In the field of construction project management, time and cost are the most important factors to be considered in planning every project, and their relationship is complex. The total cost for each project is the sum of the direct and indirect cost. Direct cost commonly represents labor, materials, equipment, etc.
Indirect cost generally represents overhead cost such as supervision, administration, consultants, and interests. Direct cost grows at an increasing rate as the project time is reduced from its original planned time. However, indirect cost continues for the life of the project and any reduction in project time means a reduction in indirect cost. Therefore, there is a trade-off between the time and cost for completing construction activities.
In this research, modeling of time-cost optimization, generating global optimum solution for time and cost problem, and lowering construction time and cost using ant colony optimization algorithm
Electrical Discharge Machining (EDM) is a widespread Nontraditional Machining (NTM) processes for manufacturing of a complicated geometry or very hard metals parts that are difficult to machine by traditional machining operations. Electrical discharge machining is a material removal (MR) process characterized by using electrical discharge erosion. This paper discusses the optimal parameters of EDM on high-speed steel (HSS) AISI M2 as a workpiece using copper and brass as an electrode. The input parameters used for experimental work are current (10, 24 and 42 A), pulse on time (100, 150 and 200 µs), and pulse off time (4, 12 and 25 µs) that have effect on the material removal rate (MRR), electrode wear rate (EWR) and wear ratio (WR). A
... Show MoreThis study was aimed to investigate the response surface methodology (RSM) to evaluate the effects of various experimental conditions on the removal of levofloxacin (LVX) from the aqueous solution by means of electrocoagulation (EC) technique with stainless steel electrodes. The EC process was achieved successfully with the efficiency of LVX removal of 90%. The results obtained from the regression analysis, showed that the data of experiential are better fitted to the polynomial model of second-order with the predicted correlation coefficient (pred. R2) of 0.723, adjusted correlation coefficient (Adj. R2) of 0.907 and correlation coefficient values (R2) of 0.952. This shows that the predicted models and experimental values are in go
... Show MoreThis work aims to optimize surface roughness, wall angle deviation, and average wall thickness as output responses of ALuminium-1050 alloy cone formed by the single point incremental sheet metal forming process. The experiments are accomplished based on the use of a mixed level Taguchi experimental design with an L18 orthogonal array. Six levels of step depth, three levels of tool diameter, feed rate, and tool rotational speed have been considered as input process parameters. The analyses of variance (ANOVA) have been used to investigate the significance of parameters and the effect of their levels for minimum surface roughness, minimum wall angle deviation, and maximum average wall thickness. The results indicate that step depth and tool r
... Show MoreThe biometric-based keys generation represents the utilization of the extracted features from the human anatomical (physiological) traits like a fingerprint, retina, etc. or behavioral traits like a signature. The retina biometric has inherent robustness, therefore, it is capable of generating random keys with a higher security level compared to the other biometric traits. In this paper, an effective system to generate secure, robust and unique random keys based on retina features has been proposed for cryptographic applications. The retina features are extracted by using the algorithm of glowworm swarm optimization (GSO) that provides promising results through the experiments using the standard retina databases. Additionally, in order t
... Show MoreOne of the most important problems of Iraqi construction projects is the cost variances, so it is important to identify the problems and shortcomings that cause poor cost control. Through the utilization of questionnaires, the study evaluated how project costs were managed and reported. The questionnaire was distributed to 180 professionals working in the Iraqi construction sector, with a response rate of 91%. The results showed that a high percentage of projects are implemented with a difference between real and estimated costs, and the process of documenting cost data needs to be more secure. On the other hand, there is a weakness in providing the necessary work structure information to monitor costs and a lack of proc
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An automatic text summarization system mimics how humans summarize by picking the most significant sentences in a source text. However, the complexities of the Arabic language have become challenging to obtain information quickly and effectively. The main disadvantage of the traditional approaches is that they are strictly constrained (especially for the Arabic language) by the accuracy of sentence feature functions, weighting schemes, and similarity calculations. On the other hand, the meta-heuristic search approaches have a feature tha
... Show MoreGaslift reactors are employed in several bioapplications due to their characteristics of cost-effectiveness and high efficiency. However, the nutrient and thermal gradient is one of the obstacles that stand in the way of its widespread use in biological applications. The diagnosis, analysis, and tracking of fluid paths in external draft tube gaslift bioreactor-type are the main topics of the current study. Several parameters were considered to assess the mixing efficiency such as downcomer-to-rizer diameter ratio (Ded/Dr), the position of the diffuser to the height of bioreactor ratio (Pd/Lr), and gas bubble size (Db). The multiple regression of liquid velocity indicates the optimal setting: Ded/Dr is (0.5), Pd/Lr is (0.02), and Db
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This study investigated the optimization of wear behavior of AISI 4340 steel based on the Taguchi method under various testing conditions. In this paper, a neural network and the Taguchi design method have been implemented for minimizing the wear rate in 4340 steel. A back-propagation neural network (BPNN) was developed to predict the wear rate. In the development of a predictive model, wear parameters like sliding speed, applying load and sliding distance were considered as the input model variables of the AISI 4340 steel. An analysis of variance (ANOVA) was used to determine the significant parameter affecting the wear rate. Finally, the Taguchi approach was applied to determine
... Show MoreThis paper proposes a novel meta-heuristic optimization algorithm called the fine-tuning meta-heuristic algorithm (FTMA) for solving global optimization problems. In this algorithm, the solutions are fine-tuned using the fundamental steps in meta-heuristic optimization, namely, exploration, exploitation, and randomization, in such a way that if one step improves the solution, then it is unnecessary to execute the remaining steps. The performance of the proposed FTMA has been compared with that of five other optimization algorithms over ten benchmark test functions. Nine of them are well-known and already exist in the literature, while the tenth one is proposed by the authors and introduced in this article. One test trial was shown t
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