Assessment of Upstream Human Intervention Coupled with Climate Change Impact for a Transboundary River Flow Regime: Nile River Basin

Water Resources Management - The aim of this article is to determine how human interventions in upstream countries coupled with drought events are affecting the flow regime of downstream countries...     

Elliptical slot based polarization insensitive compact and flexible chipless RFID tag

A miniaturized, polarization insensitive, and fully passive chipless radio frequency identification tag is proposed in this research article. The realized tag is based on slotted elliptical structures in a nested loop fashion with identical lengths and widths of slot resonators. Alteration of data sequence is accomplished by addition and elimination of nested resonators in the geometric structure. The tag is capable to encode 10 bits of data and covers spectral range from 3.6 to 15.6 GHz. The formulated structure demonstrates polarization insensitive characteristic. The data encoding structure is analyzed and optimized for different substrates that are, Rogers RT/duroid/5880, Rogers RT/duroid/5870, and Taconic TLX‐0 over the miniaturized footprint of 22.8 × 16 mm². The presented tag is robust, novel, compact, and flexible exhibiting a stable response to impinging electromagnetic waves at various angles of incidence.     

Simulation and Optimization of Hydrogen Fueled Mobile Power Plant Based on Methylcyclohexane–Toluene–Hydrogen Cycle

Theoretical Foundations of Chemical Engineering - Increase in CO2 emissions from fossil fuels has threatened the future security of human race. The addition of a renewable and environment friendly...     

Effects of Plant Growth Hormones on Mucor indicus Growth and Chitosan and Ethanol Production

The objective of this study was to investigate the effects of indole-3-acetic acid (IAA) and kinetin (KIN) on Mucor indicus growth, cell wall composition, and ethanol production. A semi-synthetic medium, supplemented with 0–5 mg/L hormones, was used for the cultivations (at 32 °C for 48 h). By addition of 1 mg/L of each hormone, the biomass and ethanol yields were increased and decreased, respectively. At higher levels, however, an inverse trend was observed. The glucosamine fraction of the cell wall, as a representative for chitosan, followed similar but sharper changes, compared to the biomass. The highest level was 221% higher than that obtained without hormones. The sum of glucosamine and N-acetyl glucosamine (chitin and chitosan) was noticeably enhanced in the presence of the hormones. Increase of chitosan was accompanied by a decrease in the phosphate content, with the lowest phosphate (0.01 g/g cell wall) being obtained when the chitosan was at the maximum (0.45 g/g cell wall). In conclusion, IAA and KIN significantly enhanced the M. indicus growth and chitosan production, while at the same time decreasing the ethanol yield to some extent. This study shows that plant growth hormones have a high potential for the improvement of fungal chitosan production by M. indicus.     

AODVCS,a new bio-inspired routing protocol based on cuckoo search algorithm for mobile ad hoc networks

Mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) are becoming an emerging technology that offer several advantages to users in terms of cost and ease of use. A MANET is a collection of mobile nodes connected by wireless links that form a temporary network topology that operates without a base station and centralized administration. Routing is a method through which information is forwarded from a transmitter to a specific recipient. Routing is a strategy that guarantees, at any time, the connection between any two nodes in a network. In this work, we propose a novel routing protocol inspired by the cuckoo search method. Our routing protocol is implemented using Network simulator 2. We chose Random WayPoint model as our mobility model. To validate our work, we opted for the comparison with the routing protocol ad hoc on-demand distance vector, destination sequence distance vector and the bio-inspired routing protocol AntHocNet in terms of the quality of service parameters: packet delivery ratio and end-to-end delay (E2ED).     

Pythagorean Dombi fuzzy aggregation operators with application in multicriteria decision-making

A Pythagorean fuzzy set, an extension of intuitionistic fuzzy sets, is very helpful in representing vague information that occurs in real world scenarios. The Dombi operators with operational parameters, have excellent flexibility. Due to the flexible nature of these Dombi operational parameters, this research paper introduces some new aggregation operators under Pythagorean fuzzy environment, including Pythagorean Dombi fuzzy weighted arithmetic averaging (PDFWAA) operator, Pythagorean Dombi fuzzy weighted geometric averaging (PDFWGA) operator, Pythagorean Dombi fuzzy ordered weighted arithmetic averaging operator and Pythagorean Dombi fuzzy ordered weighted geometric averaging operator. Further, this paper presents several advantageous characteristics, including idempotency, monotonicity, boundedness, reducibility and commutativity of preceding operators. By utilizing PDFWAA and PDFWGA operators, this article describes a multicriteria decision-making (MCDM) technique for solving MCDM problems. Finally, a numerical example related to selection of a leading textile industry is presented to illustrate the applicability of our proposed technique.     

Dynamic optimisation for highly agile supply chains in e-procurement context

In the conditions of an increased worldwide competition, supply chains are struggling to respond to an increasingly volatile and complex environment. With technological advances, current practices to build efficient supply chains have changed. Companies are seeking to use internet in order to cope with the flexible and dynamic nature of logistics networks. The purpose of this article is to address the flexible dynamic e-procurement context under asynchronous and repetitive variations over time. The supply chain considered is composed of two levels (buyer–suppliers) operating in highly agile environment. The questions facing the buyer is how many units of product should be purchased and from which supplier in response to variation in term of price and capacity. Because of this highly changing environment characterised by frequent changes in a short time, most of the classical optimisation approaches seem inadequate to address these problems. Recently, dynamic optimisation has been proposed to deal with such problems. However, we have no knowledge of its application in a supply chain context. We suggest a dynamic genetic approach which is applied to an e-procurement context in aim to optimise the procurement process during time.     

Pareto Optimal Multigene Genetic Programming for Prediction of Longitudinal Dispersion Coefficient

Water Resources Management - The longitudinal dispersion coefficient (Kx) is fundamental to modeling of pollutant and sediment transport in natural rivers, but a general expression for Kx, with...     

Emulating Software Defined Network using Mininet-ns3-WIFI Integration for Wireless Networks

SDN enables a new networking paradigm probable to improve system efficiency where complex networks are easily managed and controlled. SDN allows network virtualization and advance programmability for customizing the behaviour of networking devices with user defined features even at run time. SDN separates network control and data planes. Intelligently controlled network management and operation, such that routing is eliminated from forwarding elements (switches) while shifting the routing logic in a centralized module named SDN Controller. Mininet is Linux based network emulator which is cost effective for implementing SDN having in built support of OpenFlow switches. This paper presents practical implementation of Mininet with ns-3 using Wi-Fi. Previous results reported in literature were limited upto 512 nodes in Mininet. Tests are conducted in Mininet by varying number of nodes in two distinct scenarios based on scalability and resource capabilities of the host system. We presented a low cost and reliable method allowing scalability with authenticity of results in real time environment. Simulation results show a marked improvement in time required for creating a topology designed for 3 nodes with powerful resources i.e. only 0.077 sec and 4.512 sec with limited resources, however with 2047 nodes required time is 1623.547 sec for powerful resources and 4615.115 sec with less capable resources respectively.