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 the present paper, by making use of the new generalized operator, some results of third order differential subordination and differential superordination consequence for analytic functions are obtained. Also, some sandwich-type theorems are presented.
The biometric-based keys generation represents the utilization of the extracted features from the human anatomical (physiological) traits like a fingerprint, retina, etc. or behavioral traits like a signature. The retina biometric has inherent robustness, therefore, it is capable of generating random keys with a higher security level compared to the other biometric traits. In this paper, an effective system to generate secure, robust and unique random keys based on retina features has been proposed for cryptographic applications. The retina features are extracted by using the algorithm of glowworm swarm optimization (GSO) that provides promising results through the experiments using the standard retina databases. Additionally, in order t
... Show MoreAmong 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
... Show MoreThe goal of this paper is to design a robust controller for controlling a pendulum
system. The control of nonlinear systems is a common problem that is facing the researchers in control systems design. The Sliding Mode Controller (SMC) is the best solution for controlling a nonlinear system. The classical SMC consists from two phases. The first phase is the reaching phase and the second is the sliding phase. The SMC suffers from the chattering phenomenon which is considered as a severe problem and undesirable property. It is a zigzag motion along the switching surface. In this paper, the chattering is reduced by using a saturation function instead of sign function. In spite of SMC is a good method for controlling a nonlinear system b
Active vibration control is the main problem in different structure. Smart material like piezoelectric make a structure smart, adaptive and self-controlling so, they are effective in active vibration control. In this paper piezoelectric elements are used as sensors and actuators in flexible structures for sensing and actuating purposes, and to control the vibration of a cantilever beam by using sliding mode control. The sliding mode controller (SMC) is designed to attenuate the vibration induced by initial tip displacement which is equal to 15 mm. It is designed based on the balance realization reduction method where three states are selected for the reduced model from the 24th states that describe the c
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