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
Stuck pipe is a prevalent and costly issue in drilling operations, with the potential to cost the petroleum industry billions of dollars annually. To reduce the likelihood of this issue, efforts have been made to identify the causes of stuck pipes. The main mechanisms that cause stuck pipes include drill cutting of the formation, inappropriate hole-cleaning, wellbore instability, and differential sticking forces, particularly in highly deviated wellbores. The significant consequences of a stuck pipe include an increase in well costs and Non-Productive Time (NPT), and in the worst-case scenario, the loss of a wellbore section and down-hole equipment, or the need to sidetrack, plug, or abandon the well. This paper provides a comprehensive
... Show MoreAmong the available chaotic modulation schemes, differential chaos shift keying (DSCK) offers the perfect noise performance. The power consumption of DCSK is high since it sends chaotic signal in both of 1 and 0 transmission, so it does not represent the optimal choice for some applications like indoor wireless sensing where power consumption is a critical issue. In this paper a novel noncoherent chaotic communication scheme called differential chaos on-off keying (DCOOK) is proposed as a solution of this problem. With the proposed scheme, the DCOOK signal have a structure similar to chaos on-off keying (COOK) scheme with improved performance in noisy and multipath channels by introducing the concept of differential coherency used in DCS
... Show MoreThis work revealed the spherical aromaticity of some inorganic E4 cages and their protonated E4H+ ions (E=N, P, As, Sb, and Bi). For this purpose, we employed several evaluations like (0D-1D) nucleus independent chemical shift (NICS), multidimensional (2D-3D) off-nucleus isotropic shielding σiso(r), and natural bond orbital (NBO) analysis. The magnetic calculations involved gauge-including atomic orbitals (GIAO) with two density functionals B3LYP and WB97XD, and basis sets of Jorge-ATZP, 6-311+G(d,p), and Lanl2DZp. The Jorge-ATZP basis set showed the best consistency. Our findings disclosed non-classical aromatic characters in the above molecules, which decreased from N to Bi cages. Also, the results showed more aromaticity in E4 than E4H+
... Show MoreBackground Median sternotomy is the gold standard incision for most cardiac operations. However, with the advent of minimal invasive surgery, a new approach emerged in cardiac surgery named mini-sternotomy and has been successfully used to perform a variety of operations.
The aim of this paper is to present our experience of using mini-sternotomy to harvest the left internal mammary artery (LIMA) for off-pump revascularization of the left anterior descending artery (LAD)
Methodology Over a 2-year period (October 2012-October 2014), 100 patients underwent coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG) via conventional median sternotomy (CMS) (n=80) and mini-sternotomy (MS) (n=20). The
... Show MoreIn recent decades, tremendous success has been achieved in the advancement of chemical admixtures for Portland cement concrete. Most efforts have concentrated on improving the properties of concrete and studying the factors that influence on these properties. Since the compressive strength is considered a valuable property and is invariably a vital element of the structural design, especially high early strength development which can be provide more benefits in concrete production, such as reducing construction time and labor and saving the formwork and energy. As a matter of fact, it is influenced as a most properties of concrete by several factors including water-cement ratio, cement type and curing methods employed.
Because of acce
A study to find the optimum separators pressures of separation stations has been performed. Stage separation of oil and gas is accomplished with a series of separators operating at sequentially reduced pressures. Liquid is discharged from a higher-pressure separator into the lower-pressure separator. The set of working separator pressures that yields maximum recovery of liquid hydrocarbon from the well fluid is the optimum set of pressures, which is the target of this work.
A computer model is used to find the optimum separator pressures. The model employs the Peng-Robinson equation of state (Peng and Robinson 1976) for volatile oil. The application of t
Many voices appeared in 1980 calling on Arabs and Muslims to play a positive and effective role in American society, and to form a strong Arab pressure group that would confront Zionist pressure groups and limit their influence on American foreign policy. American public opinion, the American government, and the American media. In the late eighties and early nineties, Muslims in the United States began a phase Establishing their political and media institutions, where (4) American Islamic institutions were founded: the Islamic Public Affairs Council, which was founded in 1988, the American-Islamic Council in 1990, the Council on American-Islamic Relations in 1994, and the American-Islamic Alliance in 1994. These institutions have worked to
... Show MoreThe investment environment is the incubator for all types of domestic and foreign investments, so if their determinants are encouraging, they increase the levels of investment flows and vice versa, as there is a relationship between the nature of the investment environment and the level of investment flows, and the determinants of the investment environment are numerous and the most important of which are security and political stability, and economic and financial factors that include relative stability In the exchange rate and inflation rates, the availability of banks and their development, transparency and integrity in administrative dealings and the lack of prevalence of administrative and financial corruption, and the clari
... Show MoreRecognition is one of the basic characteristics of human brain, and also for the living creatures. It is possible to recognize images, persons, or patterns according to their characteristics. This recognition could be done using eyes or dedicated proposed methods. There are numerous applications for pattern recognition such as recognition of printed or handwritten letters, for example reading post addresses automatically and reading documents or check reading in bank.
One of the challenges which faces researchers in character recognition field is the recognition of digits, which are written by hand. This paper describes a classification method for on-line handwrit
... Show MoreThere is no doubt that Agricultural Policy is the main responsible for the degrading in Agricultural sector in Iraq during the period 2003-2013, and that was very clear from magnitude of indicators because of little sharing of each of agricultural product in GDP because it was (9.38%) in average during the study period and the annual changing of it was negative (-5.82%), and there is increasing in deficit of trade balance in Agriculture during the study period about (4185.73) million US$, and the percentage of agricultural exports from total exports was (0.14%) in average only. The foreign trade policy in Agricultural products also cannot determine map of Revealed Comparative Advantage (RCA) of Agricultural products and crops. The study sh
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