Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Application of flow principles in the production management of construction sites

This thesis is concerned with the improvement of construction practices by studying the application in the sector of some core principles underlying current production management theories. The research is motivated by the recognition in recent literature that the best production practices world-wide have a common core. The core principles investigated in this research are the "reduction of cycle time", "reduction of variability", "increase of transparency" and "build of continuous improvement into the process". The fundamental rationale underlying these principles is the concept of flow where production is seen as composed of waiting, transporting, inspecting and transformation (processing) activities. According to this concept, transformation activities are the only ones that actually add value. Hence, all other activities should be reduced or eliminated from the flow whilst increasing the efficiency of transformation activities. The assessment of construction practices against the theory was carried out through six case studies, based in England and Brazil, and a complementary meta-case. Cross-case study analysis showed that construction already applies all heuristic approaches relating to the flow principles under study. However, the intra-case study analysis revealed a serious lack of integration among the literal replications identified in each of the case studies. Integration of practices matching the theory is critical since the evidence suggests that there is a correlation between production performance and the level of integration among literal replications. An additional case study investigated the issue of how to implement these principles in the practice of construction. The interaction with the host company happened through an Action Learning set supported by the Revans Centre for Action Learning and Research. The experiment showed that a combination of both "push" and "pull" learning seems to be an appropriate approach for introducing the principles in study in the construction sector. Top management positive support during "gestation" period was the most important factor for motivating people to "pull" the learning after the initial 'push' learning exercise.
The Feasibility of Devolving HR Functions to Line Managers in the Department of Justice, Equality & Law Reform.

Research issue: In 2006 the Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform published its Human Resource Management Strategy. In Section 8.3 of the Strategy one of the key objectives is to "Devolve the relevant HR functions to line managers in a structured, supportive and planned way and in consultation with Partnership". There was, however, no exploration of the issues around devolving HR functions in the civil service in general and no research conducted into the capacity and capability of line managers to take on the functions in DJELR in particular. The perception was that line managers were too busy with their operational responsibilities to take on what they would see as additional responsibilities relating to their staff and that they were not adequately trained or knowledgeable enough to fulfill "a HR role" effectively. This dissertation examines the feasibility of devolving HR functions to line managers in DJELR and attempts to ascertain if the capacity and capability exists within this group to take on HR functions. Design/methodology/approach: A quantitative methodological approach in the form of an online self-completing questionnaire was taken, focusing on the middle line-management group in DJELR. Findings: The capacity exists within the middle line management group in DJELR to take on HR functions but the research raises issues about the capability of the group in relation to undertaking those functions successfully. Practical Implications: The research informs the decision about devolving HR functions to line managers and suggests that it is feasible to devolve HR functions to line managers as they have the capacity to take on the functions. However, particular issues, notably in the area of training, need to be addressed prior to implementation as the capability does not exist within the group currently to knowledgeably and consistently carry out HR functions.
Numerical simulation of wind-induced dispersion of emissions from rooftop stacks

The precise prediction of plume concentration distribution on or near buildings is very important for building engineers to design proper exhaust stacks and set proper air intakes to avoid adverse air quality impacts. The present study simulates the dispersion of emissions from stacks in the neutrally stable atmospheric boundary layer (ABL) by FLUENT 6.1, a commercial computational fluid dynamics (CFD) code. Three case studies have been conducted. The first case involves a simulation of plume dispersion from one isolated stack. The second case is concerned with a simulation of plume dispersion from a flush stack located at the roof center of a cubic building. The third case involves a simulation of plume dispersion from a short stack located on the rooftop of a rectangular building with some rooftop structures. Numerical results are compared with some empirical formulae, such as the Gaussian model and ASHRAE model, and validated with some experimental data. The effects of the momentum ratio, the stack height, and the turbulent characteristics caused by the building on the plume behavior are discussed. Some numerical parametric studies have been carried out.
Evaluation of a California demonstration of an automated airport ground transportation information system

This report documents an evaluation study of a demonstration program sponsored by the Division of Aeronautics of the California Department of Transportation in which computer-based ground transportation information kiosks were installed in four California airports, in parallel with a similar program by the Los Angeles Department of Airports. The study included an analysis of kiosk use patterns derived from the logfiles of user keystrokes and various system actions that are automatically maintained by the kiosks, and surveys of both kiosk users and airport users in general to determine passenger awareness of the new information kiosks, identify passenger ground transportation information needs, evaluate user satisfaction with the information provided and determine general travel characteristics of kiosk users. The research also included an analysis of the use of different ground transportation modes at each of the demonstration airports over the year prior to the start of the demonstration and the first year of the demonstration, as well as at two control airports that did not participate in the demonstration. Finally, the study examined the costs involved in routine operation and maintenance of the kiosks, and made a number of recommendations on the future use of the kiosks and the need to preserve the information generated by the demonstration program.
LTPP DATA ANALYSIS: FACTORS AFFECTING PAVEMENT SMOOTHNESS

In this research project, data available in the Long Term Pavement Performance (LTPP) Information Management System (IMS) were used to determine the effect of factors such as design and rehabilitation parameters, climatic conditions, traffic levels, material properties, and extent and severity of distress that cause changes in pavement smoothness. For the purposes of this research, the International Roughness Index (IRI) was used as the measure of pavement smoothness. The LTPP program consists of two complementary programs, the General Pavement Studies (GPS) and Specific Pavement Studies (SPS). Chapter 1 of this project report provides an introduction. Chapter 2 presents the review of literature related to factors affecting pavement smoothness and roughness development in pavements. Chapter 3 presents the data elements that were selected for analysis and data synthesis methods that were used with the data obtained from the IMS. Chapter 4 presents the data analysis methods that were utilized during the study. Chapter 5 describes roughness characteristics of new pavements, and describes the results obtained from the SPS-1 and SPS-2 experiments. Chapter 6 describes roughness characteristics of rehabilitated pavements, and describes results obtained from SPS-5 and SPS-6 experiments. Chapter 7 presents the results obtained for GPS experiments in the first design phase, which are GPS experiments 1 through 5. Chapter 8 presents the results obtained for GPS experiments 6 and 7, which are overlaid pavements. Chapter 9 presents the conclusions and recommendations for future research.
Simulation of Wave Transformation in Vertical Permeable Structure

Wave motion in porous structures and hydraulic performances of vertical permeable walls are investigated. A numerical hydrodynamic model for 2-D wave field is developed to simulate the wave transformation inside and outside the structure. Governing equations of porous flow are solved using SMAC algorithm for the time evolution of the velocity and pressure field. A two-phase model is incorporated to treat the prime variables at the air water interface. Experimental studies are done to calibrate the numerical model. The drag and inertia coefficients in the governing equations are calibrated for a typical porous material. The model is applied to assess the effect of structure width and porosity on the hydraulic performances for a vertical permeable structure. It is observed that there exist optimum values of width and porosity that can maximize hydraulic performances.
LVC Aspects and Integration of Live Simulation

ABSTRACT: The Allied Command Transformation (ACT) has initiated the NATO Snow Leopard program with the vision “to deliver to NATO and partners a persistent, distributed and joint training capability able to support training from operational to tactical level across the full spectrum of operations, while leveraging existing national expertise and capabilities”. Such envisioned simulation capability includes Live, Virtual and Constructive (LVC) simulation elements. When connecting training and simulation to your operational C2-system the primary question is to determine what the operational need are and then find ways of integrating C2 systems and simulation components together. It is of little interest for the war fighter if the system is based on Live, Virtual or Constructive simulation architecture or if it is the operational architecture that is used. From an operational C2 perspective one such operational challenge is to provide mechanisms to provide training as an embedded service to your system. Also there is no sharp division between live simulation and other categories of simulation, as the degree of real people or real systems involved in such training or simulation can vary. Still, we need to connect data to/from live and other domains in a structured way, and by that create a complete environment for the training audience. Thus,Integrating Live Simulation plays an important role today in both training and simulation environments. In order to support the Snow Leopard effort, mentioned above, the NATO Modeling and Simulation Group (NMSG) , a subsidiary within the Research and Technology Organization (RTO), have initiated a Research Task Group, MSG-068, that will provide M&S recommendations to the Snow Leopard project. Within MSG-068 a
Maternal outcome in antepartum Haemorrhage: A study at a tertiary care Centre

Antepartum hemorrhage (APH) is a grave obstetrical emergency which is an important cause of maternal mortality besides postpartum hemorrhage and sepsis. It contributes to 15-20% of maternal deaths in India. Maternal complications of antepartum hemorrhage are anemia, postpartum hemorrhage, shock. The aim of study is to find the prevalence of antepartum haemorrhage among pregnant patients in tertiary care hospital and associated risk factors contributing to maternal morbidity and mortality. The present observational study includes total 77 cases diagnosed with APH during the study period (June 2017 to March 2020). The parameter of the patients were documented in the study includes: demographic data, cause for APH, maternal outcome and difficulties faced during the management from the admission- counseling, pre op requirements, delivery and post natal period. A total of 77 patients were diagnosed with APH (Antepartum haemorrhage) during the study period and the institutional prevalence is 1.78%. The main cause of APH were Abruption which was seen in 40 (51.97%) patients and Placenta Previa was seen in 34 (44.15%) of the patients. The patients show significant difference in prevalence of abruption and placenta previa on the basis of age, parity, hemoglobin level and gestational age at the time of delivery. APH is a high-proportion obstetrical risk and one of the most severe cause of maternal mortality and morbidity. Therefore, prevention, early detection and rapid management should focus on clinical treatment.
The adoption of DEMO in practice

DEMO is a methodology for designing and engineering organizations which is mostly used for Information System Development (ISD) and redesigning the business processes. DEMO has the ability to reduce the complexity of an organization by providing an ontological model of that organization. Although DEMO has promising advantages and has provided successful outcome in practice, it hasn’t received the deserved attention from The individuals in practical fields. While many of the competitor methodologies are more successful and accepted among the practitioners, DEMO is at the risk of being forgotten among all other methodologies in the methodology jungle. It seems trivial to use effective tactics to increase the acceptance of DEMO among individuals in practice. These tactics can only be effective if they take the reasons behind this specific point of view about DEMO into account. Various factors from a technical anomalies to opinion of others can influence the perception of people about a methodology. While the acceptance of DEMO by people in practice is very important in the success of the methodology in practical fields, no research was found in the literature that the statistics on reports the adoption rate of DEMO in practice and identifies the reasons behind certain adoption behavior. Therefore, alongside providing such statistics the main goal of this thesis is to identify the factors that can determine certain behavior towards DEMO and propose recommendations to increase the adoption of DEMO based on these factors. We conducted this research in three phases: Theoretical, Quantitative and qualitative analysis. In theoretical analysis we have identified the factors that were proven to influence the adoption of other methodologies. In quantitative analysis we have tried to find out whether these factors have any influence on the adoption of DEMO. At the end, we captured the actual experience of the individuals in practice with DEMO. In this research we were able to identify several factors that influence the adoption of DEMO. We realized that the support of DEMO by management, coworkers, other individuals with the same skills as the individual and the eagerness of the individual to keep him self updated about DEMO can increase the adoption of DEMO to a great extent. Furthermore, uncertainty one’s position in the organization has a negative effect on the adoption of DEMO. Finally, the ability of the methodology to produce results in a way that can be communicated with all the individuals with different levels of knowledge about DEMO is also influencing the adoption of DEMO.
Analytic Modelling and Resource Dimensioning of Optical Burst Switched Networks

The realisation of optical network architectures may hold the key to delivering the enormous bandwidth demands of next generation Internet applications and services. Optical Burst Switching (OBS) is a potentially cost-effective switching technique that can satisfy these demands by offering a high bit rate transport service that is bandwidth-efficient under dynamic Internet traffic loads. Although various aspects of OBS performance have been extensively investigated, there remains a need to systematically assess the cost/performance trade-offs involved in dimensioning OBS switch resources in a network. This goal is essential in enabling the future deployment of OBS but poses a significant challenge due to the complexity of obtaining tractable mathematical models applicable to OBS network optimisation. The overall aim of this thesis lies within this challenge. This thesis firstly develops a novel analytic performance model of an OBS node where burst contention is resolved by combined use of Tuneable Wavelength Converters (TWCs) and Fibre Delay Lines (FDLs) connected in an efficient share-per-node configuration. The model uses a two-moment traffic representation that gives a good trade-off between accuracy and complexity, and is suitable for extension to use in network modelling. The OBS node model is then used to derive an approximate analytic model of an OBS network of switches equipped with TWCs and FDLs, again maintaining a two-moment traffic model for each end-to-end traffic path in the network. This allows evaluation of link/route loss rates under different offered traffic characteristics, whereas most OBS network models assume only a single-moment traffic representation. In the last part of this thesis, resource dimensioning of OBS networks is performed by solving single and multi-objective optimisation problems based on the analytic network model. The optimisation objectives relate to equipment cost minimisation and throughput maximisation under end-to-end loss rate constraints. Due to non-convexity of the network performance constraint equations, a search heuristic approach has been taken using a constraint-handling genetic algorithm.
Semi‐Supervised Surface Wave Tomography With Wasserstein Cycle‐Consistent GAN: Method and Application to Southern California Plate Boundary Region

Machine learning algorithm has been applied to shear wave velocity (Vs) inversion in surface wave tomography, where a set of starting 1‐D Vs profiles and their corresponding synthetic dispersion curves are used in network training. Previous studies showed that the performance of such trained network is dependent on the diversity of the training data set, which limits its application to previously poorly understood regions. Here, we present an improved semi‐supervised algorithm‐based network that takes both model‐generated and observed surface wave dispersion data in the training process. The algorithm is termed Wasserstein cycle‐consistent generative adversarial networks (Wasserstein Cycle‐GAN [Wcycle‐GAN]). Different from conventional supervised approaches, the GAN architecture enables the inclusion of unlabeled data (the observed surface wave dispersion) in the training process that can complement the model‐generated data set. The cycle‐consistency and Wasserstein metric significantly improve the training stability of the proposed algorithm. We benchmark the Wcycle‐GAN method using 4,076 pairs of fundamental mode Rayleigh wave phase and group velocity dispersion curves derived in periods from 3 to 16 s in Southern California. The final 3‐D Vs model given by the best trained network shows large‐scale features consistent with the surface geology. The resulting Vs model has reasonable data misfits and provides sharper images of structures near faults in the top 15 km compared with those from conventional machine learning methods.
Application of 99mTc-3PRGD2 Imaging for Early Prediction of Pathological Response to Neoadjuvant Chemotherapy in Breast Tumors and Axillary Lymph Nodes

Background and PurposeTechnetium 99m-dimeric cyclic RGD peptides with three polyethylene glycol spacers (99mTc-3PRGD2) had a good performance for diagnosing breast cancer. The prospective study was to assess the performance of 99mTc-3PRGD2 tumor imaging for predicting pathological complete response (pCR) outcomes to neoadjuvant chemotherapy (NAC) in breast cancer patients.Materials and MethodsForty-one patients were examined using both 99mTc-3PRGD2 and 18F-fluoro-deoxy-glucose (18F-FDG) imaging before NAC (baseline), and after the first and fifth NAC cycle. The tumor-to-background (T/B) ratios for 99mTc-3PRGD2 imaging and the maximum standardized uptake values (SUVmax) from the 18F-FDG imaging in breast tumors and axillary lymph node (ALN) metastases were separately calculated and analyzed—based on receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analysis. ResultsFinally, pCR was achieved in 13 of 41 patients after NAC. The area under curve (AUC) of T/B changes (ΔT/B) in breast tumors for predicting pCR after first and fifth cycle were 0.827 and 0.687, and 0.859 and 0.778 in ALN metastases, respectively. For SUVmax changes (ΔSUVmax), the ROC-AUC were 0.859 and 0.713, as well as 0.572 and 0.802, respectively. In breast tumors, the AUCs of ΔT/B1 and ΔSUVmax1 had no significant difference (P > 0.05). However, the AUC of ΔT/B1 was significantly higher than for ΔSUVmax1 in ALN metastases (Z = 2.10, P = 0.035). Additionally, the T/B1 trends for breast tumor and ALN in pCR group were higher than for non-pCR group in HER2-positive patients (P﹤0.05). ConclusionsCompared with 18F-FDG imaging, our study shows that use of 99mTc-3PRGD2 imaging offered a similar level of predictive performance for breast cancer pCR to NAC, and early T/B1 trends of ALN showed an higher performance for predicting pCR.Trial RegistrationClinicalTrials.gov ID: NCT02742168.
Analysis of Pedestrian-Vehicle Crashes in Korea: Focused on Developing Probabilistic Pedestrian Fatality Model

Microscopic analysis of pedestrian-vehicle accident data is a backbone of devising various intelligent functionalities of vehicles to mitigate the fatality and injury severity of pedestrians in pedestrian-vehicle crashes. Worldwide significant effort has been directed at developing advanced vehicles for protecting pedestrians by the assistance of analyzing very detailed pedestrian accident data. As a part of the multi-year project titled with ‘Development of Advanced Vehicle for Pedestrian Protection’, this study analyzes pedestrian-vehicle crash data. Firstly, overview of the characteristics of pedestrian-involved crashes in Korea is presented. Another major focus of the study is to develop a probabilistic pedestrian fatality model. The logistic regression approach, one of the multivariate statistical modeling techniques, is applied in the model development. The developed model is expected to support various safety policies and evaluations of advanced systems of vehicles toward enhancing pedestrian safety. The findings of this study would be an invaluable linkage between pedestrian accident data and the development of various countermeasures for pedestrian protection.
Demand diversion for vehicle guidance, simulation, and control in freeway corridors

Rapidly increasing traffic volume, congestion, and excessive delay are making the management, control, and guidance of traffic flow one of the most critical transportation problems in urban freeway corridors. Modeling demand diversion to less congested routes within a corridor is a necessary part of demand modeling efforts for improved simulation and control, as are guidance-navigation systems in real time. Models for describing diversion at the trip origin and diversion at freeway entrance ramps are discussed. Data collected in a major metropolitan area have shown that diversion at the origin is a function of trip time, route length, and the number of intersections along the trip. However, trip time is the dominant determining factor and can be employed to estimate the decision in the absence of additional information. Diversion at freeway entrance ramps depends on the perceived trip time on the freeway and arterial and the perceived waiting time at the ramp queue. The data confirm that socioeconomic indicators do not play a role in the diversion decision. The purpose of developing these models is for dynamic simulation, on-line freeway corridor control, and demand forecasting suitable for guidance and navigation.