Effect of oil palm empty fruit bunches (OPEFB) fibers to the compressive strength and water absorption of concrete

Growing popularity based on environmentally-friendly, low cost and lightweight building materials in the construction industry has led to a need to examine how these characteristics can be achieved and at the same time giving the benefit to the environment and maintain the material requirements based on the standards required. Recycling of waste generated from industrial and agricultural activities as measures of building materials is not only a viable solution to the problem of pollution but also to produce an economic design of building

System Support for Managing Invalid Bindings

Context-aware adaptation is a central aspect of pervasive computing applications, enabling them to adapt and perform tasks based on contextual information. One of the aspects of context-aware adaptation is reconfiguration in which bindings are created between application component and remote services in order to realize new behaviour in response to contextual information. Various research efforts provide reconfiguration support and allow the development of adaptive context-aware applications from high-level specifications, but don't consider failure conditions that might arise during execution of such applications, making bindings between application and remote services invalid. To this end, we propose and implement our design approach to reconfiguration to manage invalid bindings. The development and modification of adaptive context-aware applications is a complex task, and an issue of an invalidity of bindings further complicates development efforts. To reduce the development efforts, our approach provides an application-transparent solution where the issue of the invalidity of bindings is handled by our system, Policy-Based Contextual Reconfiguration and Adaptation (PCRA), not by an application developer. In this paper, we present and describe our approach to managing invalid bindings and compare it with other approaches to this problem. We also provide performance evaluation of our approach

The fatality index of public transport (express bus) in Malaysia

NI

Fast dynamic deployment adaptation for mobile devices

Mobile devices that are limited in terms of CPU power, memory or battery power are only capable of executing simple applications. To be able to run advanced applications we introduce a framework to split up the application and execute parts on a remote server. In order to dynamically adapt the deployment at runtime, techniques are presented to keep the migration time as low as possible and to prevent performance loss while migrating. Also methods are presented and evaluated to cope with applications generating a variable load, which can lead to an unstable system

Integrated Support for Handoff Management and Context-Awareness in Heterogeneous Wireless Networks

The overwhelming success of mobile devices and wireless communications is stressing the need for the development of mobility-aware services. Device mobility requires services adapting their behavior to sudden context changes and being aware of handoffs, which introduce unpredictable delays and intermittent discontinuities. Heterogeneity of wireless technologies (Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, 3G) complicates the situation, since a different treatment of context-awareness and handoffs is required for each solution. This paper presents a middleware architecture designed to ease mobility-aware service development. The architecture hides technology-specific mechanisms and offers a set of facilities for context awareness and handoff management. The architecture prototype works with Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, which today represent two of the most widespread wireless technologies. In addition, the paper discusses motivations and design details in the challenging context of mobile multimedia streaming applications

Adaptive online deployment for resource constrained mobile smart clients

Nowadays mobile devices are more and more used as a platform for applications. Contrary to prior generation handheld devices configured with a predefined set of applications, today leading edge devices provide a platform for flexible and customized application deployment. However, these applications have to deal with the limitations (e.g. CPU speed, memory) of these mobile devices and thus cannot handle complex tasks. In order to cope with the handheld limitations and the ever changing device context (e.g. network connections, remaining battery time, etc.) we present a middleware solution that dynamically offloads parts of the software to the most appropriate server. Without a priori knowledge of the application, the optimal deployment is calculated, that lowers the cpu usage at the mobile client, whilst keeping the used bandwidth minimal. The information needed to calculate this optimum is gathered on the fly from runtime information. Experimental results show that the proposed solution enables effective execution of complex applications in a constrained environment. Moreover, we demonstrate that the overhead from the middleware components is below 2%

The SATIN component system - a metamodel for engineering adaptable mobile systems

Mobile computing devices, such as personal digital assistants and mobile phones, are becoming increasingly popular, smaller, and more capable. We argue that mobile systems should be able to adapt to changing requirements and execution environments. Adaptation requires the ability-to reconfigure the deployed code base on a mobile device. Such reconfiguration is considerably simplified if mobile applications are component-oriented rather than monolithic blocks of code. We present the SATIN (system adaptation targeting integrated networks) component metamodel, a lightweight local component metamodel that offers the flexible use of logical mobility primitives to reconfigure the software system by dynamically transferring code. The metamodel is implemented in the SATIN middleware system, a component-based mobile computing middleware that uses the mobility primitives defined in the metamodel to reconfigure both itself and applications that it hosts. We demonstrate the suitability of SATIN in terms of lightweightedness, flexibility, and reusability for the creation of adaptable mobile systems by using it to implement, port, and evaluate a number of existing and new applications, including an active network platform developed for satellite communication at the European space agency. These applications exhibit different aspects of adaptation and demonstrate the flexibility of the approach and the advantages gaine

Context-aware Authorization in Highly Dynamic Environments

Highly dynamic computing environments, like ubiquitous and pervasive computing environments, require frequent adaptation of applications. Context is a key to adapt suiting user needs. On the other hand, standard access control trusts users once they have authenticated, despite the fact that they may reach unauthorized contexts. We analyse how taking into account dynamic information like context in the authorization subsystem can improve security, and how this new access control applies to interaction patterns, like messaging or eventing. We experiment and validate our approach using context as an authorization factor for eventing in Web service for device (like UPnP or DPWS), in smart home security

MobiThin management framework: design and evaluation

In thin client computing, applications are executed on centralized servers. User input (e.g. keystrokes) is sent to a remote server which processes the event and sends the audiovisual output back to the client. This enables execution of complex applications from thin devices. Adopting virtualization technologies on the thin client server brings several advantages, e.g. dedicated environments for each user and interesting facilities such as migration tools. In this paper, a mobile thin client service offered to a large number of mobile users is designed. Pervasive mobile thin client computing requires an intelligent service management to guarantee a high user experience. Due to the dynamic environment, the service management framework has to monitor the environment and intervene when necessary (e.g. adapt thin client protocol settings, move a session from one server to another). A detailed performance analysis of the implemented prototype is presented. It is shown that the prototype can handle up to 700 requests/s to start the mobile thin client service. The prototype can make a decision for up to 700 monitor reports per second