Measurement of construction performance is essential to a clear image of the present situation. This monitoring by the management team is necessary to identify locations where performance is exceptionally excellent or poor and to identify the primary reasons so that the lessons gained may be exported to the firm and its progress strengthened. This research attempts to construct an integrated mathematical model utilizing one of the recent methodologies for dealing with the fuzzy representation of experts’ knowledge and judgment considering hesitancy called spherical fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (SFAHP) method to assess the contractor’s performance per the project performance parameters (cost, schedule, quality, leadership, and change management). At the same time, most project control systems are currently applied through software like Primavera P6 or MS Project. These look at a project’s cost and schedule status by following the earned value analysis for finding the performance. Based on decision makers’ preferences, the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) may be used to arrive at the optimum conclusion. AHP approaches are discussed, including AHP, grey-AHP, fuzzy-AHP, and SFAHP weights comparison. Calculation results showed that the spherical fuzzy approach differs significantly from the other approaches where it considers the decision maker’s hesitation when making linguistic multicriteria decisions and then, as a result, recommends applying periodically for performance measurement. This model can be viewed as a valuable way to help the decision-making stakeholders in the construction sector do the best job about critical issues at a suitable time.
Olanzapine (OLZ) is classified as a typical antipsychotic drug utilized for the treatment of schizophrenia. Its oral bioavailability is 60% due to its low solubility and pre-systemic metabolism. Hence, the present work aims to formulate and evaluate OLZ nanoparticles dissolving microneedles (MNs) for transdermal delivery to overcome the problems associated with drug administration orally. OLZ nanoparticles were prepared by the nanoprecipitation method. The optimized OLZ nanoparticle formula was utilized for the fabrication of dissolving MNs by loading OLZ nanodispersion into polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) micromould cavities, followed by casting the polymeric solution of polyvinylpyrrolidone(PVP-K30) and polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) to form
... Show MoreAs cities across the world grow and the mobility of populations increases, there has also been a corresponding increase in the number of vehicles on roads. The result of this has been a proliferation of challenges for authorities with regard to road traffic management. A consequence of this has been congestion of traffic, more accidents, and pollution. Accidents are a still major cause of death, despite the development of sophisticated systems for traffic management and other technologies linked with vehicles. Hence, it is necessary that a common system for accident management is developed. For instance, traffic congestion in most urban areas can be alleviated by the real-time planning of routes. However, the designing of an efficie
... Show MoreRock engineers widely use the uniaxial compressive strength (UCS) of rocks in designing
surface and underground structures. The procedure for measuring this rock strength has been
standardized by both the International Society for Rock Mechanics (ISRM) and American Society
for Testing and Materials (ASTM), Akram and Bakar(2007).
In this paper, an experimental study was performed to correlate of Point Load Index ( Is(50))
and Pulse Wave Velocity (Vp) to the Unconfined Compressive Strength (UCS) of Rocks. The effect
of several parameters was studied. Point load test, Unconfined Compressive Strength (UCS) and
Pulse Wave Velocity (Vp) were used for testing several rock samples with different diameters.
The predicted e
Due to the huge variety of 5G services, Network slicing is promising mechanism for dividing the physical network resources in to multiple logical network slices according to the requirements of each user. Highly accurate and fast traffic classification algorithm is required to ensure better Quality of Service (QoS) and effective network slicing. Fine-grained resource allocation can be realized by Software Defined Networking (SDN) with centralized controlling of network resources. However, the relevant research activities have concentrated on the deep learning systems which consume enormous computation and storage requirements of SDN controller that results in limitations of speed and accuracy of traffic classification mechanism. To fill thi
... Show MoreIn order to promote sustainable steel-concrete composite structures, special shear connectors that can facilitate deconstruction are needed. A lockbolt demountable shear connector (LB-DSC), including a grout-filled steel tube embedded in the concrete slab and fastened to a geometrically compatible partial-thread bolt, which is bolted on the steel section's top flange of a composite beam, was proposed. The main drawback of previous similar demountable bolts is the sudden slip of the bolt inside its hole. This bolt has a locked conical seat lug that is secured inside a predrilled compatible counter-sunk hole in the steel section's flange to provide a non-slip bolt-flange connection. Deconstruction is achieved by demounting the tube from the t
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