This article investigates the development of the following material properties of concrete with time: compressive strength, tensile strength, modulus of elasticity, and fracture energy. These properties were determined at seven different hydration ages (18 h, 30 h, 48 h, 72 h, 7 days, 14 days, 28 days) for four pure cement concrete mixes totaling 336 specimens tested throughout the study. Experimental data obtained were used to assess the relationship of the above properties with the concrete compressive strength and how these relationships are affected with age. Further, this study investigates prediction models available in literature and recommendations are made for models that are found suitable for application to early age conc

Among the metaheuristic algorithms, population-based algorithms are an explorative search algorithm superior to the local search algorithm in terms of exploring the search space to find globally optimal solutions. However, the primary downside of such algorithms is their low exploitative capability, which prevents the expansion of the search space neighborhood for more optimal solutions. The firefly algorithm (FA) is a population-based algorithm that has been widely used in clustering problems. However, FA is limited in terms of its premature convergence when no neighborhood search strategies are employed to improve the quality of clustering solutions in the neighborhood region and exploring the global regions in the search space. On the

Scheduling Timetables for courses in the big departments in the universities is a very hard problem and is often be solved by many previous works although results are partially optimal. This work implements the principle of an evolutionary algorithm by using genetic theories to solve the timetabling problem to get a random and full optimal timetable with the ability to generate a multi-solution timetable for each stage in the collage. The major idea is to generate course timetables automatically while discovering the area of constraints to get an optimal and flexible schedule with no redundancy through the change of a viable course timetable. The main contribution in this work is indicated by increasing the flexibility of generating opti

An automatic text summarization system mimics how humans summarize by picking the most ‎significant sentences in a source text. However, the complexities of the Arabic language have become ‎challenging to obtain information quickly and effectively. The main disadvantage of the ‎traditional approaches is that they are strictly constrained (especially for the Arabic language) by the ‎accuracy of sentence feature ‎functions, weighting schemes, ‎and similarity calculations. On the other hand, the meta-heuristic search approaches have a feature tha

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Cooperation spectrum sensing in cognitive radio networks has an analogy to a distributed decision in wireless sensor networks, where each sensor make local decision and those decision result are reported to a fusion center to give the final decision according to some fusion rules. In this paper the performance of cooperative spectrum sensing examines using new optimization strategy to find optimal weight and threshold curves that enables each secondary user senses the spectrum environment independently according to a floating threshold with respect to his local environment. Our proposed approach depends on proving the convexity of the famous optimization problem in cooperative spectrum sensing that stated maximizing the probability of detec

Cognitive radio is observed as a new approach, which could be cope with the spectral limitations. This approach is designed to detect whether a particular segment of the radio spectrum is currently in use and to jump into the temporarily unused spectrum rapidly without interfering with the transmissions of other users. CR is the promising radio technology which aims to detect and utilize the temporally unused spectrum bands by sensing its radio environment in order to improve spectrum utilization. To enhance the sensing performance, cooperative spectrum sensing has been proposed. However, when the number of cognitive user tends to be very large, the bandwidth for reporting sensing results to the common receiver will be very huge. In this pa