Reliability approach to rotating-component design

A probabilistic methodology for designing rotating mechanical components using reliability to relate stress to strength is explained. The experimental test machines and data obtained for steel to verify this methodology are described. A sample mechanical rotating component design problem is solved by comparing a deterministic design method with the new design-by reliability approach. The new method shows that a smaller size and weight can be obtained for specified rotating shaft life and reliability, and uses the statistical distortion-energy theory with statistical fatigue diagrams for optimum shaft design. Statistical methods are presented for (1) determining strength distributions for steel experimentally, (2) determining a failure theory for stress variations in a rotating shaft subjected to reversed bending and steady torque, and (3) relating strength to stress by reliability

Design features and results from fatigue reliability research machines

Design and performance tests for reversed bending with steady torque fatigue test machine using notched steel specimen

Occupational Health and Safety (OHS) with the Point of View Employees

 Occupational diseases and accidents suffered by employees, cause many costs for the companies in direct and indirect ways. Instead of expanding their business by making new investments; companies spend their limited resources and power to cover these arising costs. Occupational diseases and accidents are social and economic wounds for the countries as well as the companies. For example, according to the reseach that Ministry of Labour and Social Security Training and Research Centre (Çalışma ve Sosyal Güvenlik Bakanlığı Eğitim ve Araştırma Merkezi - ÇASGEM) had made in 2010, annual cost of occupational accidents is 35 billion TL in Turkey.Sole way to reduce these costs; creating company’s awareness on Occupational Health and Safety (OHS) and to inspire their employees about this awareness. In this case, the actual practitioners of these rules, employees, have a very critical role. While managers demand from their employees to obey OHS rules and expect to bring it into a way of their life; most of the time employees may ignore OHS rules because of some reasons like finishing their job quickly, negligence and the view of protective equipments are limiting factors for their freedom and comfort. Especially the common view within Turkish people: “Nothing happens to me!”; causes unwillingness to use protective equipments.The first aim of this paper is to examine what kind of costs that companies may face in the case of non-compliance to the OHS regulations on the overall dimensions. Another aim is to show how OHS regulations work in a packaging company named Amcor which operates in 43 countries around the world, and looking to OHS with the employees’ point of view by applying a survey research.&nbsp

Fast Approximate Shortest Hyperpaths for Inferring Pathways in Cell Signaling Hypergraphs

Cell signaling pathways, which are a series of reactions that start at receptors and end at transcription factors, are basic to systems biology. Properly modeling the reactions in such pathways requires directed hypergraphs, where an edge is now directed between two sets of vertices. Inferring a pathway by the most parsimonious series of reactions then corresponds to finding a shortest hyperpath in a directed hypergraph, which is NP-complete. The state of the art for shortest hyperpaths in cell-signaling hypergraphs solves a mixed-integer linear program to find an optimal hyperpath that is restricted to be acyclic, and offers no efficiency guarantees. We present for the first time a heuristic for general shortest hyperpaths that properly handles cycles, and is guaranteed to be efficient. Its accuracy is demonstrated through exhaustive experiments on all instances from the standard NCI-PID and Reactome pathway databases, which show the heuristic finds a hyperpath that matches the state-of-the-art mixed-integer linear program on over 99% of all instances that are acyclic. On instances where only cyclic hyperpaths exist, the heuristic surpasses the state-of-the-art, which finds no solution; on every such cyclic instance, enumerating all possible hyperpaths shows that the solution found by the heuristic is in fact optimal

Online Pattern Matching for String Edit Distance with Moves

Edit distance with moves (EDM) is a string-to-string distance measure that includes substring moves in addition to ordinal editing operations to turn one string to the other. Although optimizing EDM is intractable, it has many applications especially in error detections. Edit sensitive parsing (ESP) is an efficient parsing algorithm that guarantees an upper bound of parsing discrepancies between different appearances of the same substrings in a string. ESP can be used for computing an approximate EDM as the L1 distance between characteristic vectors built by node labels in parsing trees. However, ESP is not applicable to a streaming text data where a whole text is unknown in advance. We present an online ESP (OESP) that enables an online pattern matching for EDM. OESP builds a parse tree for a streaming text and computes the L1 distance between characteristic vectors in an online manner. For the space-efficient computation of EDM, OESP directly encodes the parse tree into a succinct representation by leveraging the idea behind recent results of a dynamic succinct tree. We experimentally test OESP on the ability to compute EDM in an online manner on benchmark datasets, and we show OESP's efficiency.Comment: This paper has been accepted to the 21st edition of the International Symposium on String Processing and Information Retrieval (SPIRE2014