Concrete structures are exposed to aggressive environmental conditions that lead to corrosion of the embedded reinforcement and pre-stressing steel. Consequently, the safety of concrete structures may be compromised, and this requires a significant budgets to repair and maintain critical infrastructure. Prediction of structural safety can lead to significant reductions in maintenance costs by maximizing the impact of investments. The aim of this paper is to establish a framework to assess the reliability of existing post-tensioned concrete bridges. A time-dependent reliability analysis of an existing post-tensioned involving the assessment of Ynys-y-Gwas bridge has been presented in this study. The main cause of failure of this bridge was c

      In this paper, the interplay among four population species is offered. The system consists of two competitive prey, predator and super predators. The application of the hypothesis of the Sotomayor theorem for local bifurcation around every equilibrium point is adopted. It is detected that the transcritical bifurcation could occur near most of the system's equilibrium points, while saddle-node and pitchfork bifurcation can not be accrued at any of them. Further, the conditions that guarantee the accruing Hopf bifurcation are carried out. Finally, some numerical analysis is illustrated to confirm the analytical results.

This study presents a mathematical model describing the interaction of gut bacteria in the participation of probiotics and antibiotics, assuming that some good bacteria become harmful through mutations due to antibiotic exposure. The qualitative analysis exposes twelve equilibrium points, such as a good-bacteria equilibrium, a bad-bacteria equilibrium, and a coexisting endemic equilibrium in which both bacteria exist while being exposed to antibiotics. The theory of the Sotomayor theorem is applied to study the local bifurcation around all possible equilibrium points. It’s noticed that the transcritical and saddle-node bifurcation could occur near some of the system’s equilibrium points, while pitchfork bifurcation cannot be accrued at

Determining the aerodynamic characteristics of iced airfoil is an important step in aircraft design.  The goal of this work is to study experimentally and numerically an iced airfoil to assess the aerodynamic penalties associated with presence of ice on the airfoil surface. Three iced shapes were tested on NACA 0012 straight wing at zero and non-zero angles of attack, at Reynolds No. equal to (3.36*105). The 2-D steady state continuity and momentum equations have been solved utilizing finite volume method to analyze the turbulent flow over a clean and iced airfoil. The results show that the ice shapes affected the aerodynamic characteristics due to the change in airfoil shape. The experimental results show that the horn iced airfoil

      In education, exams are used to asses students’ acquired knowledge; however, the manual assessment of exams consumes a lot of teachers’ time and effort. In addition, educational institutions recently leaned toward distance education and e-learning due the Coronavirus pandemic. Thus, they needed to conduct exams electronically, which requires an automated assessment system. Although it is easy to develop an automated assessment system for objective questions. However, subjective questions require answers comprised of free text and are harder to automatically assess since grading them needs to semantically compare the students’ answers with the correct ones. In this paper, we present an automatic short answer grading metho

The field of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is the process of converting an image of text into a machine-readable text format. The classification of Arabic manuscripts in general is part of this field. In recent years, the processing of Arabian image databases by deep learning architectures has experienced a remarkable development. However, this remains insufficient to satisfy the enormous wealth of Arabic manuscripts. In this research, a deep learning architecture is used to address the issue of classifying Arabic letters written by hand. The method based on a convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture as a self-extractor and classifier. Considering the nature of the dataset images (binary images), the contours of the alphabet

     This paper describes the application of consensus optimization for Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) system. Consensus algorithm is usually conducted within a certain number of iterations for a given graph topology. Nevertheless, the best Number of Iterations (NOI) to reach consensus is varied in accordance with any change in number of nodes or other parameters of . graph topology. As a result, a time consuming trial and error procedure will necessary be applied
to obtain best NOI. The implementation of an intellig ent optimization can effectively help to get the optimal NOI. The performance of the consensus algorithm has considerably been improved by the inclusion of Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO). As a case s

Mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs) are composed of mobile nodes communicating through wireless medium, without any fixed centralized infrastructure. Providing quality of service (QoS) support to multimedia streaming applications over MANETs is vital. This paper focuses on QoS support, provided by the stream control transmission protocol (SCTP) and the TCP-friendly rate control (TFRC) protocol to multimedia streaming applications over MANETs. In this study, three QoS parameters were considered jointly: (1) packet delivery ratio (PDR), (2) end-to-end delay, (3) and throughput. Specifically, the authors analyzed and compared the simulated performance of the SCTP and TFRC transport protocols for delivering multimedia streaming over MANETs.

Universal image stego-analytic has become an important issue due to the natural images features curse of dimensionality. Deep neural networks, especially deep convolution networks, have been widely used for the problem of universal image stegoanalytic design. This paper describes the effect of selecting suitable value for number of levels during image pre-processing with Dual Tree Complex Wavelet Transform. This value may significantly affect the detection accuracy which is obtained to evaluate the performance of the proposed system. The proposed system is evaluated using three content-adaptive methods, named Highly Undetetable steGO (HUGO), Wavelet Obtained Weights (WOW) and UNIversal WAvelet Relative Distortion (UNIWARD).
The obtain

Attacking a transferred data over a network is frequently happened millions time a day. To address this problem, a secure scheme is proposed which is securing a transferred data over a network. The proposed scheme uses two techniques to guarantee a secure transferring for a message. The message is encrypted as a first step, and then it is hided in a video cover.  The proposed encrypting technique is RC4 stream cipher algorithm in order to increase the message's confidentiality, as well as improving the least significant bit embedding algorithm (LSB) by adding an additional layer of security. The improvement of the LSB method comes by replacing the adopted sequential selection by a random selection manner of the frames and the pixels wit