Business micro-location: factors, preferences and indicators to assess the influence factors

The paper presents a study on business micro-location behaviour as well as corresponding factors of influence, conducted in two metropolitan areas, Bucharest-Ilfov (Romania) and Greater Porto (Portugal). By business micro-location we refer to a specific site such as a building or facility, accommodating a business within a small, compact geographical area (e.g. metropolitan area). At this geographical scale, the macroeconomic layer factors were excluded, applicable when discern between regions or countries. The factors derived from location theory and previous empirical studies were surveyed, completing a cross-sectional analysis in order to find out the specific weights of the location factors and preferences, by region and by industry. Based on already established firms’ feedback on location, the specific weights were granted by each industry to the main location factors, types of areas, and types of accommodation facilities. The authors also suggested a model to integrate these results into a Geographical Information System (GIS).

Multi-agent system for personalization of location-based services

The current ubiquitous network access and increase in network bandwidth are driving the sales of mobile location-aware user devices and, consequently, the development of context-aware applications, namely location-based services. The goal of this project is to provide consumers of location-based services with a richer end-user experience by means of service composition, personalization, device adaptation and continuity of service. Our approach relies on a multi-agent system composed of proxy agents that act as mediators and providers of personalization meta-services, device adaptation and continuity of service for consumers of pre-existing location-based services. These proxy agents, which have Web services interfaces to ensure a high level of interoperability, perform service composition and take in consideration the preferences of the users, the limitations of the user devices, making the usage of different types of devices seamless for the end-user. To validate and evaluate the performance of this approach, use cases were defined, tests were conducted and results gathered which demonstrated that the initial goals were successfully fulfilled.

Low cost inertial-based localization system for a service robot

Dissertation presented at Faculty of Sciences and Technology of the New University of Lisbon to attain the Master degree in Electrical and Computer Science Engineering

Prognostics health management: perspectives in engineering systems reliability prognostics

The Prognostic Health Management (PHM) has been asserting itself as the most promising methodology to enhance the effective reliability and availability of a product or system during its life-cycle conditions by detecting current and approaching failures, thus, providing mitigation of the system risks with reduced logistics and support costs. However, PHM is at an early stage of development, it also expresses some concerns about possible shortcomings of its methods, tools, metrics and standardization. These factors have been severely restricting the applicability of PHM and its adoption by the industry. This paper presents a comprehensive literature review about the PHM main general weaknesses. Exploring the research opportunities present in some recent publications, are discussed and outlined the general guide-lines for finding the answer to these issues.

Design of a bifurcated stent graft, with its accompanying delivery system.

Abdominal Aortic Aneurysms (AAA) haemorhaging is a life-threatening disease. An aneurysm is a permanent swelling of an artery due to a weakness in its wall. Current surgical repair involves opening the chest or abdomen, gaining temporary vascular control of the aorta and suturing a prosthetic graft to the healthy aorta within the aneurysm itself The outcome of this surgical approach is not perfect, and the quality of life after this repair is impaired by postoperative pain, sexual dysfunction, and a lengthy hospital stay resulting in high health costs. All these negative effects are related to the large incision and extensive tissue dissection. Endovascular grafting is an alternative to the standard surgical method. This treatment is a less invasive method of treating aortic aneurysms. It involves a surgical exposure of the common femoral arteries where the stent graft can be inserted through by an over-the-wire technique. All manipulations are controlled from a remote place by the use of a catheter and this technique avoids the need to directly expose the diseased artery through a large incision or an extensive dissection. The proposed design method outlined in this project is to develop the endovascular approach. The main aim is to design an unitary bifurcated stent graft (1 e- bifurcated graft as a single component) to treat these Abdominal Aortic Aneurysms. This includes the delivery system and deployment mechanism necessary to first accurately position the stent graft across the aneurysm sac and also across the iliac bifurcation, and secondly fix the stent graft in position by using expandable metal stents. Thus, excluding the aneurysm from the circulation and therefore preventing rupture. Miniaturisation is a critical aspect of this design, as the smaller the crimped stent graft the easier to guide through the vascular system to the desired location. Biocompatibility is an important aspect. The preferred materials for this prosthesis are to use Shape Memory Alloys for the stent and a multifilament fabric for the graft. A taper design is applied for the geometry as this gives a favourable flow characteristic and reduced wave reflections. Adequate testing of the stent graft to prove its durability and the ease of the method of deployment is a prerequisite. A bench test facility has being designed and build to replicate the cardiovascular system and the disease in question aortic aneurysms at the iliac bifurcation. The testing here shows the feasibility of the proposed delivery system and the durability of the stent graft across the aneurysm sac. Finally, these endovascular treatments offer the economic advantage of short hospital stays or even treatment as an outpatient, as well as elimination of the need for postoperative intensive care The risk of developing an aneurysm increases with age, that is one of the mam reasons to look for less invasive ways of treating aneurysms. Consequently, there is enormous pressure to develop and use these devices rapidly.

Communally breeding Bechstein's bats have a stable social system that is independent from the postglacial history and location of the populations.

Investigating macro-geographical genetic structures of animal populations is crucial to reconstruct population histories and to identify significant units for conservation. This approach may also provide information about the intraspecific flexibility of social systems. We investigated the history and current structure of a large number of populations in the communally breeding Bechstein's bat (Myotis bechsteinii). Our aim was to understand which factors shape the species' social system over a large ecological and geographical range. Using sequence data from one coding and one noncoding mitochondrial DNA region, we identified the Balkan Peninsula as the main and probably only glacial refugium of the species in Europe. Sequence data also suggest the presence of a cryptic taxon in the Caucasus and Anatolia. In a second step, we used seven autosomal and two mitochondrial microsatellite loci to compare population structures inside and outside of the Balkan glacial refugium. Central European and Balkan populations both were more strongly differentiated for mitochondrial DNA than for nuclear DNA, had higher genetic diversities and lower levels of relatedness at swarming (mating) sites than in maternity (breeding) colonies, and showed more differentiation between colonies than between swarming sites. All these suggest that populations are shaped by strong female philopatry, male dispersal, and outbreeding throughout their European range. We conclude that Bechstein's bats have a stable social system that is independent from the postglacial history and location of the populations. Our findings have implications for the understanding of the benefits of sociality in female Bechstein's bats and for the conservation of this endangered species.

An illustration of the ALLOC 6B location-allocation analysis system, 1984

The programs included in this Discussion Paper no. 17 are Distance, Unravel, Retrench and Alloc 6B that deal with location-allocation analyses first published in 1973 by the Department of Geography, The University of Iowa.

Location referencing system team report : final report, 1998

This report is a culmination of the Location Referencing System (LRS) team. The team was charged with defining a system that coordinates the collection storage, and access to location referencing information by developing an LRS to be used throughout the Iowa DOT.

A Sufficiency Rating System for Secondary Roads in Iowa, HR-264, Volume I, 1985

County engineers in Iowa face the dual problems of rapidly escalating costs and a decreasing rate of growth of revenues. Various priority systems are in use, ranking projects for inclusion in road improvement programs, but they generally have weaknesses when used to compare one project with another in a different location. The sufficiency rating system has proven to be a useful tool in developing a priority list of projects for primary road systems, but there are none currently in use for secondary road systems. The research reported here was undertaken to develop a sufficiency rating system which could be used for secondary roads in Iowa and to produce the necessary forms and instructions to aid county engineering personnel in their efforts to complete the ratings for roads within their county.

Electronic Bulletin Board System, HR-345, 1998

The primary objectives of the Electronic Bulletin Board System (BBS) project were to: (1) Provide an electronic communication tool which would link city and county engineering offices to each other and to other governmental agencies for messaging and data sharing; (2) Provide a dial-up site for reference information or files accessible on-demand; and (3) Provide a "stepping stone" to the world of electronic data transfer, recognizing that most local government employees face a huge complex of technology with limited knowledge of computers and communications tools. The system was designed to be as simple as possible, and to require minimal equipment and software cost to the users. The original system was an Apex 386/25 computer with MS-DOS 5.0 software and the final configuration was an HP Vectra XM Pentium 90 with MS-NT 3.51 and Mustang - Wildcat 5.0 software. The users of the BBS were county engineers and their staff, offices in the central office of the Iowa Department of Transportation (DOT) and Resident Construction Engineers at the Iowa DOT. Much of the activity was between the county engineers, and their staffs, and the Iowa DOT offices with which they have ongoing business activities. The BBS contained files for mapping, Internet e-mail service, Accident Location Analysis System (ALAS) data, Iowa DOT bid lettings, and Autocad and Intergraph maps and standards. The 800 line calls were recorded and gave the best indication of the usage and the trends that were being followed. The usage tended to be higher in the winter months when design activities are occurring and lower in the summer months when the construction is in progress. The project was judged a success. The BBS did provide a "stepping stone" to the world of electronic data transfer.

GIS-Based Accident Location and Analysis System (GIS-ALAS) Project Report: Phase 1, 1998

This report summarizes progress made in Phase 1 of the GIS-based Accident Location and Analysis System (GIS-ALAS) project. The GIS-ALAS project builds on several longstanding efforts by the Iowa Department of Transportation (DOT), law enforcement agencies, Iowa State University, and several other entities to create a locationally-referenced highway accident database for Iowa. Most notable of these efforts is the Iowa DOT’s development of a PC-based accident location and analysis system (PC-ALAS), a system that has been well received by users since it was introduced in 1989. With its pull-down menu structure, PC-ALAS is more portable and user-friendly than its mainframe predecessor. Users can obtain accident statistics for locations during specified time periods. Searches may be refined to identify accidents of specific types or involving drivers with certain characteristics. Output can be viewed on a computer screen, sent to a file, or printed using pre-defined formats.

Delivery system for location based information in wireless IP networks

Tämä työ esittelee uuden tarjota paikasta riippuvaa tietoa langattomien tietoverkkojen käyttäjille. Tieto välitetään jokaiselle käyttäjälle tietämättä mitään käyttäjän henkilöllisyydestä. Sovellustason protokollaksi valittiin HTTP, joka mahdollistaa tämän järjestelmän saattaa tietoa perille useimmille käyttäjille, jotka käyttävät hyvinkin erilaisia päätelaitteita. Tämä järjestelmä toimii sieppaavan www-liikenteen välityspalvelimen jatkeena. Erilaisten tietokantojen sisällä on perusteella järjestelmä päättää välitetäänkö tietoa vai ei. Järjestelmä sisältää myös yksinkertaisen ohjelmiston käyttäjien paikantamiseksi yksittäisen tukiaseman tarkkuudella. Vaikka esitetty ratkaisu tähtääkin paikkaan perustuvien mainosten tarjoamiseen, se on helposti muunnettavissa minkä tahansa tyyppisen tiedon välittämiseen käyttäjille.

Recurrence Quantification Analysis of System Signals for Detecting Tool and Chatter in Turning

In this thesis, the applications of the recurrence quantification analysis in metal cutting operation in a lathe, with specific objective to detect tool wear and chatter, are presented.This study is based on the discovery that process dynamics in a lathe is low dimensional chaotic. It implies that the machine dynamics is controllable using principles of chaos theory. This understanding is to revolutionize the feature extraction methodologies used in condition monitoring systems as conventional linear methods or models are incapable of capturing the critical and strange behaviors associated with the metal cutting process.As sensor based approaches provide an automated and cost effective way to monitor and control, an efficient feature extraction methodology based on nonlinear time series analysis is much more demanding. The task here is more complex when the information has to be deduced solely from sensor signals since traditional methods do not address the issue of how to treat noise present in real-world processes and its non-stationarity. In an effort to get over these two issues to the maximum possible, this thesis adopts the recurrence quantification analysis methodology in the study since this feature extraction technique is found to be robust against noise and stationarity in the signals.The work consists of two different sets of experiments in a lathe; set-I and set-2. The experiment, set-I, study the influence of tool wear on the RQA variables whereas the set-2 is carried out to identify the sensitive RQA variables to machine tool chatter followed by its validation in actual cutting. To obtain the bounds of the spectrum of the significant RQA variable values, in set-i, a fresh tool and a worn tool are used for cutting. The first part of the set-2 experiments uses a stepped shaft in order to create chatter at a known location. And the second part uses a conical section having a uniform taper along the axis for creating chatter to onset at some distance from the smaller end by gradually increasing the depth of cut while keeping the spindle speed and feed rate constant.The study concludes by revealing the dependence of certain RQA variables; percent determinism, percent recurrence and entropy, to tool wear and chatter unambiguously. The performances of the results establish this methodology to be viable for detection of tool wear and chatter in metal cutting operation in a lathe. The key reason is that the dynamics of the system under study have been nonlinear and the recurrence quantification analysis can characterize them adequately.This work establishes that principles and practice of machining can be considerably benefited and advanced from using nonlinear dynamics and chaos theory.