Search results for: Strategic Emotional Intelligence

Authors: Mohamad K. Hasan, Hameed Al-Qaheri

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Optimization plays an important role in most real world applications that support decision makers to take the right decision regarding the strategic directions and operations of the system they manage. Solutions for traffic management and traffic congestion problems are considered major problems that most decision making authorities for cities around the world are looking for. This review paper gives a full description of the traffic problem as part of the transportation planning process and present a view as a framework of urban transportation system analysis where the core of the system is a transportation network equilibrium model that is based on optimization techniques and that can also be used for evaluating an alternative solution or a combination of alternative solutions for the traffic congestion. Different transportation network equilibrium models are reviewed from the sequential approach to the multiclass combining trip generation, trip distribution, modal split, trip assignment and departure time model. A GIS-Based intelligent decision support system framework for urban transportation system analysis is suggested for implementation where the selection of optimized alternative solutions, single or packages, will be based on an intelligent agent rather than human being which would lead to reduction in time, cost and the elimination of the difficulty, by human being, for finding the best solution to the traffic congestion problem.

Keywords: Multiclass simultaneous transportation equilibrium models, transportation planning, urban transportation systems analysis, intelligent decision support system.

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Authors: C. Ardil

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Unmanned combat aircraft (UCA) are expanding significantly in several defense industries, along with artificial intelligence improvements in highly precise technology. UCA is crucial in military settings for targeting enemy elements, and objects. UCA is also utilized for highly precise reconnaissance and surveillance tasks. To select the best alternative for critical missions, a methodical and effective strategy for UCA selection is required. Multiple criteria decision-making (MCDM) methodologies are ideally equipped to handle the complexity of alternative aircraft selection. To analyze UCA alternatives for the selection process, an integrated methodology built on the objective criteria weights and preference analysis for reference ideal solution (PARIS). First, the weights of essential elements are determined using the average weight (AW), standard deviation (SW) and entropy weight (EW) approach. The weights of the evaluation criteria affect the decision-making process. The aircraft choices in the decision problem are then ranked using objective criteria weights along with the PARIS technique. The validation and sensitivity analysis of the proposed MCDM approach are discussed.

Keywords: unmanned combat aircraft (UCA), multiple criteria decision making, MCDM, PARIS

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Authors: Ghada Elshafei, Abdelazim Negm

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Recently, the green architecture becomes a significant way to a sustainable future. Green building designs involve finding the balance between comfortable homebuilding and sustainable environment. Moreover, the utilization of the new technologies such as artificial intelligence techniques are used to complement current practices in creating greener structures to keep the built environment more sustainable. The most common objectives in green buildings should be designed to minimize the overall impact of the built environment that effect on ecosystems in general and in particularly human health and natural environment. This will lead to protecting occupant health, improving employee productivity, reducing pollution and sustaining the environmental. In green building design, multiple parameters which may be interrelated, contradicting, vague and of qualitative/quantitative nature are broaden to use. This paper presents a comprehensive critical state- ofart- review of current practices based on fuzzy and its combination techniques. Also, presented how green architecture/building can be improved using the technologies that been used for analysis to seek optimal green solutions strategies and models to assist in making the best possible decision out of different alternatives.

Keywords: Green architecture/building, technologies, optimization, strategies, fuzzy techniques and models.

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Authors: Pratap Sriram Sundar, Chandan Chowdhury, Sagar Kamarthi

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Nature has perfected her designs over 3.5 billion years of evolution. Research fields such as biomimicry, biomimetics, bionics, bio-inspired computing, and nature-inspired designs have explored nature-made artifacts and systems to understand nature’s mechanisms and intelligence. Learning from nature, the researchers have generated sustainable designs and innovation in a variety of fields such as energy, architecture, agriculture, transportation, communication, and medicine. Axiomatic design offers a method to judge if a design is good. This paper analyzes design aspects of one of the nature’s amazing object: chicken egg. The functional requirements (FRs) of components of the object are tabulated and mapped on to nature-chosen design parameters (DPs). The ‘independence axiom’ of the axiomatic design methodology is applied to analyze couplings and to evaluate if eggs’ design is good (i.e., uncoupled design) or bad (i.e., coupled design). The analysis revealed that eggs design is a good design, i.e., uncoupled design. This approach can be applied to any nature’s artifacts to judge whether their design is a good or a bad. This methodology is valuable for biomimicry studies. This approach can also be a very useful teaching design consideration of biology and bio-inspired innovation.

Keywords: Uncoupled design, axiomatic design, nature design, design evaluation.

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Authors: Zhang Tianci, Ding Meng, Zuo Hongfu, Zeng Lina, Sun Zejun

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Automation of airport operations can greatly improve ground movement efficiency. In this paper, we study the speed profile design problem for advanced airport ground movement control and guidance. The problem is constrained by the surface four-dimensional trajectory generated in taxi planning. A decomposed approach of two stages is presented to solve this problem efficiently. In the first stage, speeds are allocated at control points, which ensure smooth speed profiles can be found later. In the second stage, detailed speed profiles of each taxi interval are generated according to the allocated control point speeds with the objective of minimizing the overall fuel consumption. We present a swarm intelligence based algorithm for the first-stage problem and a discrete variable driven enumeration method for the second-stage problem, since it only has a small set of discrete variables. Experimental results demonstrate the presented methodology performs well on real world speed profile design problems.

Keywords: Airport ground movement, fuel consumption, particle swarm optimization, smoothness, speed profile design.

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Authors: A. M. Sultana, Norhirdawati. M. Zahir, Norzalan. H. Yaacob

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Recently in Malaysia, women's participation in teaching profession has increased. The increasing trend of women’s participation in the teaching profession poses challenges in families, especially in the developing countries like Malaysia. One of these challenges, concerns in balancing their role between family and job responsibility that faced by many women teachers. The purpose of this study is to discover how women teachers' impact on family happiness and the challenges faced by them in balancing their role between family and job responsibility. The findings presented in this study are based on survey research in a secondary school Dato’ Bijaya Setia in the district of Gugusan Manjoi which is located in Kedah, Malaysia. The study found that employment of women in economic activity has several beneficial impacts of improving the economic condition of the family. The results also revealed that in low income earning families, both husbands and wives’ employment contribute to the family income that less likely to experience of family poverty. The study also showed despite women's teachers’ significant role towards the overall development of the family, the majority of women teachers encountered a number of difficulties in balancing their role between family and job responsibility especially when they need to work more than the normal working time. Therefore, it is common for the majority of women suffering from psychological stress when they are unable to complete the task at a fixed time. The present study also suggests implication of family friendly policy and its appropriate practice to support the women teachers who are significantly contributing to family, community and the country.

Keywords: Emotional exhaustion, Family friendly policy, Work family conflict, Women Teacher.

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Authors: S. Aberkane, N. Djabali, S. Fafi, A. Baghezza

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Chronic illnesses affect many Algerians. It is possible to investigate the impact of illness representations and coping on quality of life and whether illness representations are indirectly associated with quality of life through their influence on coping. This study aims at investigating the relationship between illness perception, coping strategies and quality of life with chronic illness. Illness perceptions are indirectly associated with the quality of life through their influence on coping mediation. A sample of 316 participants with chronic illness living in the region of Batna, Algeria, has been adopted in this study. A correlation statistical analysis is used to determine the relationship between illness perception, coping strategies, and quality of life. Multiple regression analysis was employed to highlight the predictive ability of the dimensions of illness perception and coping strategies on the dependent variables of quality of life, where mediation analysis is considered in the exploration of the indirect effect significance of the mediator. This study provides insights about the relationship between illness perception, coping strategies and quality of life in the considered sample (r = 0.39, p < 0.01). Therefore, it proves that there is an effect of illness identity perception, external and medical attributions related to emotional role, physical functioning, and mental health perceived, and these were fully mediated by the asking for assistance (c’= 0.04, p < 0.05), the guarding (c’= 0.00, p < 0.05), and the task persistence strategy (c’= 0.05, p < 0.05). The findings imply partial support for the common-sense model of illness representations in a chronic illness population. Directions for future research are highlighted, as well as implications for psychotherapeutic interventions which target unhelpful beliefs and maladaptive coping strategies (e.g., cognitive behavioral therapy).

Keywords: Chronic illness, coping, illness perception, quality of life, self-regulation model.

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Authors: Armaghan Eslami, Nasrin Arshadi

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Scarce resources are the inseparable part of organization life. This fact that only small number of the employees can have these resources such as promotion, raise, and recognition can cause competition among employees, which create competitive climate. As well as any other competition, small number wins the reward, and a great number loses, one of the possible emotional reactions to this loss is negative emotions like malicious envy. In this case, the envious person may try to harm the envied person by reducing the prosocial behavior. Prosocial behavior is a behavior that aimed to benefit others. The main propose of this action is to maintain and increase well-being and well-fare of others. Therefore, one of the easiest ways for harming envied one is to suppress prosocial behavior. Prosocial behavior has positive and important implication for organizational efficiency. Our results supported our model and suggested that competitive climate has a significant effect on increasing workplace envy and on the other hand envy has significant negative impact on prosocial behavior. Our result also indicated that envy is the mediator in the relation between competitive climate and prosocial behavior. Organizational competitive climate can cause employees respond envy with negative emotion and hostile and damaging behavior toward envied person. Competition can lead employees to look out for proof of their self-worthiness; and, furthermore, they measure their self-worth, value and respect by the superiority that they gain in competitions. As a result, loss in competitions can harm employee’s self-definition and they try to protect themselves by devaluating envied other and being ‘less friendly’ to them. Some employees may find it inappropriate to engage in the harming behavior, but they may believe there is nothing against withholding the prosocial behavior.

Keywords: Competitive climate, mediator, prosocial behavior, workplace envy.

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Authors: M. Rossini, A. Portioli Studacher

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The market competition is moving from the single firm to the whole supply chain because of increasing competition and growing need for operational efficiencies and customer orientation. Supply chain management allows companies to look beyond their organizational boundaries to develop and leverage resources and capabilities of their supply chain partners. This creates competitive advantages in the marketplace and because of this SCM has acquired strategic importance. Lean Approach is a management strategy that focuses on reducing every type of waste present in an organization. This approach is becoming more and more popular among supply chain managers. The supply chain application of lean approach is not frequent. In particular, it is not well studied which are the impacts of lean approach principles in a supply chain context. In literature there are only few studies aimed at understanding the qualitative impact of the lean approach in supply chains. Therefore, the goal of this research work is to study the impacts of lean principles implementation along a supply chain. To achieve this, a simulation model of a threeechelon multi-product supply chain has been built. Kanban system (and several priority policies) and setup time reduction degrees are implemented in the lean-configured supply chain to apply pull and lot-sizing decrease principles respectively. To evaluate the benefits of lean approach, lean supply chain is compared with an EOQ-configured supply chain. The simulation results show that Kanban system and setup-time reduction improve inventory stock level. They also show that logistics efforts are affected to lean implementation degree. The paper concludes describing performances of lean supply chain in different contexts.

Keywords: Inventory policy, Kanban, lean supply chain, simulation study, supply chain management, planning.

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Authors: Jawad Alzeer

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Cultural setup is varied from country to country and nation to nation, but the ability to adapt successfully to the new cultural setup may pave the way toward the development of cultural intelligence. Overcoming differences may require to build up our personality with the ability to learn, exchange thoughts, and have a constructive dream. Adaptation processes can be accelerated if we effectively utilize our cultural diversity. This can be done through a unified body or society; people with common goals can collectively work to satisfy their values. Narrowing the gap between developed and developing countries is of prime importance. Many international organizations are trying to resolve these issues by rational and peaceful means. Failing to understand the cultural differences, mentalities, strengths and weaknesses of developed and developing countries led to the collapse of many partnerships. Establishment of a neutral body influenced by developed countries intellectuality and developing countries personality may offer a better understanding and reasonable solutions, suggestions, advice that may assist in narrowing gaps and promote-strengthening relationship between developed and developing countries. The key issues, goals, and potential concepts associated with initiating Swiss scientific society for developing countries as a model to facilitate integration of highly skilled scientists are discussed.

Keywords: Cultural diversity, developing countries, integration, Switzerland.

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Authors: Hassan Masoumi, Rashed Alavi

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Wheat is one of the strategic crops in Iran, on which the household food basket is highly dependent. Although this crop is cultivated and produced in almost all provinces of the country, its production efficiency is lower than the global and regional averages due to the lack of optimal use of allocated resources. In this research, which was carried out with a documentary and library method, first, the total and partial productivity indices of irrigated wheat production were calculated in large, medium and small exploitation scales in different provinces of the country, and then the provinces were clustered in terms of these indices. The results showed that the total productivity of production factors had a direct correlation with the scale of exploitation, so that with the increase in the size of exploitations, the total productivity index increased. On the scale of small exploitations, North Khorasan, Zanjan, Chaharmahal and Bakhtiari Province, on a medium scale, Chaharmahal and Bakhtiari Province and on the scale of large exploitations, Zanjan, Chaharmahal and Bakhtiari provinces, Kohkiloyeh and Boyer Ahmad and North Khorasan, with better use of production resources compared to other provinces, were placed in the best cluster in terms of total productivity index. The high total productivity index in Zanjan, Chaharmahal and Bakhtiari Province is related to the higher productivity of factors such as mechanization and land in these provinces. Finally, the methods of using these factors in productive provinces, along with technical and specialized regional guidelines, can facilitate the improvement of productivity in less productive provinces.

Keywords: Clustering, Irrigated wheat, Iran, total productivity.

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Authors: Leong Lee, Cyriac Kandoth, Jennifer L. Leopold, Ronald L. Frank

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Protein 3D structure prediction has always been an important research area in bioinformatics. In particular, the prediction of secondary structure has been a well-studied research topic. Despite the recent breakthrough of combining multiple sequence alignment information and artificial intelligence algorithms to predict protein secondary structure, the Q3 accuracy of various computational prediction algorithms rarely has exceeded 75%. In a previous paper [1], this research team presented a rule-based method called RT-RICO (Relaxed Threshold Rule Induction from Coverings) to predict protein secondary structure. The average Q3 accuracy on the sample datasets using RT-RICO was 80.3%, an improvement over comparable computational methods. Although this demonstrated that RT-RICO might be a promising approach for predicting secondary structure, the algorithm-s computational complexity and program running time limited its use. Herein a parallelized implementation of a slightly modified RT-RICO approach is presented. This new version of the algorithm facilitated the testing of a much larger dataset of 396 protein domains [2]. Parallelized RTRICO achieved a Q3 score of 74.6%, which is higher than the consensus prediction accuracy of 72.9% that was achieved for the same test dataset by a combination of four secondary structure prediction methods [2].

Keywords: data mining, protein secondary structure prediction, parallelization.

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Authors: T. Botelho de Sousa, F. Raphael Cabral Furtado, O. Eduardo da Silva Ferri, A. Batista, W. Augusto Varella, C. Eduardo Pinto, J. Mimar Santa Cruz Yabarrena, S. Gibran Ruwer, F. Müller Guerrini, L. Adalberto Philippsen Júnior

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Lean Supply Chain Management (LSCM) is an emerging research field in Operations Management (OM). As a strategic model that focuses on reduced cost and waste with fulfilling the needs of customers, LSCM attracts great interest among researchers and practitioners. The purpose of this paper is to present an overview of Lean Supply Chains literature, based on bibliometric analysis through 57 papers published in indexed journals by SCOPUS and/or Web of Science databases. The results indicate that the last three years (2015, 2016, and 2017) were the most productive on LSCM discussion, especially in Supply Chain Management and International Journal of Lean Six Sigma journals. India, USA, and UK are the most productive countries; nevertheless, cross-country studies by collaboration among researchers were detected, by social network analysis, as a research practice, appearing to play a more important role on LSCM studies. Despite existing limitation, such as limited indexed journal database, bibliometric analysis helps to enlighten ongoing efforts on LSCM researches, including most used technical procedures and collaboration network, showing important research gaps, especially, for development countries researchers.

Keywords: Lean supply chains, bibliometric study, SCOPUS, web of Science.

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Authors: Deng Tingting

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The coordinated and integrated development of regions is an inevitable requirement for China to move towards high-quality sustainable development. As one of the regions with the best economic foundation and the strongest economic strength in the western China, it is a typical area with national importance and strong network connection characteristics in terms of the comprehensive effect of linking the inland hinterland and connecting the western and national urban networks. The integrated development of the Chengdu-Chongqing economic circle is of great strategic significance for the rapid and high-quality development of the western region. In the context of new urbanization, this paper takes 16 urban units within the economic circle as the research object, based on the 5-year panel data of population, regional economy and spatial construction and development from 2016 to 2020, using the entropy method and Theil index to analyze the three target layers, and cause analysis. The research shows that there are temporal and spatial differences in the Chengdu-Chongqing economic circle, and there are significant differences between the core city and the surrounding cities. Therefore, by reforming and innovating the regional coordinated development mechanism, breaking administrative barriers, and strengthening the "polar nucleus" radiation function to release the driving force for economic development, especially in the gully areas of economic development belts, will not only promote the coordinated development of internal regions, but also promote the coordinated and sustainable development of the western region and toward a high-quality development path.

Keywords: Chengdu-Chongqing economic circle, new urbanization, coordinated regional development, Theil Index.

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Authors: Muhammad Sollehhuddin A. Jalil, Mohd Ibrahim Shapiai, Rubiyah Yusof

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Nowadays, ontology is common in many areas like artificial intelligence, bioinformatics, e-commerce, education and many more. Ontology is one of the focus areas in the field of Information Retrieval. The purpose of an ontology is to describe a conceptual representation of concepts and their relationships within a particular domain. In other words, ontology provides a common vocabulary for anyone who needs to share information in the domain. There are several ontology domains in various fields including engineering and non-engineering knowledge. However, there are only a few available ontology for engineering knowledge. Fuzzy logic as engineering knowledge is still not available as ontology domain. In general, fuzzy logic requires step-by-step guidelines and instructions of lab experiments. In this study, we presented domain ontology for Fuzzy Logic Control (FLC) knowledge. We give Table of Content (ToC) with middle strategy based on the Uschold and King method to develop FLC ontology. The proposed framework is developed using Protégé as the ontology tool. The Protégé’s ontology reasoner, known as the Pellet reasoner is then used to validate the presented framework. The presented framework offers better performance based on consistency and classification parameter index. In general, this ontology can provide a platform to anyone who needs to understand FLC knowledge.

Keywords: Engineering knowledge, fuzzy logic control ontology, ontology development, table of contents.

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Authors: Hyunchul Ahn, Kyoung-Jae Kim

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Corporate credit rating prediction using statistical and artificial intelligence (AI) techniques has been one of the attractive research topics in the literature. In recent years, multiclass classification models such as artificial neural network (ANN) or multiclass support vector machine (MSVM) have become a very appealing machine learning approaches due to their good performance. However, most of them have only focused on classifying samples into nominal categories, thus the unique characteristic of the credit rating - ordinality - has been seldom considered in their approaches. This study proposes new types of ANN and MSVM classifiers, which are named OMANN and OMSVM respectively. OMANN and OMSVM are designed to extend binary ANN or SVM classifiers by applying ordinal pairwise partitioning (OPP) strategy. These models can handle ordinal multiple classes efficiently and effectively. To validate the usefulness of these two models, we applied them to the real-world bond rating case. We compared the results of our models to those of conventional approaches. The experimental results showed that our proposed models improve classification accuracy in comparison to typical multiclass classification techniques with the reduced computation resource.

Keywords: Artificial neural network, Corporate credit rating, Support vector machines, Ordinal pairwise partitioning

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Authors: M. R. Akshaya, Veena Rao

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Pet population in India is increasing phenomenally owing to the changes in urban lifestyle with increasing number of single professionals, single parents, delayed parenthood etc. The animal companionship as a means of reducing stress levels, deriving emotional support, and unconditional love provided by dogs are a few reasons attributed for increasing pet ownership. The consequence is the booming of the pet care products and dog care centers catering to the different requirements of rearing the pets. Dog care centers quite popular in tier 1 metros of India cater to the requirement of the dog owners providing space for the dogs in absence of the owner. However, it is often reported that the absence of the owner leads to destructive and exploratory behavior issues; the main being the anxiety disorders. In the above context, it becomes imperative for a designer to design dog boarding centers that help in reducing the separation anxiety in dogs keeping in mind the different interior design parameters. An exploratory research with focus group discussion is employed involving a group of dog owners, behaviorists, proprietors of day care as well as boarding centers, and veterinarians to understand their perception on the significance of different interior parameters of color, texture, ventilation, aroma therapy and acoustics as a means of reducing the stress levels in dogs sent to the boarding centers. The data collected is organized as thematic networks thus enabling the listing of the interior design parameters that needs to be considered in designing dog boarding centers. 

Keywords: Behavioral response, design parameters, dog boarding centers, interior environment.

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Authors: Mijoh A. Gbededo, Kapila Liyanage, Ilias Oraifige

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Decision making for sustainable manufacturing design and management requires critical considerations due to the complexity and partly conflicting issues of economic, social and environmental factors. Although there are tools capable of assessing the combination of one or two of the sustainability factors, the frameworks have not adequately integrated all the three factors. Case study and review of existing simulation applications also shows the approach lacks integration of the sustainability factors. In this paper we discussed the development of a simulation based framework for support of a holistic assessment of sustainable manufacturing design and management. To achieve this, a strategic approach is introduced to investigate the strengths and weaknesses of the existing decision supporting tools. Investigation reveals that Discrete Event Simulation (DES) can serve as a rock base for other Life Cycle Analysis frameworks. Simio-DES application optimizes systems for both economic and competitive advantage, Granta CES EduPack and SimaPro collate data for Material Flow Analysis and environmental Life Cycle Assessment, while social and stakeholders’ analysis is supported by Analytical Hierarchy Process, a Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis method. Such a common and integrated framework creates a platform for companies to build a computer simulation model of a real system and assess the impact of alternative solutions before implementing a chosen solution.

Keywords: Discrete event simulation, life cycle sustainability analysis, manufacturing, sustainability.

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Authors: Natalia Moreira, Trevor Wood-Harper

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The acceptance of sustainable products by the final consumer is still one of the challenges of the industry, which constantly seeks alternative approaches to successfully be accepted in the global market. A large set of methods and approaches have been discussed and analysed throughout the literature. Considering the current need for sustainable development and the current pace of consumption, the need for a combined solution towards the development of new products became clear, forcing researchers in product development to propose alternatives to the previous standard product development models. This paper presents, through a systemic analysis of the literature on product development, eco-design and consumer involvement, a set of alternatives regarding consumer involvement towards the development of sustainable products and how these approaches could help improve the sustainable industry’s establishment in the general market. Still being developed in the course of the author’s PhD, the initial findings of the research show that the understanding of the benefits of sustainable behaviour lead to a more conscious acquisition and eventually to the implementation of sustainable change in the consumer. Thus this paper is the initial approach towards the development of new sustainable products using the fashion industry as an example of practical implementation and acceptance by the consumers. By comparing the existing literature and critically analysing it, this paper concluded that the consumer involvement is strategic to improve the general understanding of sustainability and its features. The use of consumers and communities has been studied since the early 90s in order to exemplify uses and to guarantee a fast comprehension. The analysis done also includes the importance of this approach for the increase of innovation and ground breaking developments, thus requiring further research and practical implementation in order to better understand the implications and limitations of this methodology.

Keywords: Consumer involvement, Products development, Sustainability.

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Authors: Chryssa Thermolia, Ekaterini S. Bei, Stelios Sotiriadis, Kostas Stravoskoufos, Euripides G.M. Petrakis

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Moving into a new era of healthcare, new tools and devices are developed to extend and improve health services, such as remote patient monitoring and risk prevention. In this concept, Internet of Things (IoT) and Cloud Computing present great advantages by providing remote and efficient services, as well as cooperation between patients, clinicians, researchers and other health professionals. This paper focuses on patients suffering from bipolar disorder, a brain disorder that belongs to a group of conditions called affective disorders, which is characterized by great mood swings. We exploit the advantages of Semantic Web and Cloud Technologies to develop a patient monitoring system to support clinicians. Based on intelligently filtering of evidence-knowledge and individual-specific information we aim to provide treatment notifications and recommended function tests at appropriate times or concluding into alerts for serious mood changes and patient’s nonresponse to treatment. We propose an architecture as the back-end part of a cloud platform for IoT, intertwining intelligence devices with patients’ daily routine and clinicians’ support.

Keywords: Bipolar disorder, intelligent systems patient monitoring, semantic web technologies, IoT.

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Authors: Sakir Tasdemir, Mustafa Altin, Gamze Fahriye Pehlivan, Ismail Saritas, Sadiye Didem Boztepe Erkis, Selma Tasdemir

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Artificial intelligence applications are commonly used in industry in many fields in parallel with the developments in the computer technology. In this study, a fire room was prepared for the resistance of wooden construction elements and with the mechanism here, the experiments of polished materials were carried out. By utilizing from the experimental data, an artificial neural network (ANN) was modelled in order to evaluate the final cross sections of the wooden samples remaining from the fire. In modelling, experimental data obtained from the fire room were used. In the developed system, the first weight of samples (ws-gr), preliminary cross-section (pcs-mm2), fire time (ft-minute), and fire temperature (t-oC) as input parameters and final cross-section (fcs-mm2) as output parameter were taken. When the results obtained from ANN and experimental data are compared after making statistical analyses, the data of two groups are determined to be coherent and seen to have no meaning difference between them. As a result, it is seen that ANN can be safely used in determining cross sections of wooden materials after fire and it prevents many disadvantages.

Keywords: Artificial neural network, final cross-section, fire retardant polishes, fire safety, wood resistance.

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Authors: Mourad Moussa, Ali Douik, Hassani Messaoud

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Events discrimination and decision maker in sport field are the subject of many interesting studies in computer vision and artificial intelligence. A large volume of research has been conducted for automatic semantic event detection and summarization of sports videos. Indeed the results of these researches have a very significant contribution, as well to television broadcasts as to the football teams, since the result of sporting event can be reflected on the economic field. In this paper, we propose a novel fuzzy sequential technique which lead to discriminate events and specify the technico-tactics on going the game, nor the fuzzy system or the sequential one, may be able to respond to the asked question, in fact fuzzy process is not sufficient, it does not respect the chronological order according the time of various events, similarly the sequential process needs flexibility about the parameters used in this study, it may affect a membership degree of each parameter on the one hand and respect the sequencing of events for each frame on the other hand. Indeed this technique describes special events such as dribbling, headings, short sprints, rapid acceleration or deceleration, turning, jumping, kicking, ball occupation, and tackling according velocity vectors of the two players and the ball direction.

Keywords: Sequential process, Event detection, Soccer videos analysis, Fuzzy process, Spatio-temporal parameters.

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Authors: Md. Ashikur Rahman Khan, M. M. Rahman, K. Kadirgama, M.A. Maleque, Rosli A. Bakar

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Conventionally the selection of parameters depends intensely on the operator-s experience or conservative technological data provided by the EDM equipment manufacturers that assign inconsistent machining performance. The parameter settings given by the manufacturers are only relevant with common steel grades. A single parameter change influences the process in a complex way. Hence, the present research proposes artificial neural network (ANN) models for the prediction of surface roughness on first commenced Ti-15-3 alloy in electrical discharge machining (EDM) process. The proposed models use peak current, pulse on time, pulse off time and servo voltage as input parameters. Multilayer perceptron (MLP) with three hidden layer feedforward networks are applied. An assessment is carried out with the models of distinct hidden layer. Training of the models is performed with data from an extensive series of experiments utilizing copper electrode as positive polarity. The predictions based on the above developed models have been verified with another set of experiments and are found to be in good agreement with the experimental results. Beside this they can be exercised as precious tools for the process planning for EDM.

Keywords: Ti-15l-3, surface roughness, copper, positive polarity, multi-layered perceptron.

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Authors: Anita Khadka, Gregory Epiphaniou, Carsten Maple

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There is a dramatic surge in the adoption of Machine Learning (ML) techniques in many areas, including the nuclear industry (such as fault diagnosis and fuel management in nuclear power plants), autonomous systems (including self-driving vehicles), space systems (space debris recovery, for example), medical surgery, network intrusion detection, malware detection, to name a few. Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become a part of everyday modern human life. To date, the predominant focus has been developing underpinning ML algorithms that can improve accuracy, while factors such as resiliency and robustness of algorithms have been largely overlooked. If an adversarial attack is able to compromise the learning method or data, the consequences can be fatal, especially but not exclusively in safety-critical applications. In this paper, we present an in-depth analysis of five adversarial attacks and two defence methods on a crack detection ML model. Our analysis shows that it can be dangerous to adopt ML techniques without rigorous testing, since they may be vulnerable to adversarial attacks, especially in security-critical areas such as the nuclear industry. We observed that while the adopted defence methods can effectively defend against different attacks, none of them could protect against all five adversarial attacks entirely.

Keywords: Resilient Machine Learning, attacks, defences, nuclear industry, crack detection.

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Authors: B. Muhammadani

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Health workforce is a fundamental component of health system and plays a significant role in delivering effective health care services. However, there is a crucial shortage of skilled personnel which make them prone to work in stressful conditions. In spite of excessively high workload and burnout among the staff, little attention is given to their job satisfaction level which has serious implications on the productivity and effective performance of staff to achieve organizational goals. Therefore, this study aims to explore the job satisfaction of midwives working in the labor ward of the Lady Dufferin Hospital, Karachi. A cross-sectional survey was conducted. The short version of Minnesota Job Satisfaction Questionnaire was administered on a convenient sample group of 22 midwives to gather information on their job satisfaction. The results demonstrated that midwives were overall satisfied with their job. The level of job satisfaction was however found different in various positions within midwifery cadre. The head of midwives was highly satisfied as compared to midwifery staff who works under the supervision of head. The level of satisfaction of team leaders fall between the head and staff of midwifery. Similar trends were observed for both intrinsic and extrinsic job satisfaction. Such evidences on these issues are essential and useful as it helps explore the attitudes of individuals towards work which has direct implications on access to quality care services. Strategic interventions are required at organizational level to provide motivators and satisfiers to health workers for their work related satisfaction and enhanced motivation.

Keywords: Health workforce, job satisfaction, motivation, workload, burnout, midwives, health system.

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Authors: Beatrix Faragó, Zsolt Szakály, Ágnes Kovácsné Tóth, Csaba Konczos, Norbert Kovács, Zsófia Pápai, Tamás Kertész

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The future of the nation is the embodiment of a healthy society. A key segment of government policy is the development of health and a health-oriented environment. As a result, sport as an activator of health is an important area for development. In Hungary, sport is a strategic sector with the aim of developing a sports nation. The function of sport in the global society is multifaceted, which is manifested in both social and economic terms. The economic importance of sport is gaining ground in the world, with implications for Central and Eastern Europe. Smaller states, such as Hungary, cannot ignore the economic effects of exploiting the effects of sport. The relationship between physical activity and health is driven by the health economy towards the nation's economic factor. In our research, we analyzed sport as a national strategy sector and its impact on age groups. By presenting the current state of health behavior, we get an idea of the directions where development opportunities require even more intervention. The foundation of the health of a nation is the young age group, whose shaping of health will shape the future generation. Our research was attended by university students from the Faculty of Health and Sports Sciences who will be experts in the field of health in the future. The other group is the elderly, who are a growing social group due to demographic change and are a key segment of the labor market and consumer society. Our study presents the health behavior of the two age groups, their differences, and similarities. The survey also identifies gaps in the development of a health management strategy that national strategies should take into account.

Keywords: Competitiveness, health behavior, health economy, health management, sports nation.

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Authors: Duygu Aydın, Aşina Gülerarslan, Süleyman Karaçor, Tarık Doğan

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Sharing motivations of viral advertisements by consumers and the impacts of these advertisements on the perceptions for brand will be questioned in this study. Three fundamental questions are answered in the study. These are advertisement watching and sharing motivations of individuals, criteria of liking viral advertisement and the impact of individual attitudes for viral advertisement on brand perception respectively. This study will be carried out via a viral advertisement which was practiced in Turkey. The data will be collected by survey method and the sample of the study consists of individuals who experienced the practice of sample advertisement. Data will be collected by online survey method and will be analyzed by using SPSS statistical package program. Recently traditional advertisement mind have been changing. New advertising approaches which have significant impacts on consumers have been argued. Viral advertising is a modernist advertisement mind which offers significant advantages to brands apart from traditional advertising channels such as television, radio and magazines. Viral advertising also known as Electronic Word-of- Mouth (eWOM) consists of free spread of convincing messages sent by brands among interpersonal communication. When compared to the traditional advertising, a more provocative thematic approach is argued. The foundation of this approach is to create advertisements that are worth sharing with others by consumers. When that fact is taken into consideration, in a manner of speaking it can also be stated that viral advertising is media engineering. The content worth sharing makes people being a volunteer spokesman of a brand and strengthens the emotional bonds among brand and consumer. Especially for some sectors in countries which are having traditional advertising channel limitations, viral advertising creates vital advantages.

Keywords: Viral advertising, marketing, consumers, brands.

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Authors: Sidharta Sahirman, Ardiansyah, Muhammad Rifan, Edy-Melmambessy

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Merauke district in Papua, Indonesia has a strategic position and natural potential for the development of agricultural industry. The development of agriculture in this region is being accelerated as part of Indonesian Government’s declaration announcing Merauke as one of future national food barns. Therefore, land-use suitability analysis for Merauke need to be performed. As a result, the mapping for future agriculture-based industries can be done optimally. In this research, a case study is carried out in Semangga sub district. The objective of this study is to determine the suitability of Merauke land for some food crops. A modified agro-ecological zoning is applied to reach the objective. In this research, land cover based on satellite imagery is combined with soil, water and climate survey results to come up with preliminary zoning. Considering the special characteristics of Merauke community, the agricultural zoning maps resulted based on those inputs will be combined with socio-economic information and culture to determine the final zoning map for agricultural industry in Merauke. Examples of culture are customary rights of local residents and the rights of local people and their own local food patterns. This paper presents the results of first year of the two-year research project funded by The Indonesian Government through MP3EI schema. It shares the findings of land cover studies, the distribution of soil physical and chemical parameters, as well as suitability analysis of Semangga sub-district for five different food plants.

Keywords: agriculture, agro-ecological, Merauke, zoning

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Authors: Shahab Kavehkar, Mohammad Ali Ghorbani, Valeriy Khokhlov, Afshin Ashrafzadeh, Sabereh Darbandi

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Water level forecasting using records of past time series is of importance in water resources engineering and management. For example, water level affects groundwater tables in low-lying coastal areas, as well as hydrological regimes of some coastal rivers. Then, a reliable prediction of sea-level variations is required in coastal engineering and hydrologic studies. During the past two decades, the approaches based on the Genetic Programming (GP) and Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) were developed. In the present study, the GP is used to forecast daily water level variations for a set of time intervals using observed water levels. The measurements from a single tide gauge at Urmia Lake, Northwest Iran, were used to train and validate the GP approach for the period from January 1997 to July 2008. Statistics, the root mean square error and correlation coefficient, are used to verify model by comparing with a corresponding outputs from Artificial Neural Network model. The results show that both these artificial intelligence methodologies are satisfactory and can be considered as alternatives to the conventional harmonic analysis.

Keywords: Water-Level variation, forecasting, artificial neural networks, genetic programming, comparative analysis.

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Authors: P. I. Adzongo, O. A. Aloga

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The purpose of the study was to examine lifelong education for teachers as a tool for achieving effective teaching and learning. Lifelong education enhances social inclusion, personal development, citizenship, employability, teaching and learning, community and the nation. It is imperative that the teacher needs to update his knowledge regularly to be able to perform optimally, since he has a major position in the inculcation of desirable elements in students, and the challenges of lifelong education were also discussed. Descriptive survey design was adopted for the study. A simple random sampling technique was used to select 80 teachers as sample from a population of 105 senior secondary school teachers in Makurdi Local Government Area of Benue State. A 20-item self designed questionnaire subjected to expert validation and reliability was used to collect data. The reliability Alpha coefficient of 0.87 was established using Cronbach’s Alpha technique, mean scores and standard deviation were used to answer the 2 research questions while chi-square was used to analyse data for the 2 null hypotheses, which states that lifelong education for teachers is not a significant tool for achieving effective teaching and lifelong education for teachers does not significantly impact on effective learning. The findings of the study revealed that, lifelong education for teachers can be used as a tool for achieving effective teaching and learning, and the study recommended among others that government, organizations and individuals should in collaboration put lifelong education programmes for teachers on the priority list. The paper concluded that the strategic position of lifelong education for teachers towards enhanced teaching, learning and the production of quality manpower in the society makes it imperative for all hands to be on “deck” to support the programme financially and otherwise.

Keywords: Lifelong Education, Tool, Effective Teaching and Learning.

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