Scoring Model in Operational Research on Cultural-Tourism: A Case Study in Kota Kinabalu, Sabah

The predominant culture of Sabah consists of a motley of cultures, each of which has been brought in by the different ethnic groups from their indigenous cultures. The total population of Sabah consists of more than thirty different ethnicities and races, and the number of languages and dialects go over eighty. Hence the cultural tourism in Sabah would have varied criteria that can be looked into. The aim of this paper is to use the scoring model in operational research to rank these decision criteria according to highest scores. The preferability of tourist visiting these hot spots is done by ranking their preferability based on a weightage. Highly scored attraction factors would attract more tourists to visit cultural spots in Kota Kinabalu. Therefore, these would help operational managers in the tourism industry to focus on promoting and marketing this sector

Assessment of Reliability of Composite Power System Including Smart Grids

The large service interruptions of power supply in the transmission system have significant impact on modern society. The aim of the power system engineers is to prevent and mitigate such events with optimal decisions in design, planning, operation and maintenance. Due to the rapid growth in the power demand and competitive power market scenario, the transmission and distribution systems are frequently being operated under heavily loaded conditions. This tends to make failure of components more frequent in the power system necessitating large downtime to repair or replace the equipment. A majority of the service interruptions are happening due to lack of proper planning and operation of power system. Therefore, complete reliability assessment in generation, transmission and distribution systems is needed at the planning stage. The reliability assessment in smart grids is very much beneficial to the power operator and reduces the risk of grid failure due to failure of major components in power systems. This chapter is confined to composite power system reliability assessment. The composite power system combines both the generation and transmission systems’ adequacy. The generation system in the composite power system includes both conventional and renewable sources. The composite power system reliability assessment is quite difficult due to the large number of equipment, interconnected network topology and uncertainties in generation capacity. The reliability assessment concentrates mainly on the use of probabilistic states of components in generation and transmission systems to evaluate the overall reliability. This analysis will result in a cost-effective system configuration to provide continuous power supply to the consumers at reasonable cost. The reliability level of the system is measured by the defined indices. One of these indices is the probability of average power availability at load bus. This reliability assessment mainly focuses on development of methods to evaluate the probability of average power availability at load buses for a specified system configuration. This chapter discusses the two main techniques called node elimination method and modified minimal cut set method

Microgrid Protection Systems

Micro grids are miniature version of conventional large power grids functioning either autonomously or with inter connection to the main grid. Primary function of micro grid is to serve power at distribution level. Distributed energy resources (DERs) connected to the micro grid enables reliable and efficient operation of micro grid. Protection of micro grids assumed importance due to increased penetration of distributed energy resources. Most of the distribution systems in earlier days are radial in nature and protection systems are designed for that. These protection systems pose serious challenges when applied to present day distribution systems which are mesh connected and fed by the distributed energy resources. Limitation of the conventional protection scheme demands new insights and methodologies for micro grid protection. Due to intermediate current injection from DERs the conventional coordination of over current (O/C) relays is not possible. Further in meshed systems the fault current flow is bidirectional. Hence the protection of micro grid systems with DERs require different approach to ensure faults are cleared in less time and minimal number of consumers connected to the system are affected. A comprehensive analysis of the suitable techniques applicable for micro grid protection is presented in this chapter

Tourist satisfaction factors via analytic hierarchy process decision model on cultural-tourism in Kota Kinabalu, Sabah

In recent years, the tourism and hospitality industry has shown a deepening diversified growth and has become internationally a quick and growing industry that contributes the most in the economic development. Tourism plays a vital role in promoting a country's cultural and heritage, while cultural tourism covers all the travelling aspects, whereby the local people educate tourists with their own living ways, beliefs and thoughts. Other resources have stated that cultural tourism involves high values of places related to tourism, history and heritage. As there are several places in Sabah that exhibit great values in history and heritage of the local people, there is a need to evaluate the best decision-making of multiple criteria in the field of cultural tourism. Factors are identified using the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) in terms of tourists' preferability, especially in the selection of cultural tourism spots in Sabah as their place of visitation. The objectives of this study are to evaluate and compare the preferability of tourists visiting the cultural-tourism locations, and to identify the significant factors that attract the tourists to visit these cultural-tourism spots. Prior to the data analysis, 150 respondents through questionnaires will be randomly selected at different cultural-tourism spots in Kota Kinabalu, Sabah. The data will be analysed using the AHP method, with the aid of Saaty 1-9 scale. The AHP decision model in this study was developed with the aid of model-building procedures like the normal matrix of z-scores and mean scores, and the pairwise comparison matrix of weights of criteria and sub-criteria. Based on the overall AHP analysis, it was found that the Destination criterion was ranked the highest at 52.51%, followed by criterion of Benefits with weight of 22.36%, partially ranked at 14.29% was Activities criterion, the criterion of Safety earned the weight 6.94%, and lastly the lowest ranking for Services criterion at 3.90%. From the analysis, it can be concluded that the most important factor in Cultural tourism was the Destination of the cultural spots. © 2020