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
The main risks arising from the WTO Agreement are the inequality and lack of competitiveness of most pharmaceutical goods, as well as the fact that Iraq is a net importer of medicines that are at the core of consumer needs, The subject matter of the Convention on the Protection of Intellectual Property Rights and its implications for the pharmaceutical industry, in particular, coinciding with the situation of financial and administrative corruption, all of which has resulted in drug fraud in the Iraqi market and its impact on public health. The control of medical technology, the persistence of the technological gap and its effects on high price levels, and the fact that domestic drug producers are obliged to obtain production licenses from
... Show MorePersuasion is a process studied by many scholars from the Greek time until the present. One persuasion strategy is metadiscourse, which refers to the writers' awareness of their text, the way they present themselves to the readers. The writers use metadiscourse markers to help the readers understand the real meaning of the text (Hyland 2005). The paper carries out a qualitative and quantitative analysis of the employment of persuasive metadiscourse markers in two English trade agreements and two Arabic agreements has provided in terms of Hyland's (2005) model of interactive and interactional markers. The aim is to find out whether all types of metadiscourse markers are used or not, and also to see whether English or Arabic employs
... Show MoreThis project presents an enhanced Iraqi vehicle plate identification system, incorporating digital processing technologies and the XOR Auto-Associative Memory advanced associative memory algorithm, towards a fast and efficient performance under diverse conditions of imagery. The system consists of three major stages: identification of the panel area, or localization, using edge transformations and morphological operations; symbol segmentation, or segmentation, based on horizontal and vertical projections for the exact extraction of numbers and letters; and finally, recognition use of XOR operations and a binary distance criterion known as Hamming Distance. The model was tested on 420 images of panels in different scenarios of lighting
... 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
The blade pitch angle (BPA) in wind turbine (WT) is controlled to maximize output power generation above the rated wind speed (WS). In this paper, four types of controllers are suggested and compared for BPA controller in WT: PID controller (PIDC), type-1 fuzzy logic controller (T1-FLC), type-2 fuzzy logic controller (T2-FLC), and hybrid fuzzy-PID controller (FPIDC). The Mamdani and Sugeno fuzzy inference systems (FIS) have been compared to find the best inference system used in FLC. Genetic algorithm (GA) and Particle swarm optimization algorithm (PSO) are used to find the optimal tuning of the PID parameter. The results of500-kw horizontal-axis wind turbine show that PIDC based on PSO can reduced 2.81% in summation error of power
... 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 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 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
... 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 MoreMany 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
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