Heterogeneous Arrival and Departure M/M/1 Queue with Vacation and Service Breakdown

This paper deals with the study of M/M/1 queue with heterogeneous arrival and departure with the provision of server vacations and breakdowns. Customer arrive service facilities with poison process and exponential service time distribution. In this paper we find the mean queue length, mean waiting time in queue and system, average number of customers in the system. The generating function method is used to find these measures of performance. The numerical results are obtained to cite the applicability of model in the real life situations. Key words: Heterogeneous; Generating function; Vacation; Breakdown; Repai

Agrobiodiversity and Its Conservation in Nepal

Nepal is a part of the world\u27s biodiversity hotspot and ranks the 49th in the world for biodiversity. Agrobiodiversity and its conservation status were studied through literature review, field survey, key informant survey and focus group discussion. Results of field implementation of some good practices and action research were also documented. Among 24,300 total species in the country, 28% are agricultural genetic resources (AGRs), termed as agrobiodiversity. Agrobiodiversity has six components (crops, forages, livestock, aquatic, insects and microorganisms) and four sub-components (domesticated, semi-domesticated, wild relatives and wild edible) in Nepal. Agrobiodiversity on each component exists at agroecosystem, species, variety/breed/biotype/race/strain, genotype and allele levels, within an altitude range from 60 to 5,000 masl. There are 12 agroecosystems supporting 1026 species under crop component, 510 under forage, 35 under livestock, 250 under the aquatic animal, 17 under aquatic plant, 3,500 under insect and 800 under microorganism. An estimated loss of agrobiodiversity is 40%, however, farmers have reported up to 100% loss of AGRs in some areas for a particular species. Conservation of agrobiodiversity has been initiated since 1986. Four strategies namely ex-situ, on-farm, in-situ and breeding have been adopted for conservation and sustainable utilization of AGRs. Eighty good practices including process, methods and actions for managing agrobiodiversity have been in practice and these practices come under five conservation components (sensitization, method and approach, accelerator, value and enabling environment). Within the country, 18,765 accessions of AGRs have been conserved in different kinds of banks. A total of 24,683 accessions of Nepalese crops, forages and microbes have been conserved in different International and foreign genebanks. Some collections are conserved as safety duplication and safety backup in different CGIARs\u27 banks and World Seed Vault, Korea. Two global databases (GENESYS and EURISCO) have maintained 19,200 Nepalese accessions. Geographical Information System, Climate Analog Tool and biotechnological tools have been applied for better managing AGRs. Many stakeholders need to further concentrate on the conservation and utilization of AGRs. Global marketing of some native AGRs is necessary for sustaining agriculture and attracting young generations as well as conserving them through use

Agro-morphological Diversity of High Altitude Bean Landraces in the Kailash Sacred Landscape of Nepal

Many varieties of bean are widely grown across diverse agro-ecological zones in Nepal. And opportunities exist for improving the crops and enhancing their resilience to various biotic and abiotic stressors. In this context, an experiment was conducted from June to October 2016 in Khar VDC of Darchula district to study the phenotypic traits of nine landraces of bean (Phaseolus vulgaris L.). The bean landraces were planted using randomized complete block design in three sites (Dhamidera, Dallekh and Sundamunda villages), with three replications in each site for their comparative analysis. The study considered the following phenotypic traits: days to emergence, days to 50% flowering, days to 90% pod maturity, number of nodes, pod length, pod width, number of pods, number of seeds per pod and weight and grain yield for 100 seeds. Kruskal-Wallis test showed significant differences in the landraces both within and among locations. KA-17-08-FB and KA-17-04-FB were late  flowering (63 and 65 days respectively) compared to other landraces whereas KA-17-07-FB flowered earliest (within 42 days). In all three sites, three landraces namely KA-17-07-FB, KA-17-04-FB and KA-17-06-FB were found to be relatively more resistant to pest and diseases than other landraces. Eight out of nine landraces in Dhamidera and Dallekh villages and seven out of nine in Sundamunda village produced seeds greater than 1.0 t/ha. Among the nine varieties KA-17-02-FB was the highest yielding variety, with an average yield of 3.8 t/ha. This study is useful for identifying suitable landraces for future promotion based on their maturity, grain yield, diseases resistance and other qualitative and quantitative characteristics

Technical efficiency of hybrid maize production in eastern terai of Nepal: A stochastic frontier approach

Maize is the second most important crop after rice in terms of area and production in Nepal. This article analyzes the technical efficiency and its determinants of hybrid maize production in eastern Nepal. Using a randomly selected data from 98 farmers (41 from Morang and 57 from Sunsari) in eastern Nepal, the study employed a stochastic frontier production model to find the production elasticity coefficients of inputs, determinants of efficiency and technical efficiency of hybrid maize farmers. The results showed that maize production responds positively to increase in amount of urea, DAP and the area planted, where as it is negative to seed quantity. The study indicate that farmers are not technically efficient with a mean technical efficiency 79 %. Socioeconomic variable age had a negative and significant while the household size had a positive and significant related to maize output. The younger farmers were observed more technically efficient than older farmers. Larger the members in the household higher the maize production. It is recommended that farmers should increase their fertilizer dose and farm size while they should decrease their seed rate for efficient production

Towards the development of affective facial expression recognition for human-robot interaction

Affective facial expression is a key feature of non-verbal behavior and is considered as a symptom of an internal emotional state. Emotion recognition plays an important role in social communication: human-human and also for human-robot interaction. This work aims at the development of a framework able to recognise human emotions through facial expression for human-robot interaction. Simple features based on facial landmarks distances and angles are extracted to feed a dynamic probabilistic classification framework. The public online dataset Karolinska Directed Emotional Faces (KDEF) [12] is used to learn seven different emotions (e.g. Angry, fearful, disgusted, happy, sad, surprised, and neutral) performed by seventy subjects. Offline and on-the-fly tests were carried out: leave-one-out cross validation tests using the dataset and on-the-fly tests during human-robot interactions. Preliminary results show that the proposed framework can correctly recognise human facial expressions with potential to be used in human-robot interaction scenarios

Technical Efficiency of Hybrid Maize Production in Eastern Terai of Nepal: a Stochastic Frontier Approach

Maize is the second most important crop after rice in terms of area and production in Nepal. This article analyzes the technical efficiency and its determinants of hybrid maize production in eastern Nepal. Using a randomly selected data from 98 farmers (41 from Morang and 57 from Sunsari) in eastern Nepal, the study employed a stochastic frontier production model to find the production elasticity coefficients of inputs, determinants of efficiency and technical efficiency of hybrid maize farmers. The results showed that maize production responds positively to increase in amount of urea, DAP and the area planted, where as it is negative to seed quantity. The study indicate that farmers are not technically efficient with a mean technical efficiency 79 %. Socioeconomic variable age had a negative and significant while the household size had a positive and significant related to maize output. The younger farmers were observed more technically efficient than older farmers. Larger the members in the household higher the maize production. It is recommended that farmers should increase their fertilizer dose and farm size while they should decrease their seed rate for efficient production