Contractor Prebid Planning Principles

Planning is an essential function of project management. Yet, many small- and medium-sized contractors do a relatively poor job of operational planning. Better prebid plans will reduce costs, shorten schedules, and improve labor productivity. Unfortunately, the published literature offers little guidance for smaller contractors on what constitutes effective planning. Most papers describe planning as a macrolevel process for owners. Most emphasize scope definition for industrial projects. This paper describes a microlevel planning process for contractors. It consists of eight steps which are: (1) assess contract risks; (2) develop a preliminary execution plan; (3) develop site layout plans; (4) identify the sequences that are essential-to-success; (5) develop detailed operational plans; (6) develop proactive strategies to assure construction input into design; (7) revise the preliminary plan; and (8) communicate and enforce the plan. The entire process is illustrated with a case study project and is fully illustrated with figures which show how to integrate the work of multiple contractors, keep key resources (crews or equipment) fully engaged with no downtime, provide time buffers so the work of follow on crews can be efficiently done, expedite the schedule using multiple work stations and concurrent work, ways to communicate the work plan to the superintendent and foremen, and how to assess the feasibility of various work methods. The steps are easy to understand and implement. They will yield immediate positive results.     

A fuzzy clustering algorithm enhancing local model interpretability

In this work, simple modifications on the cost index of particular local-model fuzzy clustering algorithms are proposed in order to improve the readability of the resulting models. The final goal is simultaneously providing local linear models (reasonably close to the plant’s Jacobian) and clustering in the input space so that desirable characteristics (regarding final model accuracy, and convexity and smoothness of the cluster membership functions) are improved with respect to other proposals in literature. Some examples illustrate the proposed approach.     

AssetCollector: a system for managing collections of cultural assets

In this paper, AssetCollector is presented, which is a system for managing collections of cultural assets. AssetCollector covers the needs of collection curators towards defining, populating and searching a collection in a flexible way, while supporting them in generating reports based on the collection’s assets and reusing them in order to build web sites and CD-ROMs. In order to support the above functionality, the system provides the content structuring subsystem, the content input subsystem, the search subsystem and the report subsystem. The use of the subsystems is straightforward and requires no technical skills from the curators. AssetCollector has been successfully applied for organizing various collections of cultural assets in Greece, such as archaeological sites, museums and published books. In the future, an evaluation procedure is planned in order to further refine the use of the system according to the targeted users’ needs. Furthermore, more import and export facilities will be provided, which will make the system compliant with widely accepted standards.     

Cross-Layer Packetization and Retransmission Strategies for Delay-Sensitive Wireless Multimedia Transmission

Existing wireless networks provide dynamically varying resources with only limited support for the quality of service required by the bandwidth-intense, loss-tolerant and delay-sensitive multimedia applications. This variability of resources does not significantly impact delay insensitive data transmission (e.g., file transfers), but has considerable consequences for multimedia applications. Recently, the research focus has been to adapt existing algorithms and protocols at the lower layers of the protocol stack to better support multimedia transmission applications and conversely, to modify application layer solutions to cope with the varying wireless networks resources. In this paper, we show that significant improvements in wireless multimedia performance can be obtained by deploying a joint application-layer adaptive packetization and prioritized scheduling and MAC-layer retransmission strategy. We deploy a state-of-the-art wavelet coder for the compression of the video data that enables on-the-fly adaptation to changing channel conditions and inherent prioritization of the video bitstream. We pose the cross-layer problem as a distortion minimization given delay constraints and derive analytical solutions by modifying existing joint source-channel coding theory aimed at fulfilling rate, rather than delay, constraints. We also propose real-time algorithms that explicitly consider the available information about previously transmitted packets. The obtained results show significant improvements in terms of video quality as opposed to ad-hoc optimizations currently deployed, while the complexity associated with performing this optimization in real time, i.e., at transmission time, is limited     

Improving the Public Health Information Network through Semantic Modeling

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) created the Public Health Information Network to advance fully capable, interoperable information systems in public health organizations. PHIN prioritizes public health information systems' functional requirements, capabilities, performance measures, and operational characteristics while letting the architects of those systems choose enabling approaches, methods, and concepts to meet the requirements. PHIN also provides a certification process for public health administrators to evaluate their information infrastructure's quality. The certification process is important because affected organizations often depend on certification for continued funding.     

An example of a GAS system which can be destabilized by an integrable perturbation

A construction of a globally asymptotically stable time-invariant system which can be destabilized by some integrable perturbation is given. Besides its intrinsic interest, this serves to provide counterexamples to an open question regarding Lyapunov functions.     

Electromagnetic signatures as a tool for connectionless test

When we test boards, we usually think in terms of traditional electrical test (in-circuit, flying probe) and nonelectrical test (optical, x-ray). This Orebro University article develops an alternative, connectionless technique based on scanning the electromagnetic field generated by active on-board devices. Could this make it into industry as an additional diagnostic tool?.     

Phylogenetic scanning: a computer-assisted algorithm for mapping gene conversions and other recombinational events

An algorithm, 'phylogenetic scanning', is described for mapping gene conversion events where comparative DNA sequence data are available from different species. In this algorithm, sets of hypothetical phylogenetic trees are constructed that describe possible sequence relationships due to gene conversions in different species lineages; these trees are then evaluated by the principle of parsimony at intervals in the sequence alignment. When used to map gene conversion events that occurred between the pair of gamma-globin genes of higher primates, the algorithm gives results nearly identical to those obtained using a tedious manual approach. Suggestions are also provided for adaptation of this procedure to the analysis of other recombination events.     

Applying CIM technology to image factories

Image processing allows the automation of the business transaction, turning “paper factories” into “image factories.” This burgeoning new area of computerization needs new paradigms, theories, and methods to maximize its effectiveness at cutting time and costs. This paper investigates what this new area of computerization can gain from CIM technology. It examines the similarities between the processing of computer images in a paperless business environment and the processing of materials into products in the manufacturing plant. These similarities will allow us to apply mature, well-tested CIM techniques to emerging image factories.