The Issues and Challenges of Flood-related Agencies in Malaysia

Objectives of this study is to identify the real issues and challenges of flood related agencies in Malaysia. By using qualitative thematic analysis, this study found that limited authorities, lack of enforcement power, lack of cooperation among agencies, lack of man-power and assets for logistics, insufficient funding for flood risk management and communication problems are the issues faced by the flood-related agencies. The government needs to solve the issues and challenges in order to strengthen the flood-related agencies capacities.Keywords: flood risk management; flood-related agencies; issues; authorityeISSN: 2398-4287 © 2020. The Authors. Published for AMER ABRA cE-Bs by e-International Publishing House, Ltd., UK. This is an open access article under the CC BYNC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/). Peer–review under responsibility of AMER (Association of Malaysian Environment-Behaviour Researchers), ABRA (Association of Behavioural Researchers on Asians) and cE-Bs (Centre for Environment-Behaviour Studies), Faculty of Architecture, Planning & Surveying, Universiti Teknologi MARA, Malaysia.DOI: https://doi.org/10.21834/e-bpj.v5i13.206

A modified flower pollination algorithm and carnivorous plant algorithm for solving engineering optimization problem

Optimization in an essential element in mechanical engineering and has never been an easy task. Hence, using an effective optimiser to solve these problems with high complexity is important. In this study, two metaheuristic algorithms, namely, modified flower pollination algorithm (MFPA) and carnivorous plant algorithm (CPA), were proposed. Flower pollination algorithm (FPA) is a biomimicry optimisation algorithm inspired by natural pollination. Although FPA has shown better convergence than particle swarm optimisation and genetic algorithm in the pioneering study, improving the convergence characteristic of FPA still needs more work. To speed up the convergence, modifications of: (i) employing chaos theory in the initialisation of initial population to enhance the diversity of the initial population in the search space, (ii) replacing FPA’s local search strategy with frog leaping algorithm to improve intensification, and (iii) integrating inertia weight into FPA’s global search strategy to adjust the searching ability of the global strategy, were presented. CPA, on the other hand, was developed based on the inspiration from how carnivorous plants adapt to survive in harsh environments. Both MFPA and CPA were first evaluated using twenty-five well-known benchmark functions with different characteristics and seven Congress on Evolutionary Computation (CEC) 2017 test functions. Their convergence characteristic and computational efficiency were analysed and compared with eight widely used metaheuristic algorithms, with the superiority validated using the Wilcoxon signed-rank test. The applicability of MFPA and CPA were further examined on eighteen mechanical engineering design problems and two challenging real-world applications of controlling the orientation of a five-degrees-of-freedom robotic arm and moving-object tracking in a complicated environment. For the optimisation of classical benchmark functions, CPA was ranked first. It also obtained the first rank in CEC04 and CEC07 modern test functions. Both CPA and MFPA showed promising results on the mechanical engineering design problems. CPA improved over the particle swarm optimisation algorithm in terms of the best fitness value by 69.40-95.99% in the optimisation of the robotic arm. Meanwhile, MFPA demonstrated a better tracking performance in the considered case studies by at least 52.99% better fitness function evaluation and fewer number of function evaluations as compared with the competitors

When developing countries meet transnational universities: searching for complementarity and dealing with dual embeddedness

During the last two decades, a growing number of universities, mainly from developed countries, have established branch campuses in developing countries. From the developing country perspective, attracting foreign universities can help mitigate financial constraints and capacity shortages that impair the state’s ability to provide greater access to higher education, while also improving teaching and research in general. However, foreign universities may also be detrimental if they crowd-out their domestic counterparts. We explore different scenarios and policy options for developing countries aiming to attract foreign universities, building upon a review of four case studies from Chile, China, Kazakhstan and Malaysia. Our analysis illustrates how host countries can provide incentives to align incoming foreign universities to complement and strengthen the areas of weakness in their higher education systems. We also reflect on how policy-makers can deal with the challenges associated with the dual embeddedness of international branch campuses

Intelligent imaging system for optimal night time driving

In the recent era, vehicles become a need of public. According to Statistic Portal, in year 2018 alone, more than 81 million vehicles were sold. This results in a large number of vehicles commuting on roads, thus increases the risks of road users. Road safety is the paramount and joint responsibility of all road users, which include pedestrians and travellers using different means of transport. Safety is always a main concern for drivers. It is a complex and difficult task even for an experienced senior driver. Road accident is the most unwanted thing to happen to a road user; it was reported that most of the road users are familiar with the general rules and safety measures when using roads, nonetheless their carelessness are causing the accidents and crashes. Zhang et.al [1] proposed an intelligent driver assist system for urban driving. This system provided smart navigation for its users with intelligent parking assistance to improve driving comfort while ensure the safety of the driver. The investigations of the system performance showed high precisions in the determination of the traffic flow and parking availabilit