In the field of construction project management, time and cost are the most important factors to be considered in planning every project, and their relationship is complex. The total cost for each project is the sum of the direct and indirect cost. Direct cost commonly represents labor, materials, equipment, etc.
Indirect cost generally represents overhead cost such as supervision, administration, consultants, and interests. Direct cost grows at an increasing rate as the project time is reduced from its original planned time. However, indirect cost continues for the life of the project and any reduction in project time means a reduction in indirect cost. Therefore, there is a trade-off between the time and cost for completing construction activities.
In this research, modeling of time-cost optimization, generating global optimum solution for time and cost problem, and lowering construction time and cost using ant colony optimization algorithm
Radio observations from astronomical sources like supernovae became one the most important sources of information about the physical properties of those objects. However, such radio observations are affected by various types of noise such as those from sky, background, receiver, and the system itself. Therefore, it is essential to eliminate or reduce these undesired noise from the signals in order to ensure accurate measurements and analysis of radio observations. One of the most commonly used methods for reducing the noise is to use a noise calibrator. In this study, the 3-m Baghdad University Radio Telescope (BURT) has been used to observe crab nebula with and without using a calibration unit in order to investigate its impact on the sign
... Show MoreA strong sign language recognition system can break down the barriers that separate hearing and speaking members of society from speechless members. A novel fast recognition system with low computational cost for digital American Sign Language (ASL) is introduced in this research. Different image processing techniques are used to optimize and extract the shape of the hand fingers in each sign. The feature extraction stage includes a determination of the optimal threshold based on statistical bases and then recognizing the gap area in the zero sign and calculating the heights of each finger in the other digits. The classification stage depends on the gap area in the zero signs and the number of opened fingers in the other signs as well as
... Show MoreThis paper is devoted to investigate the effect of internal curing technique on the properties of self-compacting concrete (SCC). In this study, SCC is produced by using silica fume (SF) as partial replacement by weight of cement with percentage of (5%), sand is partially replaced by volume with saturated fine lightweight aggregate (LWA) which is thermostone chips as internal curing material in three percentages of (5%, 10% and 15%) for SCC, two external curing conditions water and air. The experimental work was divided into three parts: in the first part, the workability tests of fresh SCC were conducted. The second part included conducting compressive strength test and modulus of rupture test at ages of (7, 28 and 90). The third part i
... Show MoreIn this work, the nano particles of Na-A zeolite were synthesized by sol –gel method. The samples were characterized by X-ray diffraction (XRD), X-ray luorescence (XRF), Surface area and pore volume, Atomic Force Microscope (AFM) and Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy (FTIR). Results show that the nano A zeolite is with average crystal size is 74.77 nm., Si/Al ratio 1.03, BET surface area was 581.211m2/g and the pore volume for NaA was found equal to 0.355cm3/g.
<p>Combating the COVID-19 epidemic has emerged as one of the most promising healthcare the world's challenges have ever seen. COVID-19 cases must be accurately and quickly diagnosed to receive proper medical treatment and limit the pandemic. Imaging approaches for chest radiography have been proven in order to be more successful in detecting coronavirus than the (RT-PCR) approach. Transfer knowledge is more suited to categorize patterns in medical pictures since the number of available medical images is limited. This paper illustrates a convolutional neural network (CNN) and recurrent neural network (RNN) hybrid architecture for the diagnosis of COVID-19 from chest X-rays. The deep transfer methods used were VGG19, DenseNet121
... Show MoreIn Computer-based applications, there is a need for simple, low-cost devices for user authentication. Biometric authentication methods namely keystroke dynamics are being increasingly used to strengthen the commonly knowledge based method (example a password) effectively and cheaply for many types of applications. Due to the semi-independent nature of the typing behavior it is difficult to masquerade, making it useful as a biometric. In this paper, C4.5 approach is used to classify user as authenticated user or impostor by combining unigraph features (namely Dwell time (DT) and flight time (FT)) and digraph features (namely Up-Up Time (UUT) and Down-Down Time (DDT)). The results show that DT enhances the performance of digraph features by i
... Show MoreAll-optical canonical logic units at 40 Gb/s using bidirectional four-wave mixing (FWM) in highly nonlinear fiber are proposed and experimentally demonstrated. Clear temporal waveforms and correct pattern streams are successfully observed in the experiment. This scheme can reduce the amount of nonlinear devices and enlarge the computing capacity compared with general ones. The numerical simulations are made to analyze the relationship between the FWM efficiency and the position of two interactional signals. © 2015 Chinese Laser Press
Cooling towers is one of the most important unit in industry, they are used to dispose heat from cooling media used in the integrated units. The choice of the cooling media plays recently an important rule due to fresh-water scarcity. The use of saline as a cooling media become of growing interest, but the corrosion problem has to be taken in consideration. In this study the simultaneous effect of cooling tower operation parameters on the corrosion rate of mild-steel is considered. The role of NaCl content is found to be pronounced more than the working solution temperature and flowrate. The corrosion of mild-steel in these studied factors had shown an interesting result especially with the NaCl% content. Firstly, there was an increase in t
... Show MoreWhen soft tissue planning is important, usually, the Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is a medical imaging technique of selection. In this work, we show a modern method for automated diagnosis depending on a magnetic resonance images classification of the MRI. The presented technique has two main stages; features extraction and classification. We obtained the features corresponding to MRI images implementing Discrete Wavelet Transformation (DWT), inverse and forward, and textural properties, like rotation invariant texture features based on Gabor filtering, and evaluate the meaning of every
... Show MoreThe -multiple mixing ratios of γ-transitions from levels of populated in the are calculated in the present work by using the a2-ratio methods. We used the experimental coefficient (a2) for two γ -transitions from the same initial state, the statistical tensor, which is related to the a2-coefficient would be the same for the two transitions. This method was used in a previous work for pure transitions or which can be considered pure. In these cases the multiple mixing ratios for the second transition ( ) equal zero, but in our work we applied this method for mixed γ-transitions and then the multiple mixing ratio ( ) is known for one transition. Then we calculate the ( ) value and versareversa. The we
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