Evaluation of alternative materials handling systems

This paper addresses the development of a simulation model to assist in the selection of a new materials handling system for the service and repair group of a major electronics company.     

An integrated approach to facility location problems

An integrated analysis approach to facility location problems is described. The approach is based on integrating analytical location models and a multicriteria decision model.     

Minimum cost route for a highway in heterogeneous terrain

This paper shows that the minimum cost route should satisfy the Snell's law of light refraction and this can be done by successive iteration, in either a forward or backward direction. The number of iterations required for full convergence depends on the geometry of the problem and the cost ratio between each of the two neighbouring cost regions.     

Weaving temporal and reliability aspects into a schema tapestry

In aspect-oriented programming (AOP) a cross-cutting concern is implemented in an aspect. An aspect weaver blends code from the aspect into a program’s code at programmer-specified cut points, yielding an aspect-enhanced program. In this paper, we apply some of the concepts from the AOP paradigm to data. Like code, data also has cross-cutting concerns such as versioning, security, privacy, and reliability. We propose modeling a cross-cutting data concern as a schema aspect. A schema aspect describes the structure of the metadata in the cross-cutting concern, identifies the types of data elements that can be wrapped with metadata, i.e., the cut points, and provides some simple constraints on the use of the metadata. Several schema aspects can be applied to a single data collection, though in this paper we focus on just two aspects: a reliability aspect and a temporal aspect. We show how to weave the schema for these two aspects together with the schema for the data into a single, unified schema that we call a schema tapestry. The tapestry guides the construction, interpretation, and validation of an aspect-enhanced data collection.     

Assessment of protein quality by partial carcass analyses. Nitrogen retention in rats in relation to the nitrogen content in hind limbs

Dietary protein quality was measured in N balance experiments and compared with partial carcass analyses (hind limbs). The results obtained from 16 experiments with rats show that there is a highly significant positive correlation (r = 0.97) between N retained in 5 days and the N content in hind limbs.     

Modeling the rate of corrosion of carbon steel using activated diethanolamine solutions for CO2 absorption

A mechanistic model is developed to investigate the influence of an activator on the corrosion rate of carbon steel in the absorption processes of carbon dioxide (CO₂). Piperazine (PZ) is used as the activator in diethanolamine (DEA) aqueous solutions. The developed model for corrosion takes into consideration the effect of fluid flow, transfer of charge and diffusion of oxidizing agents and operating parameters like temperature, activator concentration, CO₂ loading and pH. The study consists of two major models: Vapor-liquid Equilibrium (VLE) model and electrochemical corrosion model. The electrolyte-NRTL equilibrium model was used for determination of concentration of chemical species in the bulk solution. The results of speciation were subsequently used for producing polarization curves and predicting the rate of corrosion occurring at the surface of metal. An increase in concentration of activator, increases the rate of corrosion of carbon steel in mixtures of activated DEA.     

The Instant Controlled Pressure Drop Process as a New Post-harvesting Treatment of Paddy Rice: Impacts on Drying Kinetics and End Product Attributes

The instant controlled pressure drop (DIC) process was used as a post-harvesting treatment, followed by hot air drying and shade polishing. DIC treatment, which is carried out at P = 0.4–0.6 MPa, has many advantages in terms of processing time (not exceeding 30 s) and drying kinetics (about 3 h instead of 1 day under standard 50 °C hot air flow conditions). Shade polishing gives high quality rice with a whole-grain yield of 68-70% rather than the usual 52-60%. A tasting evaluation was carried out by an international panel and the rice was found to be perfect after a cooking time of 6 min, with an overcooked time of 18 min as against 17 min and 20 min, respectively, for conventional products. The shaded shelf life of the final product is much longer than 18–24 months.     

Flocculation of fine particles in ceramic wastewater using new types of polymeric flocculants

It appears to be quite a few national and international studies were reported regarding flocculation and settling properties of ceramic industry wastewater containing various mineral matters. Cleaning of ceramic industry wastewaters with ever increasing environmental standards needs effective and economical solid–liquid separation processes. In this study, quantity and type of optimum flocculant concentration were investigated for solid–liquid separation of Umpac ceramic plant (located at Usak, Turkey) wastewaters. A new generation of flocculants namely unique molecular architecture (UMA) are used to obtain high settling velocity along with high solid content waste and circulation water with low turbidity values. Zeta potential of the tailings including quartz, feldspar, clorite, and mica was also measured at different pH values. The flocculation tests were performed in the presence of different types of polymers at different polymer dosages. It seems that Magnafloc 5250 shows higher performance than the anionic flocculant SPK 508 and other anionic UMA flocculants Magnafloc 6260 and Magnafloc 3230. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Appl Polym Sci, 2009     

Feature extraction and ML techniques for static gesture recognition

The main objective of this study is to explore the utility of a neural network-based approach in hand gesture recognition. The proposed system presents two recognition algorithms to recognize a set of six specific static hand gestures, namely open, close, cut, paste, maximize, and minimize. The hand gesture image is passed through three stages: preprocessing, feature extraction, and classification. In the first method, the hand contour is used as a feature that treats scaling and translation of problems (in some cases). However, the complex moment algorithm is used to describe the hand gesture and to treat the rotation problem in addition to scaling and translation. The back-propagation learning algorithm is employed in the multilayer neural network classifier. The second method proposed in this article achieves better recognition rate than the first method.     

Toward designing a secure biosurveillance cloud

Biosurveillance is very complex, and it complements traditional public health surveillance to provide both early warning of infectious disease events and leads to situational awareness as well as to signaling any potential threat for using biological agents as weapons of mass destruction. Biosurveillance requires close cooperation and rapid information-sharing among many healthcare partners including primary care units and the biosurveillance hubs. Achieving improvements in this direction has become a bipartisan top priority for governments and institutions. Currently there are many national and international centers envisioned as clouds for intelligence on biological threats, however security obstacles have hindered their progress. This article investigates the requirements for a biosurveillance secure cloud. The investigation identifies the major security components needed to build a trusted environment for cloud based biosurveillance system through the integration of the public health enterprise private cloud with public clouds based on the Distributed OSGi framework along with a distributed authentication service. The trusted environment allows biosurveillance to be conducted over primary care private clouds including patient information from the electronic medical records.