Variation orders are an on-going phenomenon in construction and industry projects worldwide, particularly in the province of Sulaimani, where the project's damage from cost and schedule overrun because of variation orders. However, the effect on project costs and time overrun of variation order has yet to be identified. This study evaluates the impact of variation orders on the cost and time off in the Sulaimani governorate. Two hundred twenty-eight projects from various construction sectors built between 2007-2012 were adopted to calculate the contract cost and schedule overruns due to variation orders. Data analysis was applied in the study were descriptive statistics. One-way ANOVA was also applied to determine whether the overrun of project cost and schedule significantly varied depending on project type, size, duration, location, and awarded years. The findings indicated that cost overruns are very common due to variation orders. 95.6% of the projects were studied being impacted, and overrun in project cost are also huge, with 16%. Time also overruns more common than cost overruns due to the variation orders. 98.7% of the projects were studied in Sulaimani were affected by time overrun with an average of 46.3% of initial duration observed. Findings also indicated that two out of five parameters measured in the analysis had a significant correlation with project cost overruns. Three out of five considered variables correlated with construction time overruns.
One-third of the total waste generated in the world is construction and demolition waste. Reducing the life cycle of building materials includes increasing their recycling and reuse by using recycled aggregates. By preventing, the need to open new aggregate quarries and reducing the amount of construction waste dumped into landfills, the use of recycled concrete aggregate in drum compacted concrete protects the environment. Four samples of PRCC were prepared for testing (compressive strength, tensile strength, flexural strength, density, water absorption, porosity) as the reference mix and (10, 15, and 20%) of fine recycled concrete aggregate as a partial replacement for fine natural aggregate by volume. The mix is designed according to
... Show MoreThe use of a communication network in the closed loop control systems has many advantages such as remotely controlling equipment, low cost, easy to maintenance, efficient information transmission, etc. However, the Networked Control System (NCS) has many drawbacks, such as network-induce end-to-end time delay and packet loss, which lead to significant degradation in controller performance and may result in instability. Aiming at solving performance degradation in NCS, this paper propose to take the advantages and strength of the conventional Proportional-Integral-Derivative (PID), Fuzzy Logic (FL), and Gain Scheduling (GS) fundamentals to design a Fuzzy-PID like-Gain Scheduling (F-PID-GS) control technique, which has been proved to be ef
... Show MoreThe reaction oisolated and characterized by elemental analysis (C,H,N) , 1H-NMR, mass spectra and Fourier transform (Ft-IR). The reaction of the (L-AZD) with: [VO(II), Cr(III), Mn(II), Co(II), Ni(II), Cu(II), Zn(II), Cd(II) and Hg(II)], has been investigated and was isolated as tri nuclear cluster and characterized by: Ft-IR, U. v- Visible, electrical conductivity, magnetic susceptibilities at 25 Co, atomic absorption and molar ratio. Spectroscopic evidence showed that the binding of metal ions were through azide and carbonyl moieties resulting in a six- coordinating metal ions in [Cr (III), Mn (II), Co (II) and Ni (II)]. The Vo (II), Cu (II), Zn (II), Cd (II) and Hg (II) were coordinated through azide group only forming square pyramidal
... Show MoreIn this paper we present an operational computer vision system for real-time motion detection and recording that can be used in surveillance system. The system captures a video of a scene and identifies the frames that contains motion and record them in such a way that only the frames that is important to us is recorded and a report is made in the form of a movie is made and can be displayed. All parts that are captured by the camera are recorded to compare both movies. This serves as both a proof-of- concept and a verification of other existing algorithms for motion detection. Motion frames are detected using frame differencing. The results of the experiments with the system indicate the ability to minimize some of the problems false detec
... Show MoreThe rise in the general level of prices in Iraq makes the local commodity less able to compete with other commodities, which leads to an increase in the amount of imports and a decrease in the amount of exports, since it raises demand for foreign currencies while decreasing demand for the local currency, which leads to a decrease in the exchange rate of the local currency in exchange for an increase in the exchange rate of currencies. This is one of the most important factors affecting the determination of the exchange rate and its fluctuations. This research deals with the currency of the European Euro and its impact against the Iraqi dinar. To make an accurate prediction for any process, modern methods can be used through which
... Show MoreIn this research Artificial Neural Network (ANN) technique was applied to study the filtration process in water treatment. Eight models have been developed and tested using data from a pilot filtration plant, working under different process design criteria; influent turbidity, bed depth, grain size, filtration rate and running time (length of the filtration run), recording effluent turbidity and head losses. The ANN models were constructed for the prediction of different performance criteria in the filtration process: effluent turbidity, head losses and running time. The results indicate that it is quite possible to use artificial neural networks in predicting effluent turbidity, head losses and running time in the filtration process, wi
... Show MoreMethods of speech recognition have been the subject of several studies over the past decade. Speech recognition has been one of the most exciting areas of the signal processing. Mixed transform is a useful tool for speech signal processing; it is developed for its abilities of improvement in feature extraction. Speech recognition includes three important stages, preprocessing, feature extraction, and classification. Recognition accuracy is so affected by the features extraction stage; therefore different models of mixed transform for feature extraction were proposed. The properties of the recorded isolated word will be 1-D, which achieve the conversion of each 1-D word into a 2-D form. The second step of the word recognizer requires, the
... Show MoreOne of the wellbore instability problems in vertical wells are breakouts in Zubair oilfield. Breakouts, if exceeds its critical limits will produce problems such as loss circulation which will add to the non-productive time (NPT) thus increasing loss in costs and in total revenues. In this paper, three of the available rock failure criteria (Mohr-Coulomb, Mogi-Coulomb and Modified-Lade) are used to study and predict the occurrence of the breakouts. It is found that there is an increase over the allowable breakout limit in breakout width in Tanuma shaly formation and it was predicted using Mohr-Coulomb criterion. An increase in the pore pressure was predicted in Tanuma shaly formation, thus; a new mud weight and casing pr
... Show MoreMinimizing the power consumption of electronic systems is one of the most critical concerns in the design of integrated circuits for very large-scale integration (VLSI). Despite the reality that VLSI design is known for its compact size, low power, low price, excellent dependability, and high functionality, the design stage remains difficult to improve in terms of time and power. Several optimization algorithms have been designed to tackle the present issues in VLSI design. This study discusses a bi-objective optimization technique for circuit partitioning based on a genetic algorithm. The motivation for the proposed research is derived from the basic concept that, if some portions of a circuit's system are deactivated during th
... Show MoreAutonomous motion planning is important area of robotics research. This type of planning relieves human operator from tedious job of motion planning. This reduces the possibility of human error and increase efficiency of whole process.
This research presents a new algorithm to plan path for autonomous mobile robot based on image processing techniques by using wireless camera that provides the desired image for the unknown environment . The proposed algorithm is applied on this image to obtain a optimal path for the robot. It is based on the observation and analysis of the obstacles that lying in the straight path between the start and the goal point by detecting these obstacles, analyzing and studying their shapes, positions and
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