Priority based technique for rescheduling trains

No AbstractKeywords: rescheduling; mathematical modelling; service disruptions; priorit

Impact of sedimentalogical processes on mangrove ecosystem of the Indus Delta

A detailed sedimentalogical study concerning the depletion of mangrove in the Indus Delta due to the marked decrease in the supply of silt was undertaken. Thirty one stations were established for sampling in a selected area of 12000 hectares between Korangi creek and Wad do Khuddi creek. Seventy one samples of soil were collected from 6cm and 1m depth, out of which fifty one samples were selected for sedimentalogical studies. It was inferred from this study that the marine depositional processes are distinctly dominating over the fluvial processes, which is major cause in decreasing the growth of mangrove. It was also inferred that among the sampled stations the sites having clayey silt (with silt 60%-70% and clay 25%-30%) are most favourable for mangrove plantation

Green Technology Policy as a Driver for Change Sustainability Practices among the Community in Melaka

The suggestion for people to change their minds towards a developed society in line with the idea of implementing green technology urban development is a necessity to achieve sustainable development. Therefore, this study attempts to analyze the issues related to the need to change society’s practices so that society is able to face the cultural environment of society based on green technology towards sustainability. This study uses a quantitative method that is using by a questionnaire instrument involving a total of 308 respondents. The results of the analysis found that those living in areas involved with green technology were higher their awareness towards green lifestyle compared to communities outside the green technology declaration area. In general, there are various challenges in the implementation of green technology urban development in Melaka, especially in changing the lifestyle of the community towards the ideology of sustainable development based on green technology

An investigation of the relationship between Service Quality and Customer Satisfaction in Melaka Bookstore

Customer satisfaction is a significant factor in influencing the service sector’s revenue. In this competitive environment which full of advance technologies, delivering a high quality of service is a factor for a stable competitive advantage. Customer satisfaction has a beneficial impact on the profitability of an organization. Service quality will reflect the customer's satisfaction in dimension of tangibles, reliability, assurances, empathy and responsiveness. Although there are many researches about SERVQUAL Model, but there are not much academic evidence measuring customer satisfaction in the bookstore services. Therefore, this research attempts to describe the relationship of service quality and customer satisfaction in the business-to-consumer (B2C). Business to Consumer or B2C is used by businesses that intend to market the products or services to consumers. B2C will conduct directly that business with customers without middleman. Data collection covers 15 bookstores in Melaka state. This research will focusing on selected bookstores such as Popular bookstore, MPH bookstore, TS Commerce bookstore, Kedai Buku Pintar Sdn Bhd and other bookstores that situated in the area of Melaka Tengah. The 151 survey questionnaires received and analyzed using SPSS software. Based on the regression analysis, onlytwo variables from five variables are significant. The two significant variables are reliability and empathy but have positive relationship with customer satisfaction

Thermal Conductivity Enhancement of Al2O3 Nanofluid in Ethylene Glycol and Water Mixture

AbstractThe ability of nanofluids that exhibits enhanced thermal performance is acknowledged by researchers through studies since decades ago. However, the observation of thermal properties for nanofluids in water and ethylene glycol based is not fully explored yet. Hence, this paper presents the thermal conductivity of water and ethylene glycol (EG) based Al2O3 nanofluid. The 13 nm sized Al2O3 nanoparticles were dispersed into three different volume ratio of water: EG such as 40:60, 50:50 and 60:40 using a two-step method. The measurement of thermal conductivity was performed using KD2 Pro Thermal Properties Analyzer at working temperatures of 30 to 70 ̊C for volume concentration of 0.5 to 2.0%. The results indicate that the thermal conductivity increases with the increase of nanofluid concentration and temperature. While the percentage of ethylene glycol increase, the range of thermal conductivity decreases due to ethylene glycol properties. The measurement data of the nanofluids give maximum enhancement of thermal conductivity at condition 2.0% volume concentration, temperature of 70 ̊C and for all base fluid

Microwave filter research in Universiti Teknologi Malaysia

This paper describes four microwave filter configurations that have been recently developed over the past five years. These are a direct coupled cavity waveguide filter, an internally- coupled hairpin-line filter, a meander-gap hairpin line filter and a three-element parallel-coupled filter

Optimization of Reduction Process of Egyptian Ilmenitevia Metallothermic reactions

It is important to develop technologies for the production of master alloys for industrial applications. Detailed research on reduction of titanium from Egyptian ilmenite by an aluminothermic process in a graphite Crucible was charged by the mixture of ilmenite, flux, aluminum was investigated. This paper study the effect of aluminum feed (10%- 35%), flux material (type, and amount), and temperature preheat from 50 oC to 400 oC and time of preheating from 0.5 hr. to 3 hrs.  Then, the metallic samples formed by the reduction were analyzed using X-ray diffraction, scanning electron microscopy. The mixed fluxes were strongly and successfully reduced ilmenite to a high-purity master alloy with small amounts of detected impurities. Key words: Aluminothermic, Egyptian ilmenite, flux, ferrotitanium, master alloy DOI: 10.7176/CMR/11-7-04 Publication date:September 30th 2019

An Improved Retraining Scheme for Convolutional Neural Network

A feed-forward neural network artificial model, or multilayer perceptron (MLP), learns input samples adaptively and solves non-linear problems for data that are noisy and imprecise. Another variant of MLP, known as Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) has additional features such as weight sharing, local receptive field, and subsampling, making CNN superior in handling challenging pattern-recognition tasks. Although CNN has improved the performance of MLP, the complexity of its structure has caused retraining processes to become inefficient whenever new categories or neurons using a winner-takes-all approach are added at the classifier stage. Thus, it is necessary to retrain the complete network set when new categories are added to the network. However, such a retraining incurs additional cost and training time. In this paper, we propose a retraining scheme that could overcome the mentioned problem. The proposed retraining scheme generalizes the feature of extraction layers, hence the retraining process only involves the last two layers instead of the whole network. The design was evaluated on AT&T and JAFFE databases. The results obtained have proved that training an additional category is approximately more than 70 times faster than retraining the whole network architectur

Dickson Charge Pump Rectifier using Ultra-Low Power (ULP) Diode for BAN Applications

High power consumption and small battery size severely limit the operating time of devices in Body Area Network (BAN). Radio Frequency (RF) harvesting system can be one of the ways to solve this constraint. Rectifier converts ambient RF into direct current (DC). In a conventional rectifier circuit, Schottky diodes have been considered as an attractive candidate due to their low forward voltage drop and fast switching speed. However, Schottky diodes are not properly modelled in Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor (CMOS) technologies which restrict their usefulness in low -cost applications, where high integration levels are desired. Thus, an efficient model of Schottky diode in an integrated circuit (IC) domain is needed. For this reason, Ultra-Low Power (ULP) diode has been proposed in the IC rectifier designs. The performance of ULP diode was compared with diode-connected MOSFET based on Dickson topology and Villard voltage multiplier in 130nm Silterra process technology. The correlation of the design parameters to the performance of voltage rectifier was analysed. The results show that the efficiency of the voltage multiplier has successfully increased more than double based on the optimisation of the design parameters

Investigation of concrete floor vibration using heel-drop, test

In recent years, there is an increased in floor vibration problems of structures like residential and commercial building. Vibration is defined as a serviceability issue related to the comfort of the occupant or damage equipment. Human activities are the main source of vibration in the building and it could affect the human comfort and annoyance of residents in the building when the vibration exceed the recommend level. A new building, Madrasah Tahfiz located at Yong Peng have vibration problem when load subjected on the first floor of the building. However, the limitation of vibration occurs on building is unknown. Therefore, testing is needed to determine the vibration behaviour (frequency, damping ratio and mode shape) of the building. Heel-drop with pace 2Hz was used in field measurement to obtain the vibration response. Since, the heel-drop test results would vary in light of person performance, test are carried out three time to reduce uncertainty. Natural frequency from Frequency Response Function analysis (FRF) is 17.4Hz, 16.8, 17.4Hz respectively for each test