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
These days, it is crucial to discern between different types of human behavior, and artificial intelligence techniques play a big part in that. The characteristics of the feedforward artificial neural network (FANN) algorithm and the genetic algorithm have been combined to create an important working mechanism that aids in this field. The proposed system can be used for essential tasks in life, such as analysis, automation, control, recognition, and other tasks. Crossover and mutation are the two primary mechanisms used by the genetic algorithm in the proposed system to replace the back propagation process in ANN. While the feedforward artificial neural network technique is focused on input processing, this should be based on the proce
... Show MoreThis paper proposes improving the structure of the neural controller based on the identification model for nonlinear systems. The goal of this work is to employ the structure of the Modified Elman Neural Network (MENN) model into the NARMA-L2 structure instead of Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) model in order to construct a new hybrid neural structure that can be used as an identifier model and a nonlinear controller for the SISO linear or nonlinear systems. Two learning algorithms are used to adjust the parameters weight of the hybrid neural structure with its serial-parallel configuration; the first one is supervised learning algorithm based Back Propagation Algorithm (BPA) and the second one is an intelligent algorithm n
... Show MoreAbstract The research investigates in detail the fascinating story of its title character, which may work as an allegory for Africa itself in its past. Ama Ata Aidoo is miscellaneous writers who wrote in different literary genre like drama , short stories novel and , poetry and criticism . She is also an active feminist. Aidoo is against the colonial practice and its influence on African minds. Aidoo's play Anowa confronts painful issues in Africa's past, mostly those of the slave trade. She goes further to tackle issues of patriarchal domination and African feminism, like the relationships between individuals and society, women and motherhood, men and women, husbands and wives, mothers and daughters, and above all the future invasion
... Show MorePing message focused on highlighting the fact commodity trading in Iraq, and increased exposure to world merchandise trade imbalance, which dominate Iraq's foreign trade major commodity is oil, and therefore the inability of Iraq to control financial revenue as a result of the fluctuations in the international market, the shortage of commodity products will lead inevitably to the weakness in the ability of the local market to meet the internal demand and due to the lack of flexible production machine For agricultural, industrial and economic sectors are responding to changes in the domestic or external demand which will open the door to merchandise imports to invade these markets, since the adoption of the Iraq oil exports,
... Show MoreBackground: One of the recommended methods for reducing aerosol contamination during the daily regular usage of high-speed turbine and ultrasonic scaling is the use of preprocedural mouth rinse. Several agents have been investigated as a preprocedural mouth rinse. Chlorhexidine significantly reduce the viable microbial content of aerosol when used as a preprocedural rinse. Studies have shown that cetylpridinum chloride (CPC) mouthwash is equally effective as chlorhexidine in reducing plaque and gingivitis. This study compared the effect of 0.07% CPC to 0.2% chlorhexidine gluconate (CHX) as preprocedural mouth rinses in reducing the aerosol contamination by high-speed turbine. Materials and Methods: 36 patients were divided into three gro
... Show MoreIt is estimated that over the next few decades, EOR will be used for the more than 50% of oil production in the US and worldwide. From these, in reservoir with viscositites ranging between 10 – 150 mPa.s, polymer flooding is suggsted as the EOR method. Therefore, there is an upper limit to the recommended range of reservoir oil viscosities for polymer flooding. To address the issue of this limitation of polymer injectivity and pumping efficiency, we propose a novel method. The method involves the use of Supramolecular Systems, which are composed of long-chain aminoacids and maleic acids post complexation. Their unique feature of resersible viscosities allows the operator to overcome
In 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
Among 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 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 MoreStuck 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
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