Variation orders are an on-going phenomenon in construction and industry projects worldwide, particularly in the province of Sulaimani, where the project's damage from cost and schedule overrun because of variation orders. However, the effect on project costs and time overrun of variation order has yet to be identified. This study evaluates the impact of variation orders on the cost and time off in the Sulaimani governorate. Two hundred twenty-eight projects from various construction sectors built between 2007-2012 were adopted to calculate the contract cost and schedule overruns due to variation orders. Data analysis was applied in the study were descriptive statistics. One-way ANOVA was also applied to determine w

This paper presents a cognition path planning with control algorithm design for a nonholonomic wheeled mobile robot based on Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm. The aim of this work is to propose the circular roadmap (CRM) method to plan and generate optimal path with free navigation as well as to propose a nonlinear MIMO-PID-MENN controller in order to track the wheeled mobile robot on the reference path. The PSO is used to find an online tune the control parameters of the proposed controller to get the best torques actions for the wheeled mobile robot. The numerical simulation results based on the Matlab package show that the proposed structure has a precise and highly accurate distance of the generated refere

Dam operation and management have become more complex recently because of the need for considering hydraulic structure sustainability and environmental protect on. An Earthfill dam that includes a powerhouse system is considered as a significant multipurpose hydraulic structure. Understanding the effects of running hydropower plant turbines on the dam body is one of the major safety concerns for earthfill dams. In this research, dynamic analysis of earthfill dam, integrated with a hydropower plant system containing six vertical Kaplan turbines (i.e., Haditha dam), is investigated. In the first stage of the study, ANSYS-CFX was used to represent one vertical Kaplan turbine unit by designing a three-dimensional (3-D) finite element (F

This paper introduces the concept of fuzzy σ-ring as a generalization of fuzzy σ-algebra and basic properties; examples of this concept have been given.  As the first result, it has been proved that every  σ-algebra over a fuzzy set x*  is a  fuzzy σ-ring-over a fuzzy set x*  and construct their converse by example. Furthermore, the fuzzy ring  concept has been studied to generalize fuzzy algebra and its relation. Investigating  that the concept of fuzzy  σ-Ring is a stronger form of a fuzzy ring  that is every fuzzy σ-Ring over a fuzzy set x* is a fuzzy ring over a fuzzy set x* and construct their converse by example. In addition, the idea of the smallest, as an important property in the study of real analysis, is studied

The increasing population growth resulting in the tremendous increase in consumption of fuels, energy, and petrochemical products and coupled with the depletion in conventional crude oil reserves and production make it imperative for Nigeria to explore her bitumen reserves so as to meet her energy and petrochemicals needs. Samples of Agbabu bitumen were subjected to thermal cracking in a tubular steel reactor operated at 10 bar pressure to investigate the effect of temperature on the cracking reaction. The gas produced was analyzed in a Gas Chromatograph while the liquid products were subjected to Gas Chromatography-Mass Spectrometry (GC-MS) analysis. Heptane was the dominant gas produced in bitumen cracking at all temperatures and the r

conventional FCM algorithm does not fully utilize the spatial information in the image. In this research, we use a FCM algorithm that incorporates spatial information into the membership function for clustering. The spatial function is the summation of the membership functions in the neighborhood of each pixel under consideration. The advantages of the method are that it is less
sensitive to noise than other techniques, and it yields regions more homogeneous than those of other methods. This technique is a powerful method for noisy image segmentation.