Controlling cost in construction projects is an essential issue. This study investigates the most critical problems that cause weakness in cost control in Iraqi construction projects. The quantitative technique was used by conducting a survey directed to professionals who work on construction projects. One hundred and sixty-four questionnaire forms were distributed to private sector companies, government companies, and government institutions, and the responses were subjected to the required statistical analysis. The results indicate that the most influential factors are the weakness in keeping up with the use of modern concepts, methods, and technologies, the delay in receiving the amounts due for work done from the owner, fluctuat

This paper represents an experimental study on the application of smart control represented by the use of the fuzzy logic controller. Two-link flexible manipulators that are used in airspace and military applications are made of flexible materials characterized by low frequency and damping ratio. To solve this problem, this paper proposes the use of smart materials (piezoelectric transducers), where each link is bonded with a pair of piezoelectric transducers that act as a sensor and another as an actuator. As the arm vibrates because of the movement generated by the motor, this voltage is controlled by a regulator inside the LABVIEW® 2020 software and sends the output control voltage to the piezoelectric actuator. Experimental results

In this article, a continuous terminal sliding mode control algorithm is proposed for servo motor systems. A novel full-order terminal sliding mode surface is proposed based on the bilimit homogeneous property, such that the sliding motion is finite-time stable independent of the system’s initial condition. A new continuous terminal sliding mode control algorithm is proposed to guarantee that the system states reach the sliding surface in finitetime. Not only the robustness is guaranteed by the proposed controller but also the continuity makes the control algorithm more suitable for the servo mechanical systems. Finally, a numerical example is presented to depict the advantages of the proposed control algorithm. An application in the rota

Tor (The Onion Routing) network was designed to enable users to browse the Internet anonymously. It is known for its anonymity and privacy security feature against many agents who desire to observe the area of users or chase users’ browsing conventions. This anonymity stems from the encryption and decryption of Tor traffic. That is, the client’s traffic should be subject to encryption and decryption before the sending and receiving process, which leads to delay and even interruption in data flow. The exchange of cryptographic keys between network devices plays a pivotal and critical role in facilitating secure communication and ensuring the integrity of cryptographic procedures. This essential process is time-consuming, which causes del

Energy efficiency is a significant aspect in designing robust routing protocols for wireless sensor networks (WSNs). A reliable routing protocol has to be energy efficient and adaptive to the network size. To achieve high energy conservation and data aggregation, there are two major techniques, clusters and chains. In clustering technique, sensor networks are often divided into non-overlapping subsets called clusters. In chain technique, sensor nodes will be connected with the closest two neighbors, starting with the farthest node from the base station till the closest node to the base station. Each technique has its own advantages and disadvantages which motivate some researchers to come up with a hybrid routing algorit

In recent years, the number of applications utilizing mobile wireless sensor networks (WSNs) has increased, with the intent of localization for the purposes of monitoring and obtaining data from hazardous areas. Location of the event is very critical in WSN, as sensing data is almost meaningless without the location information. In this paper, two Monte Carlo based localization schemes termed MCL and MSL* are studied. MCL obtains its location through anchor nodes whereas MSL* uses both anchor nodes and normal nodes. The use of normal nodes would increase accuracy and reduce dependency on anchor nodes, but increases communication costs. For this reason, we introduce a new approach called low communication cost schemes to reduce communication