Abstract

Despite the fact of the importance and effectiveness of supporting the pricing policy for agriculture sector in Iraq, but this policy has stopped in supporting those agriculture production needs, and it was confined to support the final product only, and supporting the strategic corps exclusively after the U.S. Invasion in 2003, but after 2008 the state has returned to support some of this policy activities through providing financial loans through the agricultural initiative campaign, with trillions of iraqi dinars without any use, also providing support to some of the agricultural production needs such as fertilizers , tractors and agricultural combines, in addition supporting the pricing policy for the

Optical burst switching (OBS) network is a new generation optical communication technology. In an OBS network, an edge node first sends a control packet, called burst header packet (BHP) which reserves the necessary resources for the upcoming data burst (DB). Once the reservation is complete, the DB starts travelling to its destination through the reserved path. A notable attack on OBS network is BHP flooding attack where an edge node sends BHPs to reserve resources, but never actually sends the associated DB. As a result the reserved resources are wasted and when this happen in sufficiently large scale, a denial of service (DoS) may take place. In this study, we propose a semi-supervised machine learning approach using k-means algorithm

Prediction of the structural response of reinforced concrete to the time-dependent, creep and shrinkage, volume changes is complex. Creep is usually determined by measuring the change, with time, in the strain of specimens subjected to a constant stress and stored under appropriate conditions. This paper brings into view the development of creep strain for four self-compacting concrete mixes: A40, AL40, B60 and BL60 (where 40 and 60 represent the compressive strength level at 28 days and L indicates to Portlandlimestone cement). Specimens were put under sustained load and exposed to controlled conditions in a creep chamber (ASTM C512). The test results showed that normal strength Portland-limestone mixes have yielded lower ultimate c

Plastic soil exhibits unfavorited geotechnical properties (when saturation), which causes negative defects to engineering structures. Different attempts (included various materials) were conducted to proffer solutions to such defects by experimenting in practical ways. On one hand, these attempts aimed to improve the engineering characteristics of plastic soil, and on the other hand, to use problematic waste materials as a stabilizer, like cement kiln dust, and to reduce environmental hazards. This paper explored the shrinkage, plasticity, and strength behavior of plastic soil enhanced with cement dust. The cement dust contents were 0%, 5%, 10%, 15% and 20% by dry weight of soil. An experimental series of shrinkage and p

This study presented an endeavour to integrate the value chain activities with the Balanced Scorecard for a comprehensive evaluation of an organization’s strategic performance. It also demonstrated the connection and the integration of the activities of the value chain with the Balanced Scorecard. The financial measurement was linked with non-financial measurement by integrating these techniques to achieve an appropriate performance that supports all aspects of the organizational performance. Consequently, the research problem in this study emerged, which is due to the concentration of many organizations on the measurement of financial performance. Notably, the latter caused the decline of some organizations from the competitive market. T

The convergence speed is the most important feature of Back-Propagation (BP) algorithm. A lot of improvements were proposed to this algorithm since its presentation, in order to speed up the convergence phase. In this paper, a new modified BP algorithm called Speeding up Back-Propagation Learning (SUBPL) algorithm is proposed and compared to the standard BP. Different data sets were implemented and experimented to verify the improvement in SUBPL.

A set of hydro treating experiments are carried out on vacuum gas oil in a trickle bed reactor to study the hydrodesulfurization and hydrodenitrogenation based on two model compounds, carbazole (non-basic nitrogen compound) and acridine (basic nitrogen compound), which are added at 0–200 ppm to the tested oil, and dibenzotiophene is used as a sulfur model compound at 3,000 ppm over commercial CoMo/ Al2O3 and prepared PtMo/Al2O3. The impregnation method is used to prepare (0.5% Pt) PtMo/Al2O3. The basic sites are found to be very small, and the two catalysts exhibit good metal support interaction. In the absence of nitrogen compounds over the tested catalysts in the trickle bed reactor at temperatures of 523 to 573 K, liquid hourly space v

A Strength Pareto Evolutionary Algorithm 2 (SPEA 2) approach for solving the multi-objective Environmental / Economic Power Dispatch (EEPD) problem is presented in this paper. In the past fuel cost consumption minimization was the aim (a single objective function) of economic power dispatch problem. Since the clean air act amendments have been applied to reduce SO2 and NOX emissions from power plants, the utilities change their strategies in order to reduce pollution and atmospheric emission as well, adding emission minimization as other objective function made economic power dispatch (EPD) a multi-objective problem having conflicting objectives. SPEA2 is the improved version of SPEA with better fitness assignment, density estimation, an