Construction is a hazardous industry with a high number of injuries. Prior research found that many industry injuries can be prevented by implementing an effective safety plan if prepared and maintained by qualified safety personnel. However, there are no specific guidelines on how to select qualified construction safety personnel and what criteria should be used to select an individual for a safety position in the United States (US) construction industry. To fill this gap in knowledge, the study goal was to identify the desired qualifications of safety personnel in the US construction industry. To achieve the study goal, the Delphi technique was used as the main methodology for determining the desired qualifications for construction safety personnel. As a result, a panel of 15 subject-matter experts was selected, and 4 rounds of surveys were carried out. The findings of the study led to the identification of the desired qualifications for three construction safety positions (safety entry, safety professional, and safety manager). The present study contributes to the body of theoretical knowledge on construction safety and presents practical guidelines to assist industry stakeholders select qualified safety personnel for their projects. The selection of qualified safety personnel is expected to improve workplace safety performance and positively reflect on other project outcomes. Construction stakeholders should pay attention to three key aspects (namely, education, experience, and certification) when determining the qualifications for a safety leadership position and take into consideration the type of position intended to be filled. This study fills the gap in knowledge by identifying the desired qualifications and criteria on how to select safety personnel in the US construction industry.
In this paper, we studied the scheduling of jobs on a single machine. Each of n jobs is to be processed without interruption and becomes available for processing at time zero. The objective is to find a processing order of the jobs, minimizing the sum of maximum earliness and maximum tardiness. This problem is to minimize the earliness and tardiness values, so this model is equivalent to the just-in-time production system. Our lower bound depended on the decomposition of the problem into two subprograms. We presented a novel heuristic approach to find a near-optimal solution for the problem. This approach depends on finding efficient solutions for two problems. The first problem is minimizing total completi
... Show MoreAlloys of GaxSb1-x system with different Ga concentration (x=0.4, 0.5, 0.6) have been prepared in evacuated quartz tubes. The structure of the alloys were examined by X-ray diffraction analysis (XRD) and found to be polycrystalline of zincblend structure with strong crystalline orientation (220). Thin films of GaxSb1-x system of about 1.0 μm thickness have been deposited by flash evaporation method on glass substrate at 473K substrate temperature (Ts) and under pressure 10-6 mbar. This study concentrated on the effect of Ga concentration (x) on some physical properties of GaxSb1-x thin films such as structural and optical properties. The structure of prepared films for various values of x was polycrystalline. The X-ray diffraction analy
... Show MoreThe evaluation of subsurface formations as applied to oil well drilling started around 50 years ago. Generally, the curent review articule includes all methods for coring, logging, testing, and sampling. Also the methods for deciphering logs and laboratory tests that are relevant to assessing formations beneath the surface, including a look at the fluids they contain are discussed. Casing is occasionally set in order to more precisely evaluate the formations; as a result, this procedure is also taken into account while evaluating the formations. The petrophysics of reservoir rocks is the branch of science interested in studying chemical and physical properties of permeable media and the components of reservoir rocks which are associated
... Show MoreThe integration of decision-making will lead to the robust of its decisions, and then determination optimum inventory level to the required materials to produce and reduce the total cost by the cooperation of purchasing department with inventory department and also with other company,s departments. Two models are suggested to determine Optimum Inventory Level (OIL), the first model (OIL-model 1) assumed that the inventory level for materials quantities equal to the required materials, while the second model (OIL-model 2) assumed that the inventory level for materials quantities more than the required materials for the next period. &nb
... Show MoreThis paper proposes a new strategy to enhance the performance and accuracy of the Spiral dynamic algorithm (SDA) for use in solving real-world problems by hybridizing the SDA with the Bacterial Foraging optimization algorithm (BFA). The dynamic step size of SDA makes it a useful exploitation approach. However, it has limited exploration throughout the diversification phase, which results in getting trapped at local optima. The optimal initialization position for the SDA algorithm has been determined with the help of the chemotactic strategy of the BFA optimization algorithm, which has been utilized to improve the exploration approach of the SDA. The proposed Hybrid Adaptive Spiral Dynamic Bacterial Foraging (HASDBF)
... Show MoreCopper nanoparticles (CuNPs) were prepared with different diameters by sonoelectrodeposition technique using Electrodeposition process coupled with high-power ultrasound horn (Sonoelectrodeposition). The particle diameter of the CuNPs was adjusted by varying CuSO4 solution acidity (pH) and current density. The morphology and structure of the CuNPs were examined by X-ray diffraction (XRD) and Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM). It was found that the size of the produced copper nanoparticles ranged between 22 to 77 nm, where the diameter of CuNPs increases with reduction the solution acidity from 0.5 to 1.5 pH and increasing the current density of the deposition from 100 to 400 nm. Finally the produced CuNPs were pressed to fabricate disc
... Show MoreA particulate composite material was prepared by adding the Titanium dioxide (TiO2) with a particle size of (75-150) µm to Epoxy resin at weight percentage of (10%,20%,30%,40%,50%).The following some mechanical properties were studied,fracture toughness, hardness.casting preparation methods were used in this study includes preparing plate of matrix and composites. specimens were prepared according to ASTM for the Mechanical properties tests. After that Another samples were heat treated for three and six hour at 65C?. Fracture toughness (Kic) represent for stress intensity factor results were showed that the curve of three hours aging increases in fracture toughness (Kic) for composites but for six hours aging increases fracture tough
... Show MoreThe optical energy gap and optical constants such as the reflective index, dielectric constant have been evaluated due to The optical transmission and UV-VIS absorption spectra have been recorded in the wavelength (200 - 1100 nm) for PVA/PANI polymer blends and PVA/PANI/ZnO nanocomposites with different concentrations of ZnO (0.02, 0.05, 0.07, 0.1and 0.2) wt %. The results indicate that the materials have allowed direct transition. The reflection index and dielectric constant are increase with wavelength
Roof in the Iraqi houses normally flattening by a concrete panel. This concrete panel has poor thermal properties. The usage of materials with low thermal conductivity and high specific heat gives a good improvements to the thermal properties of the concrete panel, thus, the indoor room temperature improves. A Mathcad program based on a mathematical model employing complex Fourier series built for a single room building. The model input data are the ambient temperature, solar radiation, and sol-air temperature, which have been treated as a periodic function of time. While, the room construction is constant due to their materials made of it, except the roof properties are taken as a variable generated practically from the
... Show MoreIn this paper, a simple medical image compression technique is proposed, that based on utilizing the residual of autoregressive model (AR) along with bit-plane slicing (BPS) to exploit the spatial redundancy efficiently. The results showed that the compression performance of the proposed techniques is improved about twice on average compared to the traditional autoregressive, along with preserving the image quality due to considering the significant layers only of high image contribution effects.