Challenges of Business Simulation Games — A New Approach of Teaching Business

Serious games are part of the new emerging world of education environment that is based on sophisticated technology with elements of entertainment. They have been seen as good supplements for supporting the learning processes due to their capability to increase visualisations and challenge the student creativity. They have the potential to significantly improve training and education activities and initiatives. As a part of serious computer games, business simulation games support training and learning focused on the management of economic processes. They have been proven to be useful in empowering and mediating learning business content. This chapter addresses the simulation business games used in the educational process by analysing selected popular games regarding their properties that are considered as important in the learning process. The first part presents a short introduction in the field of business games and the approach used in selection of the studied games. The next part provides a review of related articles and brief overview of the state of the art that has guided the selection of business simulation games to be analysed and assessed. The game parameters used in the assessment have been defined and described. The analysis and the assessment report are followed with brief concluding remarks

Test Strategies for Embedded ADC Cores in a System-on-Chip, A Case Study

Testing of a deeply embedded mixed-signal core in a System-on-Chip (SoC) is a challenging issue due to the communication bottleneck in accessing the core from external automatic test equipment. Consequently, in many cases the preferred approach is built-in self-test (BIST), where the major part of test activity is performed within the unit-under-test and only final results are communicated to the external tester. IEEE Standard 1500 provides efficient test infrastructure for testing digital cores; however, its applications in mixed-signal core test remain an open issue. In this paper we address the problem of implementing BIST of a mixed-signal core in a IEEE Std 1500 test wrapper and discuss advantages and drawbacks of different test strategies. While the case study is focused on histogram based test of ADC, test strategies of other types of mixed-signal cores related to trade-off between performance (i.e., test time) and required resources are likely to follow similar conclusions

Contribution of non-troglobiotic terrestrial invertebrates to carbon input in hypogean habitats

Eleven of the most important terrestrial invertebrate species in Slovenian caves were analyzed for differences in their fresh and dry biomass, energy content and carbon bulk during winter. These data were combined with the species abundance in 54 caves and adits in order to estimate their organic carbon bulk and carbon input into these habitats. In Central European caves, Troglophilus cavicola, T. neglectus, Faustina illyrica, Amilenus aurantiacus and Scoliopteryx libatrix are the most important vectors of carbon between the epigean and hypogean habitats. In contrast to the general assumption, carbon total contribution to caves via dead bodies is only 0.15% of total migratory biomass, and it is not directly available to troglobionts because of infection with entomopathogenic fungi. In winter, together with predated migratory specimens, carbon input does not exceed 0.3% of the total migratory biomass. This situation should be carefully examined in every karstic region inhabited by distinctive fauna.Keywords: biomass, carbon flux, caves, non-troglobiotic species, organic carbon, respiration.DOI: 10.3986/ac.v42i2-3.66

Faunal Dynamics in the Železna Jama Cave

V letih 2000-2001 smo raziskovali favno in ekološke razmere v Železni jami pri Dobu. V jami smo našli 53 vrst, dominantne so bile: Meta menardi, Amilenus auriantiacus, Troglophilus neglectus, T. cavicola, Laemosthenes schreibersi, Ceuthmonocharis robici, Limonia nubeculosa in nedoločena vrsta foride. Troglomorfozni taksoni so bili Zospeum sp., C. robici, Anophthalmus sp. in nekateri drugi. Poleg sezonskih sprememb v lokalni klimi in klimi jame so spremembe jakosti prepiha ter količina organskih snovi v substratu v posameznih delih jame verjetno poglavitni vzroki za intenzivne migracije favne. Živali so migrirale med jamo ter površjem, sistemi špranj ob jami in vodnim rovom ob dnu jame.In 2000-2001, the fauna of and ecological conditions in the Železna jama cave near Dob in the isolated karst area of Domžale-Moravče (east of the town of Domžale, central Slovenia), were investigated. Fifty-three species were found in the cave, the dominant ones being Meta menardi, Amilenus auriantiacus, Troglophilus neglectus, T. cavicola, Laemosthenes schreibersi, Ceuthmonocharis robici, Limonia nubeculosa and an undetermined phorid species. The troglomorphotic taxa found were: Zospeum sp., C. robici, Anophthalmus sp. among others. Besides seasonal changes in the local and the cave climate, changes in drought intensity and the varying quantities of organic matter in the substrate were probably the most important factors triggering migrations. Animals migrated between the cave and the surface, adjacent fissure systems and the water channel in the bottom of the cave, which is inaccessible to humans

A formal framework of human–machine interaction in proactive maintenance – MANTIS experience

The general concept of MANTIS project is to provide a proactive maintenance service platform architecture that allows to monitor essential system parameters and schedule maintenance in order to predict and prevent imminent failures. Human–machine interaction (HMI) is an important integral part of the platform by providing the right information in the right modality to the users when needed. As MANTIS comprises 11 distinct industrial use cases, the design of such HMI presents a great challenge. The framework presented in this paper originates from the scenariobased design and can be treated as a part of the overall scenario-based usability engineering approach. The framework has been conceived from an extensive list of HMI features extracted from the descriptions of use-case scenarios provided by each industrial partner. Due to the broad range of representative industry environments including production asset maintenance, vehicle maintenance, energy production management and health equipment maintenance we believe that the resulting HMI framework can be applied in different cases in practice and the paper would also be of general interest to the readers

Studies of the Fauna of Percolation Water of Huda Luknja, a Cave in Isolated Karst in Northeast Slovenia

The fauna and community ecology of percolation water was studied using monthly samples of 12 drips in the Medvedji rov in the cave Huda luknja. This is the largest cave system in the so-called isolated karst whichconsists of limestone patches of <1 to 10 km2 in size in central and northeastern Slovenia. Huda luknja is developed in one of these patches measuring about 1 km2 in the Triassic limestones—the Paka karst. The researchfocused on the investigation of the epikarst fauna in NE Slo­venia. Temperature, conductivity, hardness and concentrations of various ions in water were measured. Considerable spatial and temporal variation in parameters existed among the drips. However, there was no correlation between the community structure and the parameters. There are six aquatic species and 19 terrestrial species in the epikarst of the Paka isolated karst. In the drips, individuals of epigean, epikarstic and hypogean aquatic taxa as well as terrestrial taxa belonging to the same groups as those in caves in the Dinaric karst were found. Unlike the Dinaric karst, the most abundant group was oligochaetes, not copepods. In general, the biotic diversity diminished from the entrance to deep in the cave. More investigation in the iso­lated karst is required to decide either this is the specific charac­teristic of this karst patchor a general phenomenon of isolated karst

Functional Testing of Processor Cores in FPGA-Based Applications

Embedded processor cores, which are widely used in SRAM-based FPGA applications, are candidates for SEU (Single Event Upset)-induced faults and need to be tested occasionally during system exploitation. Verifying a processor core is a difficult task, due to its complexity and the lack of user knowledge about the core-implementation details. In user applications, processor cores are normally tested by executing some kind of functional test in which the individual processor's instructions are tested with a set of deterministic test patterns, and the results are then compared with the stored reference values. For practical reasons the number of test patterns and corresponding results is usually small, which inherently leads to low fault coverage. In this paper we develop a concept that combines the whole instruction-set test into a compact test sequence, which can then be repeated with different input test patterns. This improves the fault coverage considerably with no additional memory requirements

Hardware Accelerated Compression of LIDAR Data Using FPGA Devices

Abstract: Airborne Light Detection and Ranging (LIDAR) has become a mainstream technology for terrain data acquisition and mapping. High sampling density of LIDAR enables the acquisition of high details of the terrain, but on the other hand, it results in a vast amount of gathered data, which requires huge storage space as well as substantial processing effort. The data are usually stored in the LAS format which has become the de facto standard for LIDAR data storage and exchange. In the paper, a hardware accelerated compression of LIDAR data is presented. The compression and decompression of LIDAR data is performed by a dedicated FPGA-based circuit and interfaced to the computer via a PCI-E general bus. The hardware compressor consists of three modules: LIDAR data predictor, variable length coder, and arithmetic coder. Hardware compression is considerably faster than software compression, while it also alleviates the processor load