A conceptual model for group support systems in local councils

This paper proposes a conceptual model of a context-aware group support system (GSS) to assist local council employees to perform collaborative tasks in conjunction with inter- and intra-organisational stakeholders. Most discussions about e-government focus on the use of ICT to improve the relationship between government and citizen, not on the relationship between government and employees. This paper seeks to expose the unique culture of UK local councils and to show how a GSS could support local government employer and employee needs.

A design for business intelligence service in demand driven supply chain management

This paper discusses the problems inherent within traditional supply chain management's forecast and inventory management processes arising when tackling demand driven supply chain. A demand driven supply chain management architecture developed by Orchestr8 Ltd., U.K. is described to demonstrate its advantages over traditional supply chain management. Within this architecture, a metrics reporting system is designed by adopting business intelligence technology that supports users for decision making and planning supply activities over supply chain health.

Parallel performance and scalability experiments with the Danish Eulerian Model on the EPCC supercomputers

The Danish Eulerian Model (DEM) is a powerful air pollution model, designed to calculate the concentrations of various dangerous species over a large geographical region (e.g. Europe). It takes into account the main physical and chemical processes between these species, the actual meteorological conditions, emissions, etc.. This is a huge computational task and requires significant resources of storage and CPU time. Parallel computing is essential for the efficient practical use of the model. Some efficient parallel versions of the model were created over the past several years. A suitable parallel version of DEM by using the Message Passing Interface library (AIPI) was implemented on two powerful supercomputers of the EPCC - Edinburgh, available via the HPC-Europa programme for transnational access to research infrastructures in EC: a Sun Fire E15K and an IBM HPCx cluster. Although the implementation is in principal, the same for both supercomputers, few modifications had to be done for successful porting of the code on the IBM HPCx cluster. Performance analysis and parallel optimization was done next. Results from bench marking experiments will be presented in this paper. Another set of experiments was carried out in order to investigate the sensitivity of the model to variation of some chemical rate constants in the chemical submodel. Certain modifications of the code were necessary to be done in accordance with this task. The obtained results will be used for further sensitivity analysis Studies by using Monte Carlo simulation.

A camera based digit location and recognition system for garment tracking

Garment information tracking is required for clean room garment management. In this paper, we present a camera-based robust system with implementation of Optical Character Reconition (OCR) techniques to fulfill garment label recognition. In the system, a camera is used for image capturing; an adaptive thresholding algorithm is employed to generate binary images; Connected Component Labelling (CCL) is then adopted for object detection in the binary image as a part of finding the ROI (Region of Interest); Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) with the BP (Back Propagation) learning algorithm are used for digit recognition; and finally the system is verified by a system database. The system has been tested. The results show that it is capable of coping with variance of lighting, digit twisting, background complexity, and font orientations. The system performance with association to the digit recognition rate has met the design requirement. It has achieved real-time and error-free garment information tracking during the testing.