The paper deals with claims in construction projects in Iraq and studies their types, causes, impacts, resolution methods and then proposes a management system to control the impacts of claims. Two parts have been done to achieve the research objective (theoretical part and practical part). The findings showed that the main types of the claims are extra work claims, different site condition claims, delay claims and the main causes of the claims are variation of the orders, design errors and omission, delay in payments by owner, variation in quantities and scheduling errors. The claims have bad impacts on the cost by increasing (10% to 25%) and also on the duration of the project by increasing from (25% to 50%).The negotiation is the main

This paper presents a fuzzy logic controller for a two-tank level control system, which is a process with a dead time. The fuzzy controller is a proportional-integral (PI-like) fuzzy controller which is suitable for steady state behavior of the system. Transient behavior of the system was improved without the need for a derivative action by suitable change in the rule base of the controller. Simulation results showed the step response of the two-tank level control system when this controller was used to control this plant and the effect of the dead time on the response of the system.

    Wireless control networks (WCNs), based on distributed control systems of wireless sensor and actuator networks, integrate four technologies: control, computer network and wireless communications. Electrostatic precipitator (ESP) in cement plants reduces the emissions from rotary kiln by 99.8% approximately. It is an important thing to change the existing systems (wireline) to wireless because of dusty and hazardous environments. In this paper, we designed a wireless control system for ESP using Truetime 2 beta 6 simulator, depending on the mathematical model that have been built using identification toolbox of Matlab v7.1.1. We also study the effect ofusing wireless network on performance and stability of the closed l

  With the fast progress of information technology and the computer networks, it becomes very easy to reproduce and share the geospatial data due to its digital styles. Therefore, the usage of geospatial data suffers from various problems such as data authentication, ownership proffering, and illegal copying ,etc. These problems can represent the big challenge to future uses of the geospatial data. This paper introduces a new watermarking scheme to ensure the copyright protection of the digital vector map. The main idea of proposed scheme is based on transforming  the digital map to frequently domain using the Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) in order to determine suitable areas to insert the watermark data.

The process of controlling a Flexible Joint Robot Manipulator (FJRM) requires additional sensors for measuring the state variables of flexible joints. Therefore, taking the elasticity into account adds a lot of complexity as all the additional sensors must be taken into account during the control process. This paper proposes a nonlinear observer that controls FJRM, without requiring equipment sensors for measuring the states. The nonlinear state equations are derived in detail for the FJRM where nonlinearity, of order three, is considered. The Takagi–Sugeno Fuzzy Model (T-SFM) technique is applied to linearize the FJRM system. The Luenberger observer is designed to estimate the unmeasured states using error correction. The develop

High vehicular mobility causes frequent changes in the density of vehicles, discontinuity in inter-vehicle communication, and constraints for routing protocols in vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs). The routing must avoid forwarding packets through segments with low network density and high scale of network disconnections that may result in packet loss, delays, and increased communication overhead in route recovery. Therefore, both traffic and segment status must be considered. This paper presents real-time intersection-based segment aware routing (RTISAR), an intersection-based segment aware algorithm for geographic routing in VANETs. This routing algorithm provides an optimal route for forwarding the data packets toward their destination