Green buildings are considered more efficient than traditional buildings due to the incorporated techniques and the multidisciplinary specializations required to comply with their specifications, in addition to the advanced commissioning, which undergoes before handing over the buildings to the owners to ensure requirements conformance. As a result, the appropriate selection of a project delivery system acts as the essential factor that affects the performance of the project. This research aims at building a system that helps to select the best method to implement green buildings. Through studying the recent research approaches in project delivery systems, the factors that affect the selection of the optimal implementation method for green buildings have been identified; expert interviews have been done to study and analyze the main influential factors that affect the selection of the best method for implementing green buildings. The results of interviews indicate that the main influential factors are as follows: The occurrence of economic crises in the country, availability of financial capacity for the contractor and the owner, the lack of previous experience in similar projects, hiring an incompetent contractor, differences between design drawings among all disciplines, and providing qualified contractors, subcontractors, suppliers and craftsmen with sufficient qualifications early in the project. Depending on these main factors, a software system is built to choose the best delivery system for green building projects. This research encourages future works to focus on the quality and performance of green buildings and lays out the foundation for academic researchers to explore new techniques for evaluating the project delivery systems as well as supporting the decision-makers to choose the best.
The approach of greening existing buildings, is an urgent necessity, because the greening operation provides the speed and optimal efficiency in the environmental performance, as well as keeping up with the global green architecture revolution. Therefore, greening existing buildings in Iraq is important for trends towards renewable energies, because of what the country went through economic conditions and crises and wars which kept the country away from what took place globally in this issue. The research problem is: insufficient knowledge about the importance and the mechanism of the greening of existing buildings, including its environmental and economic dimensions, by rationalization of energy consumption and preservi
... Show MoreVariable-Length Subnet Masks (VLSM), often referred to as "subnetting a subnet", is used to maximize addressing efficiency. The network administrator is able to use a long mask on networks with few hosts, and a short mask on subnets with many hosts. This addressing scheme allows growth and does not involve wasting addresses. VLSM gives a way of subnetting a network with
minimal loses of IP addresses for a specific range. Unfortunately, the network administrator has to perform several mathematical steps (or use charts) to get the required results from VLSM. In this paper, a simple graph simulator is proposed (using Visual Basic 6.0 Language) to perform all the required mathematical steps and to display the obtained required informatio
In developing countries, individual students and researchers are not able to afford the high price of the subscription to the international publishers, like JSTOR, ELSEVIER,…; therefore the governments and/or universities of those countries aim to purchase one global subscription to the international publishers to provide their educational resources at a cheaper price, or even freely, to all students and researchers of those institutions. For realizing this concept, we must build a system that sits between the publishers and the users (students or researchers) and act as a gatekeeper and a director of information: this system must register its users and must have an adequate security to e
... Show MoreVariable-Length Subnet Masks (VLSM), often referred to as "subnetting a subnet", is used to maximize addressing efficiency. The network administrator is able to use a long mask on networks with few hosts, and a short mask on subnets with many hosts. This addressing scheme allows growth and does not involve wasting addresses. VLSM gives a way of subnetting a network with minimal loses of IP addresses for a specific range. Unfortunately, the network administrator has to perform several mathematical steps (or use charts) to get the required results from VLSM. In this paper, a simple graph simulator is proposed (using Visual Basic 6.0 Language) to perform all the required mathematical steps and to display the obtained required information (the
... Show MoreThe purpose of this work is to concurrently estimate the UVvisible spectra of binary combinations of piroxicam and mefenamic acid using the chemometric approach. To create the model, spectral data from 73 samples (with wavelengths between 200 and 400 nm) were employed. A two-layer artificial neural network model was created, with two neurons in the output layer and fourteen neurons in the hidden layer. The model was trained to simulate the concentrations and spectra of piroxicam and mefenamic acid. For piroxicam and mefenamic acid, respectively, the Levenberg-Marquardt algorithm with feed-forward back-propagation learning produced root mean square errors of prediction of 0.1679 μg/mL and 0.1154 μg/mL, with coefficients of determination of
... Show MoreMen with castration-resistant prostate cancer (CRPC) face poor prognosis and increased risk of treatment-incurred adverse effects resulting in one of the highest mortalities among patient population globally. Immune cells act as double-edged sword depending on the tumor microenvironment, which leads to increased infiltration of pro-tumor (M2) macrophages. Development of new immunomodulatory therapeutic agents capable of targeting the tumor microenvironment, and hence orchestrating the differentiation of pro-tumor M2 macrophages to anti-tumor M1, would substantially improve treatment outcomes of CRPC patients. We report, herein, Mangiferin functionalized gold nanoparticles (MGF-AuNPs) and its
Density functional theory (DFT) calculations were used to evaluate the capability of Glutamine (Gln) and its derivative chemicals as inhibitors for the anti-corrosive behavior of iron. The current work is devoted to scrutinizing reactivity descriptors (both local and global) of Gln, two states of neutral and protonated. Also, the change of Gln upon the incorporation into dipeptides was investigated. Since the number of reaction centers has increased, an enhancement in dipeptides’ inhibitory effect was observed. Thus, the adsorption of small-scale peptides and glutamine amino acids on Fe surfaces (1 1 1) was performed, and characteristics such as adsorption energies and the configuration with the highest stability and lowest energy were ca
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