Strength, water absorption and thermal comfort of mortar bricks containing crushed ceramic waste

This present study investigated the crushed ceramic waste utilisation as sand replacement in solid mortar bricks. The percentage of crushed ceramic waste used were 0% (CW0), 10% (CW10), 20% (CW20) and 30% (CW30) from the total weight of sand. The dimension prescribed of mortar bricks are 215 mm x 102.5 mm x 65 mm as followed accordance to MS 2281:2010 and BS EN 771-1:2011+A1:2015. Four (4) tests were conducted on mortar bricks namely crushing strength, water absorption, compressive strength of masonry units and thermal comfort. The incorporation of ceramic waste in all designated mortar bricks showed the increment of crushing strength between 23% and 46% at 28 days of curing and decrement water absorption between 34% and 44% was recorded corresponding to control mortar bricks. The prism test of masonry units consists of mortar bricks containing ceramic waste indicated the high increment of compressive strength at about 200% as compared to mortar brick without ceramic waste. The thermal comfort test of ceramic mortar bricks were also showed the good insulation with low interior temperature. Therefore, the ceramic waste can be utilised as a material replacement to fine aggregate in mortar brick productions due to significant outcomes performed

The level of Marzano higher-order thinking skills among polytechnic students

This study aims to identify polytechnic students' level of Marzano Higher-Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) based on two dimensions, 'Extension and Refinement of Knowledge' and 'Meaningful Use of Knowledge,' and to analyze the difference in the students' level of Marzano HOTS based on these two dimensions depending on the students' demographic factors. This study design was a survey using quantitative methods. A total of 313 students were randomly selected as the survey sample. A questionnaire in the form of closed-ended questions was used as the research instrument. Data were analyzed using frequency percentage and MANOVA test. The findings showed no significant differences in the eight HOTS in the dimension of 'Extension and Refinement of Knowledge' with the gender and socio-economic status (SES) factors. However, there were significant differences in the eight HOTS with the academic achievement factor. Meanwhile, based on the dimension of 'Meaningful Use of Knowledge,' the findings showed no significant differences in the five HOTS in this dimension with the gender and academic achievement factors. The paper includes implications of the Higher-Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) for students to improve their academic performance. In future research, the authors can further identify university students' HOTS levels in the technical area

Robust modeling and planning of radio-frequency identification network in logistics under uncertainties

To realize higher coverage rate, lower reading interference, and cost efficiency of radio-frequency identification networkin logistics under uncertainties, a novel robust radio-frequency identification network planning model is built and arobust particle swarm optimization is proposed. In radio-frequency identification network planning model, coverage isestablished by referring the probabilistic sensing model of sensor with uncertain sensing range; reading interference iscalculated by concentric map–based Monte Carlo method; cost efficiency is described with the quantity of readers. Inrobust particle swarm optimization, a sampling method, the sampling size of which varies with iterations, is put forwardto improve the robustness of robust particle swarm optimization within limited sampling size. In particular, the exploita-tion speed in the prophase of robust particle swarm optimization is quickened by smaller expected sampling size; theexploitation precision in the anaphase of robust particle swarm optimization is ensured by larger expected sampling size.Simulation results show that, compared with the other three methods, the planning solution obtained by this work ismore conducive to enhance the coverage rate and reduce interference and cost.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Bi-velocity discrete particle swarm optimization and its application to multicast routing problem in communication networks

This paper proposes a novel bi-velocity discrete particle swarm optimization (BVDPSO) approach and extends its application to the NP-complete multicast routing problem (MRP). The main contribution is the extension of PSO from continuous domain to the binary or discrete domain. Firstly, a novel bi-velocity strategy is developed to represent possibilities of each dimension being 1 and 0. This strategy is suitable to describe the binary characteristic of the MRP where 1 stands for a node being selected to construct the multicast tree while 0 stands for being otherwise. Secondly, BVDPSO updates the velocity and position according to the learning mechanism of the original PSO in continuous domain. This maintains the fast convergence speed and global search ability of the original PSO. Experiments are comprehensively conducted on all of the 58 instances with small, medium, and large scales in the OR-library (Operation Research Library). The results confirm that BVDPSO can obtain optimal or near-optimal solutions rapidly as it only needs to generate a few multicast trees. BVDPSO outperforms not only several state-of-the-art and recent heuristic algorithms for the MRP problems, but also algorithms based on GA, ACO, and PSO

Differential Evolution with a Variable Population Size for Deployment Optimization in a UAV-Assisted IoT Data Collection System

This paper studies an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-assisted Internet of Things (IoT) data collection system, where a UAV is employed as a data collection platform for a group of ground IoT devices. Our objective is to minimize the energy consumption of this system by optimizing the UAV’s deployment, including the number and locations of stop points of the UAV. When using evolutionary algorithms to solve this UAV’s deployment problem, each individual usually represents an entire deployment. Since the number of stop points is unknown a priori, the length of each individual in the population should be varied during the optimization process. Under this condition, the UAV’s deployment is a variable-length optimization problem and the traditional fixed-length mutation and crossover operators should be modified. In this paper, we propose a differential evolution algorithm with a variable population size, called DEVIPS, for optimizing the UAV’s deployment. In DEVIPS, the location of each stop point is encoded into an individual, and thus the whole population represents an entire deployment. Over the course of evolution, differential evolution is employed to produce offspring. Afterward, we design a strategy to adjust the population size according to the performance improvement. By this strategy, the number of stop points can be increased, reduced, or kept unchanged adaptively. In DEVIPS, since each individual has a fixed length, the UAV’s deployment becomes a fixed-length optimization problem and the traditional fixed-length mutation and crossover operators can be used directly. The performance of DEVIPS is compared with that of five algorithms on a set of instances. The experimental studies demonstrate its effectiveness

Who wrote this scientific text?

The IEEE bibliographic database contains a number of proven duplications with indication of the original paper(s) copied. This corpus is used to test a method for the detection of hidden intertextuality (commonly named "plagiarism"). The intertextual distance, combined with the sliding window and with various classification techniques, identifies these duplications with a very low risk of error. These experiments also show that several factors blur the identity of the scientific author, including variable group authorship and the high levels of intertextuality accepted, and sometimes desired, in scientific papers on the same topic

IoT in smart communities, technologies and applications.

Internet of Things is a system that integrates different devices and technologies, removing the necessity of human intervention. This enables the capacity of having smart (or smarter) cities around the world. By hosting different technologies and allowing interactions between them, the internet of things has spearheaded the development of smart city systems for sustainable living, increased comfort and productivity for citizens. The Internet of Things (IoT) for Smart Cities has many different domains and draws upon various underlying systems for its operation, in this work, we provide a holistic coverage of the Internet of Things in Smart Cities by discussing the fundamental components that make up the IoT Smart City landscape, the technologies that enable these domains to exist, the most prevalent practices and techniques which are used in these domains as well as the challenges that deployment of IoT systems for smart cities encounter and which need to be addressed for ubiquitous use of smart city applications. It also presents a coverage of optimization methods and applications from a smart city perspective enabled by the Internet of Things. Towards this end, a mapping is provided for the most encountered applications of computational optimization within IoT smart cities for five popular optimization methods, ant colony optimization, genetic algorithm, particle swarm optimization, artificial bee colony optimization and differential evolution. For each application identified, the algorithms used, objectives considered, the nature of the formulation and constraints taken in to account have been specified and discussed. Lastly, the data setup used by each covered work is also mentioned and directions for future work have been identified. Within the smart health domain of IoT smart cities, human activity recognition has been a key study topic in the development of cyber physical systems and assisted living applications. In particular, inertial sensor based systems have become increasingly popular because they do not restrict users’ movement and are also relatively simple to implement compared to other approaches. Fall detection is one of the most important tasks in human activity recognition. With an increasingly aging world population and an inclination by the elderly to live alone, the need to incorporate dependable fall detection schemes in smart devices such as phones, watches has gained momentum. Therefore, differentiating between falls and activities of daily living (ADLs) has been the focus of researchers in recent years with very good results. However, one aspect within fall detection that has not been investigated much is direction and severity aware fall detection. Since a fall detection system aims to detect falls in people and notify medical personnel, it could be of added value to health professionals tending to a patient suffering from a fall to know the nature of the accident. In this regard, as a case study for smart health, four different experiments have been conducted for the task of fall detection with direction and severity consideration on two publicly available datasets. These four experiments not only tackle the problem on an increasingly complicated level (the first one considers a fall only scenario and the other two a combined activity of daily living and fall scenario) but also present methodologies which outperform the state of the art techniques as discussed. Lastly, future recommendations have also been provided for researchers