This paper demonstrates an experimental and numerical study aimed at comparing the influence of openings of different configurations on the flexural behavior of reinforced concrete gable roof beams. The experimental program consisted of testing six simply supported gable beams subjected to mid-point concentrated load. The variable which has been investigated in this work was opening's configuration (quadrilateral or circular) with the same upper and lower chords depth. The results indicate improvement in the beams’ flexural behavior when circular openings were used compared with that of quadrilateral openings, represented by an increase in ultimate load capacity and a decrease in deflection at the service limit. Also, there was an

In this paper we investigate the use of two types of local search methods (LSM), the Simulated Annealing (SA) and Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO), to solve the problems ( ) and . The results of the two LSMs are compared with the Branch and Bound method and good heuristic methods. This work shows the good performance of SA and PSO compared with the exact and heuristic methods in terms of best solutions and CPU time.

Two unsupervised classifiers for optimum multithreshold are presented; fast Otsu and k-means. The unparametric methods produce an efficient procedure to separate the regions (classes) by select optimum levels, either on the gray levels of image histogram (as Otsu classifier), or on the gray levels of image intensities(as k-mean classifier), which are represent threshold values of the classes. In order to compare between the experimental results of these classifiers, the computation time is recorded and the needed iterations for k-means classifier to converge with optimum classes centers. The variation in the recorded computation time for k-means classifier is discussed.

        In this paper, estimation of system reliability of the multi-components in stress-strength model R_(s,k) is considered, when the stress and strength are independent random variables and follows the Exponentiated Weibull Distribution (EWD) with known first shape parameter θ and, the second shape parameter α is unknown using different estimation methods. Comparisons among the proposed estimators through  Monte Carlo simulation technique were made depend on mean squared error (MSE)  criteria

      In this study, different methods were used for estimating location parameter  and scale parameter for extreme value distribution, such as maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) , method of moment  estimation (ME),and approximation  estimators based on percentiles which is called white method in estimation, as the extreme value distribution is one of exponential distributions. Least squares estimation (OLS) was used, weighted least squares estimation (WLS), ridge regression estimation (Rig), and adjusted ridge regression estimation (ARig) were used. Two parameters for expected value to the percentile  as estimation for distribution f