Standardized equipment reliability and integrity process to achieve world class performance

This paper (part 2) provide a systematic, staged approach to deploy and execute standardized Equipment Reliability and Integrity Process, Sub-processes and Procedures that enable operation and maintenance of facilities to sustain reliability, integrity and Incident Free Operation (IFO) at Oil and Gas Company.The Equipment Reliability and Integrity Process (ERIP) procedures are executed in five stages, minimum performance levels must be achieved in one stage prior to moving to the next stage.Procedures are executed in a prescribed order referred to as stages.ERIP is a Base Business initiative designed to arrest the natural rate of production decline.This is brought about through identifying the opportunities and solutions for optimizing reserves management, improving the reliability of facilities, and optimizing the capacity of existing facilities.Performance is first verified by the Business Unit through self assessment then through formal Global Upstream validation. It has been determined through bench-marking studies of competitors, that company can deliver superior returns by effectively managing its asset base and standardizing processes across its operations. Standardization of common processes holds great promise and can help company achieve its objectives.This ERIP is applicable for the company that has more than one subsidiary

Program Verification in the presence of complex numbers, functions with branch cuts etc

In considering the reliability of numerical programs, it is normal to "limit our study to the semantics dealing with numerical precision" (Martel, 2005). On the other hand, there is a great deal of work on the reliability of programs that essentially ignores the numerics. The thesis of this paper is that there is a class of problems that fall between these two, which could be described as "does the low-level arithmetic implement the high-level mathematics". Many of these problems arise because mathematics, particularly the mathematics of the complex numbers, is more difficult than expected: for example the complex function log is not continuous, writing down a program to compute an inverse function is more complicated than just solving an equation, and many algebraic simplification rules are not universally valid. The good news is that these problems are theoretically capable of being solved, and are practically close to being solved, but not yet solved, in several real-world examples. However, there is still a long way to go before implementations match the theoretical possibilities

A New Instrument For Measuring Student Beliefs About Physics and Learning Physics: The Colorado Learning Attitudes About Science Survey

The Colorado Learning Attitudes about Science Survey (CLASS) is a new instrument designed to measure student beliefs about physics and about learning physics. This instrument extends previous work by probing additional aspects of student beliefs and by using wording suitable for students in a wide variety of physics courses. The CLASS has been validated using interviews, reliability studies, and extensive statistical analyses of responses from over 5000 students. In addition, a new methodology for determining useful and statistically robust categories of student beliefs has been developed. This paper serves as the foundation for an extensive study of how student beliefs impact and are impacted by their educational experiences. For example, this survey measures: that most teaching practices cause substantial drops in student scores; that a student's likelihood of becoming a physics major correlates with their 'Personal Interest' score; and that, for a majority of student populations, women's scores in some categories, including 'Personal Interest' and 'Real World Connections', are significantly different than men's scores

Modeling and Recognition of Smart Grid Faults by a Combined Approach of Dissimilarity Learning and One-Class Classification

Detecting faults in electrical power grids is of paramount importance, either from the electricity operator and consumer viewpoints. Modern electric power grids (smart grids) are equipped with smart sensors that allow to gather real-time information regarding the physical status of all the component elements belonging to the whole infrastructure (e.g., cables and related insulation, transformers, breakers and so on). In real-world smart grid systems, usually, additional information that are related to the operational status of the grid itself are collected such as meteorological information. Designing a suitable recognition (discrimination) model of faults in a real-world smart grid system is hence a challenging task. This follows from the heterogeneity of the information that actually determine a typical fault condition. The second point is that, for synthesizing a recognition model, in practice only the conditions of observed faults are usually meaningful. Therefore, a suitable recognition model should be synthesized by making use of the observed fault conditions only. In this paper, we deal with the problem of modeling and recognizing faults in a real-world smart grid system, which supplies the entire city of Rome, Italy. Recognition of faults is addressed by following a combined approach of multiple dissimilarity measures customization and one-class classification techniques. We provide here an in-depth study related to the available data and to the models synthesized by the proposed one-class classifier. We offer also a comprehensive analysis of the fault recognition results by exploiting a fuzzy set based reliability decision rule

A Route Confidence Evaluation Method for Reliable Hierarchical Text Categorization

Hierarchical Text Categorization (HTC) is becoming increasingly important with the rapidly growing amount of text data available in the World Wide Web. Among the different strategies proposed to cope with HTC, the Local Classifier per Node (LCN) approach attains good performance by mirroring the underlying class hierarchy while enforcing a top-down strategy in the testing step. However, the problem of embedding hierarchical information (parent-child relationship) to improve the performance of HTC systems still remains open. A confidence evaluation method for a selected route in the hierarchy is proposed to evaluate the reliability of the final candidate labels in an HTC system. In order to take into account the information embedded in the hierarchy, weight factors are used to take into account the importance of each level. An acceptance/rejection strategy in the top-down decision making process is proposed, which improves the overall categorization accuracy by rejecting a few percentage of samples, i.e., those with low reliability score. Experimental results on the Reuters benchmark dataset (RCV1- v2) confirm the effectiveness of the proposed method, compared to other state-of-the art HTC methods

Levels of Management Commitment: a Moderator the Structural Relationships Among Critical Success Factors of TQM, World-Class Performance in Operations, and Company Financial Performance

This study investigates the moderating impacts of the three levels of management commitment (top, middle, and low levels) on the structural relationships among the constructs— six critical success factors of TQM (quality improvement program, supervisory leadership, supplier involvement, management commitment, training to improve products/services, cross-functional relationships); world-class performance in operations (world-class company practices, operational excellence practices, company non-financial performance); and company financial performance. It uses a sample of 1,332 managers in 140 strategic business units (SBUs) within 49 oil and gas companies in Indonesia. The empirical results indicate that the goodness-of-fit of the unconstrained model is much better than that of the constrained model, and this is an indicative that the three level of management moderates the structural relationships among the constructs. Those are, three levels of management act as a moderator variable between critical success factors of TQM, world-class company practices, operational excellence practices, company non-financial performance, and company financial performance. Results further reveal that world-class performances in operations (world-class company practices, operational excellence practices, and company non-financial performance) were positively mediated the impact of critical success factors of TQM on company financial performance. Results also point out that five of six critical success factors of TQM positively associated with world-class company practices and operational excellence practices under the three levels of management (top, middle, low). World-class company practices and operational excellence practices have direct and significant effects on company non-financial performance (productivity, operational reliability). Furthermore, empirical results suggest that there is a positive and significant relationship between company non-financial performance and company financial performance. Implications, limitation and lines of future research are discussed

Determining world class university from the evaluation of service quality and students satisfaction level

This paper aims to investigate the characteristics of high service quality and its relationship in determining UiTM’s Terengganu ability to provide a high student’s satisfaction level that may represents a world class university from the student’s perspective. More than 100 questionnaires were distributed to final year students from the Bachelors of Business Administration at UiTM Terengganu. Questionnaires were distributed to students who were attending a research methodology workshop. The questionnaires were used to measure the physical facilities, reliability, responsiveness, assurance, empathy and the learning outcome between what students expect and their actual experience. Furthermore, the student’s satisfaction level on the quality of the lecturers, physical facilities, the learning outcome and their demographic profiles were also evaluated. Result indicated that the student’s are satisfied with the quality of the lecturers, physical facilities and the learning outcome. However there are elements in the service delivery that need to be improved as indicated by gap between what the student’s expected and their actual experience