A Holistic Framework for Transitional Management

For all business organizations, there comes a time when a change must take place within their eco-system. It consumes a great deal of thought and planning to ensure that the right decision is made as it could alter the entire course of their business for a number of years to come. This change may appear in the form of a brilliant CEO reaching the age of retirement, or an unsuccessful Managing Director being asked to leave before fulfilling the term of her contract. Regardless of the cause, a transition must occur in which a suitable successor is chosen and put into place while minimizing costs, satisfying stakeholders, ensuring that the successor has been adequately prepared for their new position, and minimizing work place gossip, among other things. It is also important to understand how the nature of the business, as well as its financial standing, effects such a transition. Engineering and management principles come together in this study to ensure that organizations going through such a change are on the right course. As the problem of transitional management is not one of concrete values and contains many ambiguous concepts, one way to tackle the problem is by utilizing various industrial engineering methodologies that allow these companies to systematically begin preparing for such a change. By default, organizational strategy has to change, technology is continually being renewed and it becomes very hard for the same leader to constantly implement new and innovative developments. Organizations today have a very poor understanding of where they currently stand and as a result the cause for a company\u27s lack of profitability is often overlooked with time and money being wasted in an attempt to fix something that is not broken. To be able to look at the bigger picture of an organization and from there begin to close in on the main problems causing a negative impact, the Matrix of Change is used and takes in many factors to layout an accurate representation of the direction in which an organization should be headed and how it can continue to grow and remain successful. The Theory of Constraints on the other hand is used here as a step-by-step guide allowing companies to be better organized during times of change. And System Dynamics modeling is where these companies can begin to simulate and solve the dilemma of transitional management using causal loop diagrams and stock and flow diagrams. Through such tools a framework can begin to be developed, one that is valued by corporations and continually reviewed. Several case studies, simulation modeling, and a panel of experts were used in order to demonstrate and validate this framework

DIM for Detecting Cracks in Masonry Piers with Different Crack Patterns

In the Framework of identifying defects in structures, Damage Index Method (DIM) is considered one of the trustable tools used intensively. In the present research, DIM – modal displacement based - was applied on experimental data to detect damage for masonry piers. Damage index (DI) was obtained by comparing modal displacement functions for damaged and sound conditions. Firstly, two scaled down piers were prepared experimentally for examination. The piers were of same unit area while the thicknesses were 170, and 260 mm, respectively. The physical models were subjected to different artificial crack patterns. The cracks were created for each pier on three steps representing different intensity of damage. The piers were then examined under free vibration mode at sound condition and after each degradation. The collected records were processed, and DIM was applied. Furthermore, parametric numerical analysis was used to study the effect of crack dimensions, location, shape, and repetition among the simulated piers. The results showed that the selected DI was effective in detecting cracks in masonry structures for all examined cases. Moreover, the investigation showed that as the severity of cracks increased, the identification of damage became easier and was reflected in an increase in DI value. DIM was also able to detect expected route of cracks. On the other hand, DIM can’t be used to obtain degradation level directly but for comparison between severity of cracks in different stages of damage

TOWARDS THE ADAPTATION OF GREEN BUILDING MATERIAL SYSTEMS TO THE EGYPTIAN ENVIRONMENT

ABSTRACT This research briefly reviews the definition and the principles of green architecture, making a comparison between the global green building rating systems in respect to materials only. These systems are the [1, 2]Green Pyramid, BREEAM (Building Research Establishment Environment Assessment Method), [3] LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) and the [4] Green Star in the form of Credits %, importance and its Requirements

Generalisability of deep learning models in low-resource imaging settings: A fetal ultrasound study in 5 African countries

Most artificial intelligence (AI) research and innovations have concentrated in high-income countries, where imaging data, IT infrastructures and clinical expertise are plentiful. However, slower progress has been made in limited-resource environments where medical imaging is needed. For example, in Sub-Saharan Africa the rate of perinatal mortality is very high due to limited access to antenatal screening. In these countries, AI models could be implemented to help clinicians acquire fetal ultrasound planes for diagnosis of fetal abnormalities. So far, deep learning models have been proposed to identify standard fetal planes, but there is no evidence of their ability to generalise in centres with low resources, i.e. with limited access to high-end ultrasound equipment and ultrasound data. This work investigates for the first time different strategies to reduce the domain-shift effect arisen from a fetal plane classification model trained on one clinical centre with high-resource settings and transferred to a new centre with low-resource settings. To that end, a classifier trained with 1,792 patients from Spain is first evaluated on a new centre in Denmark in optimal conditions with 1,008 patients and is later optimised to reach the same performance in five African centres (Egypt, Algeria, Uganda, Ghana and Malawi) with 25 patients each. The results show that a transfer learning approach for domain adaptation can be a solution to integrate small-size African samples with existing large-scale databases in developed countries. In particular, the model can be re-aligned and optimised to boost the performance on African populations by increasing the recall to 0.92±0.04 and at the same time maintaining a high precision across centres. This framework shows promise for building new AI models generalisable across clinical centres with limited data acquired in challenging and heterogeneous conditions and calls for further research to develop new solutions for usability of AI in countries with less resources and, consequently, in higher need of clinical support

Thermal investigation into the Oldroyd-B hybrid nanofluid with the slip and Newtonian heating effect: Atangana–Baleanu fractional simulation

The significance of thermal conductivity, convection, and heat transportation of hybrid nanofluids (HNFs) based on different nanoparticles has enhanced an integral part in numerous industrial and natural processes. In this article, a fractionalized Oldroyd-B HNF along with other significant effects, such as Newtonian heating, constant concentration, and the wall slip condition on temperature close to an infinitely vertical flat plate, is examined. Aluminum oxide (Al2O3) and ferro-ferric oxide (Fe3O4) are the supposed nanoparticles, and water (H2O) and sodium alginate (C6H9NaO7) serve as the base fluids. For generalized memory effects, an innovative fractional model is developed based on the recently proposed Atangana–Baleanu time-fractional (AB) derivative through generalized Fourier and Fick’s law. This Laplace transform technique is used to solve the fractional governing equations of dimensionless temperature, velocity, and concentration profiles. The physical effects of diverse flow parameters are discussed and exhibited graphically by Mathcad software. We have considered 0.15≤α≤0.85,2≤Pr⁡≤9,5≤Gr≤20,0.2≤ϕ1,ϕ2≤0.8,3.5≤Gm≤8, 0.1≤ Sc ≤0.8, and 0.3≤λ1,λ2≤1.7. Moreover, for validation of our present results, some limiting models, such as classical Maxwell and Newtonian fluid models, are recovered from the fractional Oldroyd-B fluid model. Furthermore, comparing the results between Oldroyd-B, Maxwell, and viscous fluid models for both classical and fractional cases, Stehfest and Tzou numerical methods are also employed to secure the validity of our solutions. Moreover, it is visualized that for a short time, temperature and momentum profiles are decayed for larger values of α, and this effect is reversed for a long time. Furthermore, the energy and velocity profiles are higher for water-based HNFs than those for the sodium alginate-based HNF