Diagnosing nutrient limitations to lentil and chickpea in acid soils of Bangladesh

Lentil and chickpea are dietary staple crops in Bangladesh but their local production has been markedly declining in recent decades, mainly due to competition with irrigated cereals. However, in northern Bangladesh, an additional problem to their cultivation is acid surface soil conditions, potentially causing deficiencies of molybdenum (Mo) and boron (B), and toxicities of aluminium (Al), manganese (Mn) or hydrogen ion (H+). In an attempt to rehabilitate lentil and chickpea in northern Bangladesh on-farm trials were conducted to determine the response of these crops to Mo, B, and lime and Rhizobium inoculation. Despite earlier reports of widespread B deficiency in the region a response to B was only found in chickpea. Responses to Mo and Rhizobium, applied through seed priming, were found. There were responses to lime even after B, Mo, and Rhizobium had been applied, suggesting Al toxicity. Recommendations for fertilizer requirement, to fit into an overall integrated crop management package for lentil and chickpea, were modified accordingly

A dynamic approach to determine the product flow nature in apparel supply chain network

This paper presents a novel metric, product flow number, to determine the product flow nature across the supply chain of apparel industries. The metric is based on mapping the dynamics of fluid flow across a pipe to product flow across a supply chain. Numerical analysis is conducted to examine the impact of the different metric parameters on the product flow. Results showed that smooth dynamics can be achieved through scaling production and extending delivery times, while undesirable dynamics are tied to complex product designs and increasing number of suppliers. Finally, the paper demonstrated how the new metric can be used as a planning and control tool for supply chain management in the apparel industry

Metrics for Assessing Overall Performance of Inland Waterway Ports: A Bayesian Network Based Approach

Because ports are considered to be the heart of the maritime transportation system, thereby assessing port performance is necessary for a nation’s development and economic success. This study proposes a novel metric, namely, “port performance index (PPI)”, to determine the overall performance and utilization of inland waterway ports based on six criteria, port facility, port availability, port economics, port service, port connectivity, and port environment. Unlike existing literature, which mainly ranks ports based on quantitative factors, this study utilizes a Bayesian Network (BN) model that focuses on both quantitative and qualitative factors to rank a port. The assessment of inland waterway port performance is further analyzed based on different advanced techniques such as sensitivity analysis and belief propagation. Insights drawn from the study show that all the six criteria are necessary to predict PPI. The study also showed that port service has the highest impact while port economics has the lowest impact among the six criteria on PPI for inland waterway ports

Hardware approach of a novel algorithm of R-peak detection for the simultaneous measurement of fetal and maternal heart rates during pregnancy

continuous fetal electrocardiogram (FECG) monitoring will ease the fetal well-being. An algorithm has been developed to detect R-peak for the simultaneous measurement of the fetal and maternal heart rates during pregnancy. The algorithm is based on crosscorrelation, adaptive threshold and statistical properties in the time domain. The performance achieved for the R-peak detection for the heart rate measurements shows that the model can extract R-peak for both maternal and fetal utilizing a single-lead configuration. The algorithm has been implemented into Altera’s Stratix EP1S10. Test case results showed an error percentage of around ±0.3% and ±0.5% for the R-peak detection of maternal and fetal respectively. The system is capable to run at a maximum clock frequency of 48.56 MHz, and consumed 9 633 logic elements.Muhammad Asraful Hasan, Md Mamun, Mohd Marufuzzama

Launching an existing product to a new demographic area : strategic plans and system reconfiguration

In this paper, a particular product is selected to analyse its current technical and marketing condition, and based on this, a suitable roadmap is presented to improve the market share of that product step by step to a new demographic area. This paper concentrated on system reconfiguration and has revealed all the critical points of improvement so that the profit will be greater than before satisfactorily. It will help not only the existing organisations to improve their market share, but also to contribute the new organisations in taking appropriate business plan for better competition and existence

A dynamic approach to determine the product flow nature in apparel supply chain network

This paper presents a novel metric, product flow number, to determine the product flow nature across the supply chain of apparel industries. The metric is based on mapping the dynamics of fluid flow across a pipe to product flow across a supply chain. Numerical analysis is conducted to examine the impact of the different metric parameters on the product flow. Results showed that smooth dynamics can be achieved through scaling production and extending delivery times, while undesirable dynamics are tied to complex product designs and increasing number of suppliers. Finally, the paper demonstrated how the new metric can be used as a planning and control tool for supply chain management in the apparel industry.Product flow number (PFN) Dynamics Apparel supply chain network

Setting Push-Pull Boundaries: A Case of Textile Manufacturer

This chapter discusses a case study to define the push-pull boundary for both continuous and periodic review policies. It compares the cost for push-based supply chain and combined-based supply chain strategy. It focuses on how to set push-pull boundaries to benefit from both the push and pull systems with a case of a textile manufacturer. The chapter demonstrates the concept of setting push-pull boundaries and their outcome through the means of analytical examples. Continuous review policy is driven by the amount of inventory level. The inventory position at any point in time is the actual inventory at the warehouse, plus the items ordered by the distributor that have not yet arrived, minus the items that are backordered. In periodic review policy, the inventory is reviewed on a routine basis. While everything else remains same and equal, higher demand uncertainty leads to preference for managing the supply chain based on demand realization, a pull strategy

Classification and detection of intelligent house resident activities using multiagent

The intelligent home research requires understanding of the human behavior and recognizing patterns of activities of daily living (ADL).However instead of understand the psychosomatic nature of human early projects in this area simply employed intelligence to the household appliance.This paper proposed an algorithm for detecting ADL.The proposed method is based on two opposite state entity extraction.The method reflects on the common data flow of smart home event sequence.The developed algorithm clusters the smart home events by isolating opposite status of home appliance. Result shows that, the algorithm can successfully identify 135 unique tasks of different lengths.This algorithm is surely being an alternate way of pattern recognition in intelligent home