The determinants of supplier selection criteria at Alcatel-Lucent / Nor Ilyani Asgarali

Supplier selection is the process by which firms identify, evaluate, and contract with supplier. With increasingly competitive global world markets, companies are under intense pressure to find ways to cut production and material costs to survive and sustain their competitive position in their respective markets. Since a qualified supplier is a key element and a good resource for a buyer in reducing such costs, evaluation and selection of the potential suppliers has become an important component of supply chain management. This case study analyzes the main criteria of potential supplier of Alcatel-Lucent Malaysia Sdn Bhd. Those criteria are quality, delivery performance and cost. The case study first will identify as many as possible factor for each element, then the researcher will select the major factor foreach elements and conduct research to support each factor

Planner’s primer on extreme heat events and hazard mitigation planning

The amount of information available on individual hazards can appear overwhelming to a planning organization managing multiple, large-scale projects. While hazard mitigation planning is required by federal law, it is often an elective topic in university planning programs. This paper is intended to serve as an introduction to a specific hazard: extreme heat events. It is important for planners to understand this topic because nearly all United States municipalities face the threat of more frequent, more intense, and longer duration extreme heat events, largely due to human-induced climate change. To draft this paper, I carried out my work in two phases. First, I conducted a literature review to answer the question, “What information about extreme heat events is relevant to planning professionals?” Second, I used the City of Baltimore, Maryland, as a case study for applying this knowledge to identify how their extreme heat event hazard planning documents might be strengthened by the knowledge accumulated in the first phase. My primary findings from the literature review highlight the importance of establishing a definition for extreme heat events, understanding the history of extreme heat events, realizing the amplifying effect of climate change and the urban heat island effect on extreme heat events, and the importance of understanding and identifying socially vulnerable populations and communities.Community and Regional Plannin

A Study of Unjha Market Yard (APMC): Financial Performance

The growth of farmers is greatly aided by APMCs. The actions of the farmers in terms of selling and purchasing might be significantly impacted by APMC. The major activity to enhance the trade cycle is carried out by APMC Unjha, one of the most active APMCs in Gujarat and India. It is located in Gujarat state\u27s Mehsana district. It belongs to a charity. In this study, we examine Unjah APMC\u27s balance sheet and profit and loss statement. Different ratios can be utilised for financial performance analysis and generated on the basis of translating APMC terminology into corporate terms. The financial performance of APMC Unjha is gauged using a variety of factors, including the net profit ratio, current ratio, debt equity ratio, different income and expenditure ratios, and fixed asset turnover ratios. This study\u27s primary goal is to determine the financial status using a ratio analysis

Effect of Lime and Fly Ash on Cation Exchange Capacity (CEC) and Unconfined Compressive Strength (UCS) of Soils

The utilization of fly ash in India varies between 50-60% and the rest are disposed in ash ponds. The fly ash which are utilized for reclamation of low lying areas or which are used in geotechnical engineering application has the tendency of leaching the heavy metal pollutants and thus polluting the groundwater, surface water and surrounding soil. Also the discharge of effluents from waste water treatment plants may lead to pollution of the ground water. If these ground water pollution can be controlled by increasing the Cation Exchange Capacity of the sub soil through application of any of the additives such as lime, fly ash, cement etc. which also leads to increase in strength of the soil then that additive would be favourable in case of geotechnical projects where ground water pollution is of great concern. The present work aims to find the effect of additives namely Lime and Fly ash on Cation Exchange Capacity (CEC),Compaction characteristics, and Unconfined Compressive Strength (UCS) of two soils. The two soils used in this study are Sandy Clay (SC) and Low Plasticity Clay (CL).First the soils were mixed individually with varying contents of lime and fly ash to find out their effects on Cation Exchange Capacity (CEC) and for conducting Light compaction test to find the compaction characteristics. Then the treated soil samples compacted at Optimum Moisture Content (OMC) and Maximum Dry Density (MDD) were tested for Unconfined Compressive Strength (UCS) at different Curing periods. From the experimental results obtained, it is observed that for both soils, Cation Exchange Capacity (CEC) decreases more with increase in fly ash content than with Lime content. Also Optimum Moisture Content (OMC) increases and Maximum Dry density (MDD) decreases with increase in Lime and Fly ash content for both the soil samples. The Unconfined Compressive Strength (UCS) increases with lime and fly ash content up to a certain limit beyond which further increase in lime and fly ash content does not increase the Unconfined Compressive Strength (UCS) The Unconfined Compressive Strength (UCS) increases more with increase in Lime content than by increase in fly ash content. The Unconfined Compressive Strength (UCS) increases with curing time

Experimental Study on Brucella abortus Strain RB51 Vaccinated Water Buffalo (Bubalus bubalis) Challenged with Virulent B. abortus Strain during Pregnancy

The study was conducted to determine the efficacy of Brucella abortus strain RB51 (RB51) vaccine in preventing abortion in pregnant water buffalo (Bubalus bubalis) experimentally challenged using the intravenous route, with a local pathogenic strain of B. abortus biovar 1 (Trinidad 1). Thirty-two female water buffalo calves aged 6-10 months were randomly divided into three groups for the vaccination trial using the subcutaneous route: Group I animals received recommended dose (RD) vaccine twice 4 weeks apart, Group II was vaccinated twice 18 weeks apart and Group III (control) received saline once. At approximately 6 months of pregnancy following natural breeding, the animals were challenged by the intravenous route with 2.5 x 108 to 4.4 x 108 colony forming units of a local strain of B. abortus, Trinidad 1. Blood samples were collected, pre-challenge and post-challenge, for serological assay using the BPAT and the animals were monitored for clinical signs. The bacteriological study was also performed on tissues of the dams and their calves. The frequency of abortion/stillbirths/early neonatal deaths was 55.6% (5/9), 42.9% (3/7) and 40.0% (2/5) for Groups I, II and III dams respectively (P>0.05; ?2). For calves from infected dams, the frequency of isolation of B. abortus Trinidad 1 from the abomasal and rectal swabs was 100.0%, 80.0% and 100.0% for Groups I, II and III animals respectively (P>0.05). It was concluded that vaccination of water buffalo with the RB51 vaccine using the recommended dose was ineffective in preventing infection, abortion, stillbirths, and neonatal deaths

DATA REPLICATION IN DISTRIBUTED SYSTEMS USING OLYMPIAD OPTIMIZATION ALGORITHM

Achieving timely access to data objects is a major challenge in big distributed systems like the Internet of Things (IoT) platforms. Therefore, minimizing the data read and write operation time in distributed systems has elevated to a higher priority for system designers and mechanical engineers. Replication and the appropriate placement of the replicas on the most accessible data servers is a problem of NP-complete optimization. The key objectives of the current study are minimizing the data access time, reducing the quantity of replicas, and improving the data availability. The current paper employs the Olympiad Optimization Algorithm (OOA) as a novel population-based and discrete heuristic algorithm to solve the replica placement problem which is also applicable to other fields such as mechanical and computer engineering design problems. This discrete algorithm was inspired by the learning process of student groups who are preparing for the Olympiad exams. The proposed algorithm, which is divide-and-conquer-based with local and global search strategies, was used in solving the replica placement problem in a standard simulated distributed system. The 'European Union Database' (EUData) was employed to evaluate the proposed algorithm, which contains 28 nodes as servers and a network architecture in the format of a complete graph. It was revealed that the proposed technique reduces data access time by 39% with around six replicas, which is vastly superior to the earlier methods. Moreover, the standard deviation of the results of the algorithm's different executions is approximately 0.0062, which is lower than the other techniques' standard deviation within the same experiments

A mining-based approach for selecting best resources nodes on grid resource broker

Nowadays, Grid Computing has been accepted as an infrastructure to perform parallel computing in distributed computational resources (Karl et al., 2001). Grid has users, resources, and an information service (IS). Grid computing is new technology for creating distributed infrastructures and virtual organizations (VOs) for applying a very largescale computing or enterprise applications. In a grid environment, the computational resource is main part of system that can be a Desktop PC, Cluster machine or supercomputer. A main goal of grid computing is enabling applications to identify resources dynamically to create distributed computing environments that can utilize computing resources on demand (Karl et al., 2001)

Localized job scheduling system using cooperative and system-centric scheduling policy for market-oriented grids

In grid scheduling systems, a major challenge is to manage the consumers' job based on their Quality of Service (QoS) and provider nodes' satisfaction. Most of the capable job scheduling polices operate on the basis of meta-scheduling systems that may result in a complex management with overcrowding probability in market-oriented grids. Therefore, the need for an efficient job scheduling algorithm based on the local scheduling policy is vital to reduce overcrowding in the meta-scheduling system. This paper presents an efficient scheduling approach concerning the localization of job scheduling policy. This approach adapts appropriate computing nodes to jobs by taking their throughput into account and QoS requirements. The job management policy of the proposed scheduling approach focuses specially on increasing the job submission rate using accurate estimation procedure and completing the submitted jobs within defined deadline. Experiments were designed to study the performance of the proposed job scheduling approach. We compared the performance of the proposed approach with other popular algorithms and policies based on general and standard metrics. Results show an increase in the performance and user satisfaction criteria. Additionally, the overdue time for jobs which is a main concern in market-oriented grid computing systems was significantly improved