NIOSH national survey of long-haul truck drivers: Injury and safety

Approximately 1,701,500 people were employed as heavy and tractor-trailer truck drivers in the United States in 2012. The majority of them were long-haul truck drivers (LHTDs). There are limited data on occupational injury and safety in LHTDs, which prompted a targeted national survey. The National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health conducted a nationally representative survey of 1265 LHTDs at 32 truck stops across the contiguous United States in 2010. Data were collected on truck crashes, near misses, moving violations, work-related injuries, work environment, safety climate, driver training, job satisfaction, and driving behaviors. Results suggested that an estimated 2.6% of LHTDs reported a truck crash in 2010, 35% reported at least one crash while working as an LHTD, 24% reported at least one near miss in the previous 7 days, 17% reported at least one moving violation ticket and 4.7% reported a non-crash injury involving days away from work in the previous 12 months. The majority (68%) of non-crash injuries among company drivers were not reported to employers. An estimate of 73% of LHTDs (16% often and 58% sometimes) perceived their delivery schedules unrealistically tight; 24% often continued driving despite fatigue, bad weather, or heavy traffic because they needed to deliver or pick up a load at a given time; 4.5% often drove 10 miles per hours or more over the speed limit; 6.0% never wore a seatbelt; 36% were often frustrated by other drivers on the road; 35% often had to wait for access to a loading dock; 37% reported being noncompliant with hours-of-service rules (10% often and 27% sometimes); 38% of LHTDs perceived their entry-level training inadequate; and 15% did not feel that safety of workers was a high priority with their management. This survey brings to light a number of important safety issues for further research and interventions, e.g., high prevalence of truck crashes, injury underreporting, unrealistically tight delivery schedules, noncompliance with hours-of-service rules, and inadequate entry-level training.     

Conditional Control Charts for Monitoring the Weibull Shape Parameter under Progressively Type II Censored Data

In this paper, (i) we propose new conditional Shewhart‐type control charts for monitoring the shape parameter of the Weibull distribution under a progressively type II censoring strategy, and (ii) we generalize the control charts proposed by Guo and Wang¹ for the progressively type II censoring case. We provide a comparison between these control charts in terms of the out‐of‐control average run length obtained by simulation for both the known and unknown parameter cases. A real example consisting of data from breaking stress of carbon fibers is also presented for illustration and comparison of the proposed control charts. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

P2Care: A dynamic peer-to-peer network for collaboration in personalized healthcare service delivery

In the healthcare domain, the quality of personalized service delivery is strongly tied with collaboration among multiple stakeholders for accurate and reliable access to a variety of distributed and heterogeneous information and services. Existing healthcare information systems lack collaboration since they offer limited accessibility to resources and pose many restrictions in terms of scalability and flexibility. In this work, we propose P2Care, a decentralized, dynamic, scalable and self-organized network that exploits the functionalities of the structured peer-to-peer networks in order to provide collaboration. P2Care provides efficient ubiquitous access to medical information by organizing participating entities into groups according to common characteristics and interests. It incorporates enhanced lookup mechanisms with low response time and signaling overhead. The performance of the P2Care system has been evaluated through simulations. A prototype application demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed system for cooperation and collaboration in order to facilitate personalized service delivery.     

QoS-Aware Power Allocation Scheme for Relay Satellite Networks

This paper investigated a QoS-aware power allocation for relay satellite networks. For the given QoS requirements, we analyzed the signal model of relay transmission and formulated the power minimization problem which is non-convex and difficult to solve. To find the optimal solution to the considered problem, we first analyzed the optimization problem and equivalently turn it into a convex optimization problem. Then, we provided a Lagrangian dual-based method to obtain the closed-form of the power allocation and provided an iterative algorithm to the optimal solution.Moreover, we also extended the results to the cooperative transmission mode. Finally, simulation results were provided to verify the superiority of the proposed algorithm.     

SRS: Spatial-tagged radio-mapping system combining LiDAR and mobile-phone data for indoor location-based services

One of the most challenging issues in radio received signal strength (RSS)-based localization systems is the generation and distribution of a radio map with a coordinate system linked with spatial information in a large indoor space. This study proposes a novel spatial-tagged radio-mapping system (SRS) that effectively combines the heterogeneous properties of LiDAR and mobile phones to simultaneously perform both spatial and radio mappings. The SRS consists of synchronization, localization, and map building processes, and enables real-time spatial and radio mapping. In the synchronization process, the distance range, motion data, and radio signals obtained through the LiDAR and mobile phone are collected in nodal units according to the sensing time. In the localization process, a feature variance filter is used to control the number of features generated from LiDAR and estimate the positions at which the nodes are generated in real time according to the motion data and radio signals. In map building, the estimated positions of the nodes are used to extract spatial and radio maps by using a unified location coordinate system. To ensure mobility, the SRS is manufactured in the form of a backpack supporting LiDAR and a mobile phone; the usefulness of the system is experimentally verified. The experiments are performed in a large indoor shopping mall with a complex structure. The experimental results demonstrated that a common coordinate system could be used to build spatial and radio maps with high accuracy and efficiency in real time. In addition, the field applicability of the SRS to location-based services is experimentally verified by applying the constructed radio map to well-known fingerprinting algorithms using the heterogeneous mobile phones.     

To outsource or not: The impact of information leakage risk on information security strategy

Emerging studies advocate that firms shall completely outsource their information security for cost and technical advantages. However, the risk of information leakage in outsourcing to managed security service providers (MSSPs) is overlooked and poses a confidentiality threat. We develop analytical models to describe several strategies for firms to consider when they decide to outsource to MSSPs. Based on our results, we suggest partial outsourcing as an alternative strategy when the firm faces information leakage risk. Besides, we suggest that in-house information security strategy is the optimal solution when the risk of being attacked is low regardless of the risk of information leakage. We then extend scenarios to the competitive environment where firms that are in the same market are highly likely to choose the same strategy.     

基于QFD的社区老年人慢性病管理产品服务系统设计研究

以老年慢性病患者为研究对象,以提高社区居家养老模式下的老年慢性病管理水平为研究目标,以提供社区卫生机构慢性病管理产品服务方案为实践目标。在数据收集和分析阶段,采用定性研究的方法收集用户数据,通过构建典型人物模型总结现有问题;通过分解典型场景中的用户需求,得出对应的具体服务需求和服务内容;并以KANO模型的结果为依据,划分服务需求的类型。在服务模型构建阶段,以QFD方法及相关理论为指导,构建质量屋,输出用户需求对应的服务特性重要度排序,并依照设计原则评估。构建基于不同类型用户需求的质量屋,得出慢性病管理有关的服务特性在社区场景下的重要度排序,并提出面向社区老年人的慢性病管理产品服务系统设计策略。     

油气开采用钛合金石油管材料耐腐蚀性能研究

选取5种油气开发常用钛合金材料(Ti-6Al-4V、Ti-6Al-4V-0.1Ru、Ti-6Al-2Sn-4Zr-6Mo、Ti-3Al-8V-6Cr-4Zr-4Mo和Ti-5.5Al-4.5V-2Zr-1Mo)为研究对象,使用高温高压釜模拟国内典型严酷服役工况环境,研究了不同钛合金材料耐均匀腐蚀、局部腐蚀、点蚀、应力腐蚀开裂(SCC)及缝隙腐蚀的性能,通过使用扫描电镜和能谱分析等手段对腐蚀形貌和腐蚀产物进行了分析,并使用电化学方法对不同合金的耐腐蚀机理进行了研究。结果显示,在所测试工况条件下,所有钛合金材料腐蚀反应均为阳极控制过程,均匀腐蚀速率均低于0.001mm/a,并且对应力腐蚀开裂均有良好的抗力。Ti-6Al-4V和Ti-5.5Al-4.5V-2Zr-1Mo合金出现明显的点蚀和缝隙腐蚀问题。对腐蚀机理研究表明,在工况条件温度下,随着pH值的降低,所有钛合金均发生自腐蚀电位降低,极化电阻减小,腐蚀电流增大,耐腐蚀性能下降,其中Ti-6Al-4V耐腐蚀性能下降的最为明显,研究结果为油气开发工况下钛合金石油管的选材和缝隙腐蚀问题防治提供理论基础。     

SLA-driven container consolidation with usage prediction for green cloud computing

Since service level agreement(SLA)is essentially used to maintain reliable quality of service between cloud providers and clients in cloud environment,there has been a growing effort in reducing power consumption while complying with the SLA by maximizing physical machine(PM)-level utilization and load balancing techniques in infrastructure as a service.However,with the recent introduction of container as a service by cloud providers,containers are increasingly popular and will become the major deployment model in the cloud environment and specifically in platform as a service.Therefore,reducing power consumption while complying with the SLA at virtual machine(VM)-level becomes essential.In this context,we exploit a container consolidation scheme with usage prediction to achieve the above objectives.To obtain a reliable characterization of overutilized and underutilized PMs,our scheme jointly exploits the current and predicted CPU utilization based on local history of the considered PMs in the process of the container consolidation.We demonstrate our solution through simulations on real workloads.The experimental results show that the container consolidation scheme with usage prediction reduces the power consumption,number of container migrations,and average number of active VMs while complying with the SLA.     

Telesurgery QoS improvement over SDN based on a Type‐2 fuzzy system and enhanced cuckoo optimization algorithm

Telemedicine is a new area based on the information and communication technology for collecting, storing, organizing, retrieving and exchanging medical information. One of the most important applications of telemedicine is indeed telesurgery in which an efficient telecommunication infrastructure between the surgery room and remote surgeons need to be established. One of the most important issues to be tackled in telesurgery is to find favorable links for routing as well as providing high Quality of Service (QoS). In this paper, an efficient model based on the hybridization of Type‐2 Fuzzy System (T2FS) and Cuckoo Optimization Algorithm (COA) over the Software Defined Networks (SDN) is proposed in order to achieve optimal and reliable routes for telesurgery application. Using T2FS, the fitness of the links is determined; then, a COA is conducted over the Constraint Shortest Path (CSP) problem to find the best routes. Delay is considered as a CSP problem which is satisfied by trying to find the paths with minimum cost. Due to the NP‐completeness of the CSP problem, an Enhanced COA (so‐called E‐COA) is proposed and utilized as a metaheuristic solver. To the best of our knowledge, this paper is the first SDN‐based communication model that applies both T2FS and E‐COA for assigning proper costs to the network's links, and solves the consequence CSP problem according to the QoS requirement for telesurgery. The model also recognizes and preserves the second‐best routes in order to keep the reliability for such a critical application. In addition to the simulations, the performance evaluation is also conducted on a real experimental scenario. Many comparisons are carried out between the proposed model and other conventional methods, and the evaluation study shows the superiority of the proposed model on all the three QoS‐related metrics, i.e. average end‐to‐end delay, packet loss ratio and PSNR.