk, Sebastian Kot

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In subjective terms, Polish SME sector occupies a prominent position in the national economic development, in which planning of the management strategies should be primarily based on identifying and meeting the innovation needs. As a research sample, there is chosen a printing sector of industry. SMEs share in printing sector in Poland is estimated at the level of 81% of all enterprises. In recent years, the printing industry achieved one of the highest levels of EU support in Poland. There is a relatively high increase in the development of technological innovations in equipment and the associated significant increase in production capacity. It can be also noticed that on average, every third enterprise belonging to the printing industry has implemented innovations, but not all of them effected in better economic results. Therefore, the aim of this article is to evaluate the impact of the implementation of innovation projects financed from the EU funds for performance of SMEs in the printing industry. As the results of research of EU funds co-financing effects on the development of innovation in the printing industry, it was specified that examined SMEs prefer to implement product innovation to receive a grant to the project at a level between 40% to 60%, the remaining part of the investment is usually covered with equity. The most common type of innovation had indicated a single implementation, related only to the change in process, technology, or organization. The relationship between variables of the EU funds and management of innovative activities was verified. It has been observed that the identified variables arising from the support in a form of the EU funds had a positive effect on the level of earned revenue, the increase in margin and in increase in employment as well. It was confirmed that the implemented innovations supported by the European funds have a positive impact on the performance of the printing companies. Although there is a risk that due to the decreasing demand for printing services such a high level of funding the companies in this sector will significantly increase competition in the long term, that may also contribute to the economic problems of the enterprises belonging to the analyzed branch.

Keywords: Innovations, SMEs, performance, results.

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Authors: Helen L. Hein, Joachim Schwarte

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As a pillar of sustainable development, ecology has become an important milestone in research community, especially due to global challenges like climate change. The ecological performance of products can be scientifically conducted with life cycle assessments. In the construction sector, significant amounts of CO₂ emissions are assigned to the energy used for building heating purposes. Therefore, sustainable construction materials for insulating purposes are substantial, whereby aerogels have been explored intensively in the last years due to their low thermal conductivity. Therefore, the WALL-ACE project aims to develop an aerogel-based thermal insulating plaster that would achieve minor thermal conductivities. But as in the early stage of development phases, a lot of information is still missing or not yet accessible, the ecological performance of innovative products bases increasingly on uncertain data that can lead to significant deviations in the results. To be able to predict realistically how meaningful the results are and how viable the developed products may be with regard to their corresponding respective market, these deviations however have to be considered. Therefore, a classification method is presented in this study, which may allow comparing the ecological performance of modern products with already established and competitive materials. In order to achieve this, an alternative calculation method was used that allows computing with lower and upper bounds to consider all possible values without precise data. The life cycle analysis of the considered products was conducted with an interval arithmetic based calculation method. The results lead to the conclusion that the interval solutions describing the possible environmental impacts are so wide that the result usability is limited. Nevertheless, a further optimization in reducing environmental impacts of aerogels seems to be needed to become more competitive in the future.

Keywords: Aerogel-based, insulating material, early develop¬ment phase, interval arithmetic.

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Authors: Mohammadjavad Mehrabanpour, Maryam Ranjbar Bushehri, Dorsa Mehrabanpour

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Respiratory diseases are the most important problems in the country’s poultry industry, particularly when it comes to broiler flocks. Ornithobacterium rhinotracheale (ORT) is a species that causes poor performance in growth rate, egg production, and mortality. This pathogen causes a respiratory infection including pulmonary alveolar inflammation, and pneumonia of birds throughout the world. Newcastle disease (ND) is a highly contagious disease in poultry, and also, it causes considerable losses to the poultry industry. The aim of this study was to evaluate the simultaneous occurrence of ORT and ND and NDV isolation by inoculation in embryonated eggs and confirmed by RT-PCR in broiler chicken flocks in Fars province. In this study, 318 blood and 85 tissue samples (brain, trachea, liver, and cecal tonsils) were collected from 15 broiler chicken farms. Survey serum antibody titers against ORT by using a commercial enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) kit performed. Evaluation of antibody titer against ND virus is performed by hemagglutination inhibition test. Virus isolation with chick embryo eggs 9-11 and RT-PCR method were carried out. A total of 318 serum samples, 135 samples (42.5%) were positive for antibodies to ORT and titer of HI antibodies against NDV in 122 serum samples (38/4%) were 7-10 (log2) and 61 serum samples (19/2%) had occurrence antibody titer against Newcastle virus and ORT. Results of the present study indicated that 20 tissue samples were positive in embryonated egg and in rapid hemagglutination (HA) test. HI test with specific ND positive serum confirmed that 6 of 20 samples. PCR confirmed that all six samples were positive and PCR products of samples indicated 535-base pair fragments in electrophrosis. Due to the great economic importance of these two diseases in the poultry industry, it is necessary to design and implement a comprehensive plan for prevention and control of these diseases.

Keywords: ELISA, Newcastle disease, Ornithobacterium rhinotracheale, seroprevalence.

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Authors: Vanessa A. Segovia, Sonia E. Ruiz

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The use of energy dissipation systems for seismic applications has increased worldwide, thus it is necessary to develop practical and modern criteria for their optimal design. Here, a direct displacement-based seismic design approach for frame buildings with hysteretic energy dissipation systems (HEDS) is applied. The building is constituted by two individual structural systems consisting of: 1) a main elastic structural frame designed for service loads; and 2) a secondary system, corresponding to the HEDS, that controls the effects of lateral loads. The procedure implies to control two design parameters: a) the stiffness ratio (α=Kframe/Ktotal system), and b) the strength ratio (γ=Vdamper/Vtotal system). The proposed damage-controlled approach contributes to the design of a more sustainable and resilient building because the structural damage is concentrated on the HEDS. The reduction of the design displacement spectrum is done by means of a damping factor (recently published) for elastic structural systems with HEDS, located in Mexico City. Two limit states are verified: serviceability and near collapse. Instead of the traditional trial-error approach, a procedure that allows the designer to establish the preliminary sizes of the structural elements of both systems is proposed. The design methodology is applied to an 8-story steel building with buckling restrained braces, located in soft soil of Mexico City. With the aim of choosing the optimal design parameters, a parametric study is developed considering different values of હ and ઻. The simplified methodology is for preliminary sizing, design, and evaluation of the effectiveness of HEDS, and it constitutes a modern and practical tool that enables the structural designer to select the best design parameters. 

Keywords: Damage-controlled buildings, direct displacementbased seismic design, optimal hysteretic energy dissipation systems

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Authors: Abu Salim Mustafa

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Polymerase chain reaction (PCR) assays targeting genomic DNA segments have been established for the detection of Helicobacter pylori in clinical specimens. However, the data on comparative evaluations of various targets in detection of H. pylori are limited. Furthermore, the frequencies of vacA (s1 and s2) and cagA genotypes, which are suggested to be involved in the pathogenesis of H. pylori in other parts of the world, are not well studied in Kuwait. The aim of this study was to evaluate PCR assays for the detection and genotyping of H. pylori by targeting the amplification of DNA targets from four genomic segments. The genomic DNA were isolated from 72 clinical isolates of H. pylori and tested in PCR with four pairs of oligonucleotides primers, i.e. ECH-U/ECH-L, ET-5U/ET-5L, CagAF/CagAR and Vac1F/Vac1XR, which were expected to amplify targets of various sizes (471 bp, 230 bp, 183 bp and 176/203 bp, respectively) from the genomic DNA of H. pylori. The PCR-amplified DNA were analyzed by agarose gel electrophoresis. PCR products of expected size were obtained with all primer pairs by using genomic DNA isolated from H. pylori. DNA dilution experiments showed that the most sensitive PCR target was 471 bp DNA amplified by the primers ECH-U/ECH-L, followed by the targets of Vac1F/Vac1XR (176 bp/203 DNA), CagAF/CagAR (183 bp DNA) and ET-5U/ET-5L (230 bp DNA). However, when tested with undiluted genomic DNA isolated from single colonies of all isolates, the Vac1F/Vac1XR target provided the maximum positive results (71/72 (99% positives)), followed by ECH-U/ECH-L (69/72 (93% positives)), ET-5U/ET-5L (51/72 (71% positives)) and CagAF/CagAR (26/72 (46% positives)). The results of genotyping experiments showed that vacA s1 (46% positive) and vacA s2 (54% positive) genotypes were almost equally associated with VaCA+/CagA- isolates (P > 0.05), but with VacA+/CagA+ isolates, S1 genotype (92% positive) was more frequently detected than S2 genotype (8% positive) (P< 0.0001). In conclusion, among the primer pairs tested, Vac1F/Vac1XR provided the best results for detection of H. pylori. The genotyping experiments showed that vacA s1 and vacA s2 genotypes were almost equally associated with vaCA⁺/cagA^- isolates, but vacA s1 genotype had a significantly increased association with vacA⁺/cagA⁺ isolates.

Keywords: H. pylori, detection, genotyping, Kuwait.

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Authors: Victor Birikorang Danquah

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Ghana's primary energy supply is heavily reliant on petroleum, biomass, and hydropower. Currently, Ghana gets its energy from hydropower (Akosombo and Bui), thermal power plants powered by crude oil, natural gas, and diesel, solar power, and imports from La Cote d'Ivoire. Until the early 2000s, large hydroelectric dams dominated Ghana's electricity generation. Due to the unreliable weather patterns, Ghana increased its reliance on thermal power. Thermal power contributes the highest percentage in terms of electricity generation in Ghana and is predominantly supplied by Independent Power Producers (IPPs). Ghana's electricity industry operates the corporate utility model as its business model. This model is typically 'vertically integrated', with a single corporation selling the majority of power generated by its generation assets to its retail business, which then sells the electricity to retail market consumers. The corporate utility model has a straightforward value proposition that is based on increasing the number of energy units sold. The unit volume business model drives the entire energy value chain to increase throughput, locking system users into unsustainable practices. This report uses the qualitative research approach to explore the electricity industry in Ghana. There is the need for increasing renewable energy such as wind and solar in the electricity generation. The research recommends two critical business models for the penetration of renewable energy in Ghana's power sector. The first model is the peer-to-peer electricity trading model which relies on a software platform to connect consumers and generators in order for them to trade energy directly with one another. The second model is about encouraging local energy generation, incentivizing optimal time-of-use behaviour, and allow any financial gains to be shared among the community members.

Keywords: business model innovation, electricity generation, renewable energy, solar energy, sustainability, wind energy

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Authors: Guneet Saini, Shahrukh, Sunil Sharma

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Traffic congestion is the most critical issue faced by those in the transportation profession today. Over the past few years, roundabouts have been recognized as a measure to promote efficiency at intersections globally. In developing countries like India, this type of intersection still faces a lot of issues, such as bottleneck situations, long queues and increased waiting times, due to increasing traffic which in turn affect the performance of the entire urban network. This research is a case study of a non-conventional roundabout, in terms of geometric design, in a small town in India. These types of roundabouts should be analyzed for their functionality in mixed traffic conditions, prevalent in many developing countries. Microscopic traffic simulation is an effective tool to analyze traffic conditions and estimate various measures of operational performance of intersections such as capacity, vehicle delay, queue length and Level of Service (LOS) of urban roadway network. This study involves analyzation of an unsymmetrical non-circular 6-legged roundabout known as “Kala Aam Chauraha” in a small town Bulandshahr in Uttar Pradesh, India using VISSIM simulation package which is the most widely used software for microscopic traffic simulation. For coding in VISSIM, data are collected from the site during morning and evening peak hours of a weekday and then analyzed for base model building. The model is calibrated on driving behavior and vehicle parameters and an optimal set of calibrated parameters is obtained followed by validation of the model to obtain the base model which can replicate the real field conditions. This calibrated and validated model is then used to analyze the prevailing operational traffic performance of the roundabout which is then compared with a proposed alternative to improve efficiency of roundabout network and to accommodate pedestrians in the geometry. The study results show that the alternative proposed is an advantage over the present roundabout as it considerably reduces congestion, vehicle delay and queue length and hence, successfully improves roundabout performance without compromising on pedestrian safety. The study proposes similar designs for modification of existing non-conventional roundabouts experiencing excessive delays and queues in order to improve their efficiency especially in the case of developing countries. From this study, it can be concluded that there is a need to improve the current geometry of such roundabouts to ensure better traffic performance and safety of drivers and pedestrians negotiating the intersection and hence this proposal may be considered as a best fit.

Keywords: Operational performance, roundabout, simulation, VISSIM, traffic.

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