Estimation of the evacuation time in an emergency situation in hospitals

In this paper, a prediction model is presented that estimates the evacuation time in an emergency situation for hospitals. The model is generic enough to be used in various hospital settings. This model can provide incident managers with estimates of the evacuation times of different types of patients and can offer support to the managers with their resource allocation decisions in emergency situations. The major advantage of the prediction model is that the computation time is very short and the model does not need a lengthy and costly design. The model was applied for several different evacuation scenarios and the results were compared with those of a simulation model which had already been designed for use by the hospital. The comparison shows that the prediction model can provide estimates of the evacuation time that are similar to the results found by using costly and time-consuming simulation models.     

A Comparison of MVDR and LCMV Beamformers’ Floating Point Implementations on FPGAs

Adaptive beamformers are designed with the aim of detection of noise and intentional destructive interference and then removing them from the desired signal. This is done by placing high attenuation in the direction of the destructive signal in the radiation pattern of antenna arrays without attenuating the signal from a known direction. Minimum variance distortionless response and linearly constrained minimum variance are among such algorithms in mobile communications. A short explanation of the theory and weights formulae of these beamformers will be given. Two designs for weights calculations in Simulink with the added library of DSP-Builder tool from Altera will be presented. Quadrature Rectangular decomposition with Modified Gram-Schmidt algorithm is used instead of the direct matrix inversion. All calculations are done in single floating point mode for the required high accuracy. Modelsim has been used for hardware simulation and measuring the required clock cycles. The target FPGA is Aria10 from Altera which has floating point DSP blocks for high-performance computations. Hardware resources usage, power consumption, maximum clock frequency and update rate for different matrix sizes of these two beamformers are compared and discussed. The results are also compared with some other relevant reported works.     

A framework for multi-objective optimisation of 3D part-build orientation with a desired angular resolution in additive manufacturing processes

In additive manufacturing processes, the part build orientation (PBO) is one of the most important factors that can affect the characteristics of the quality product such as the amount of support structure and the surface roughness. In most previous methods, the optimal PBO cannot be determined with high precision and accuracy in 3D space. In this paper, to find the precise and accurate optimal PBO with a desired angular accuracy, a new Taguchi-based method, called the Zooming-Taguchi method, is proposed. The proposed simulation-based method can precisely find the optimal PBO in absence of the noise effects. In order to find the optimal PBO with the desired angular resolution, the zooming procedure is iteratively carried out on factor levels through a clustering strategy. Finally, to validate the proposed method, two case studies are considered and the obtained results are compared with conventional methods in the literature and the experimental results.     

European trends in library development

The time-to-market and cost constraints of designing VLSI circuits, together with increasing complexity, necessitate a structured design methodology. Such a methodology should be based on an extensive use of libraries of generic components and previously designed macro blocks. An ideal library for modern design strategies that are based on a top-down structured approach is described. The concepts of portability, migratability, and interoperability of libraries are discussed. It is shown that libraries capitalize on knowledge gained over generations of designs, and successful libraries demand a serious effort at standardization