Mehran University Research Journal of Engineering and Technology

6

Authors: Lakho N.A., Zardari M.A., Pathan A.A.

Walls of wet loam, used in earthen houses, generally experience more shrinkage which results in cracks and less compressive strength. This paper presents a technique of producing loam masonry blocks that are compacted in drained state during casting process in order to minimize shrinkage. For this purpose, loam masonry blocks were cast and compacted at a pressure of 6 MPa and then dried in shade by covering them in plastic sheet. The results show that linear shrinkage of 2% occurred which is smaller when compared to un-compacted wet loam walls. This implies that the loam masonry blocks compacted in drained state is expected to perform better than un-compacted wet loam walls.

6

Authors: Narejo G.B., Azeem F., Zardari S.

Pakistan energy demand has grown exponentially over the last 2 decades. Reason behind increasing energy demand is excessive mobility of rural population to cities, rapid progression in industrial and transport sector, lack of policy making and implementation on the developed policies and improvements in living style. At present, Pakistan witness 5000-7000 MW power deficit in summer. To reduce the demand and supply gap, power plants across Pakistan are planned to be installed while some are under development phase. Power expansion plans cannot cope with the current energy shortfall since several years are required for them to get fully operational. Effective energy policy is the only key to address the existing shortfall. This paper discusses the initiatives that may be taken to reduce the power shortfall using energy efficiency and conservation, deployment of microgrids, utilization of renewable energy resources and effective research and development in energy sector. Since another most important issue evaluated in the research regarding the energy crises is energy efficiency and lack of compliance to government regulations for energy efficiency and conservation. Implementation on the policies developed for energy efficiencies and conservation has not been witnessed. Possible solutions on short term basis to lessen the energy crises have also been discussed in the paper.

10

Authors: Nadeem A., Ahsan K., Sarim M.

MANETs (Mobile Ad Hoc Networks) have applications in various walks of life from rescue operations to battle field operations, personal and commercial. However, routing operations in MANETs are still vulnerable to anomalies and DoS (Denial of Service) attacks such as sleep deprivation. In SD (Sleep Deprivation) attack malicious node exploits the vulnerability in the route discovery function of the reactive routing protocol for example AODV (Ad Hoc On-Demand Distance Vector). In this paper, we first illustrate the SD anomaly in MANETs and then propose a SD detection and prevention algorithm which efficiently deals with this attack. We assess the performance of our proposed approach through simulation, evaluating its successfulness using different network scenarios.

10

Authors: Mahmood W., Khan N.A., Memon N.M., Chaudhry F.A.

A technique of cross-term suppression in WD (Wigner Distribution) for a multi-component signal that is embedded WGN (White Gaussian Noise) is proposed. In this technique, an optimized algorithm is developed for time-varying noisy signal and a CAD (Computer Aided Design) simulator is designed for Numerical simulations of synthetic signal. In proposed technique, signal components are localized in tf (time frequency) plane by STFT (Short Time Fourier Transform). Rectified STFT is computed and Spectral Kurtosis is used to separate a signal components from noise in t-f plane. The t-f plane is segmented and then signal components are filtered out by FFT (Fractional Fourier Transform). Finally, WD (free of cross terms) of isolated signal component is computed to obtain high resolution in t-f plane.

10

Authors: Solangi U.S., Memon T.D., Noonari A.S., Ansari O.A.

The problem of vehicular traffic congestion is a persistent constraint in the socio-economic development of Pakistan. This paper presents design and implementation of an intelligent traffic controller based on FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) to provide an efficient traffic management by optimizing functioning of traffic lights which will result in minimizing traffic congestion at intersections. The existent Traffic Signal system in Pakistan is fixed-time based and offers only Open Loop method for Traffic Control. The Intelligent Traffic Controller presented here uses feedback sensors to read the Traffic density present at a four way intersection to provide an efficient alternative for better supervisory Control of Traffic flow. The traffic density based control logic has been developed in a State Flow Chart for improved visualization of State Machine based operation, and implemented as a Subsystem in Simulink and transferred into VHDL (Hardware Description Language) code using HDL Coder for reducing development time and time to market, which are essential to capitalize Embedded Systems Market. The VHDL code is synthesized with Altera QUARTUS, simulated timing waveform is obtained to verify correctness of the algorithm for different Traffic Scenarios. For implementation purpose estimations were obtained for Cyclone-III and Stratix-III.

12

Authors: Bajwa I.S., Shahzada M.A.

This paper presents an approach used for automated generations of software constraints. In this model, the SBVR (Semantics of Business Vocabulary and Rules) based semi-formal representation is obtained from the syntactic and semantic analysis of a NL (Natural Language) (such as English) sentence. A SBVR representation is easy to translate to other formal languages as SBVR is based on higher-order logic like other formal languages such as OCL (Object Constraint Language). The proposed model endows with a systematic and powerful system of incorporating NL knowledge on the formal languages. A prototype is constructed in Java (an Eclipse plug-in) as a proof of the concept. The performance was tested for a few sample texts taken from existing research thesis reports and books.

12

Authors: Rind M.M., Qureshi I.A., Ansari A.Q.

With the emergence of internet and WWW (World Wide Web), traditional businesses got a new opportunity to compete globally. A new term of M-Commerce (Mobile Commerce) emerged and set a new trend in commerce and business. Traditional bricks-and-mortar businesses became e-business (electronic business) with the help of ICT (Information & Communication Technology) tools. Evidences from literature review suggest that there has been little growth in the acceptance of M-commerce in developing economies such as Pakistan as compared to developed economies. There are doubts that users of M-commerce demonstrate a lack of enthusiasm, which may be because of the lack of trustworthiness. Based on the well-known and widely used TAM (Technology Acceptance Model), this study provides the theoretical underpinning and empirical evidence between the relationships of trust construct with the adoption of Mcommerce in Pakistan. A cross sectional questionnaire survey was conducted to collect data from Mcommerce users in Pakistan to check the influence of trust. After the analysis of 390 valid responses obtained results indicate that trust and other constructs of TAM are related and there is positive and significant role of trust in the acceptance of M-commerce in Pakistan. Results also prove the hypothesized relationship among all constructs of proposed Model.

12

Authors: Abro M.M.Q., Memon Z.A., Shah A.A., Naqvi I.B.

In today's knowledge based globalized business world, the contemporary organizations are thriving to apply the innovative as well as modern business techniques and tools in their products and processes regularly. Besides, the organizations give sufficient significance while building up their business organisms and operations in order to utilize the innovative methodologies alongside their other primary procedures. Based on the ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) and prior literature on management of supply chain, this paper analyzed an integrated model of ERP assimilation and integration by using Saudi Arabian firms as a case. This paper addresses the questions (1) there is a positive link between technological, organizational and environmental factors and ERP implementation, and (2) that ERP implementation encourages SCI (Supply Chain Integration) and performance. The paper empirically examines the antecedents of ERP implementation on SCI which will lead towards the firm performance by using SEM (Structural Equation Modeling) as an approach. Moreover, ERP is used as a mediating factor by using quantitative data, collected from Tadawul. Tadawul is Saudi Arabian stock exchange, in which 167 firms are registered. The results of the paper, may add to the hypothetical comprehension of accomplishing a change in supply chain management, and might leave some imperative implications for the firms motivated by enhancing their supply chain performance. It is also found that the linkage from ERP implementation to SCI is very significant.

16

Authors: Baber J, Bakhtyar M., Ihsanullah, Rehman M., Khalid M.

In this paper, we propose simple and effective compression of CSLBP (Center Symmetric Local Binary Pattern) descriptors, which is a textured based operator and mostly used as key point descriptor. With default parameters for computation, it is 256-length descriptor for each keypoint or affine patch. CSLBP is an extended form of LBP (Local Binary Patterns). The calculation of CSLBP descriptor is effective, robust, and straightforward for different image transformations for instance; image blurring and illumination alteration. However, an improvement in time and space consumption of CSLBP can be attained by means of simple compression. For this reason, CSLBP is a smart choice for smart phones as well as large databases. We reduce the descriptor length (dimensions) upto 50% without applying any techniques of dimensionality reduction like PCA (Principle Component Analysis) or LDA (Linear Discriminant Analysis). The compressed CSLBP descriptor is denoted as C-CSLBP. The performance of C-CSLBP is evaluated on state-of-the-art datasets using standard metrics. It is quantitatively shown by experiments that C-CSLBP is equivalently effective compared to CSLBP despite of reduced dimensions.

18

Authors: Shaikh S.H., Malik T.N.

Due to the increasing environmental concerns, the demand of clean and green energy and concern of atmospheric pollution is increasing. Hence, the power utilities are forced to limit their emissions within the prescribed limits. Therefore, the minimization of fuel cost as well as exhaust gas emissions is becoming an important and challenging task in the short-term scheduling of hydro-thermal energy systems. This paper proposes a novel algorithm known as WCA-ER (Water Cycle Algorithm with Evaporation Rate) to inspect the short term EEPSHES (Economic Emission Power Scheduling of Hydrothermal Energy Systems). WCA has its ancestries from the natural hydrologic cycle i.e. the raining process forms streams and these streams start flowing towards the rivers which finally flow towards the sea. The worth of WCA-ER has been tested on the standard economic emission power scheduling of hydrothermal energy test system consisting of four hydropower and three thermal plants. The problem has been investigated for the three case studies (i) ECS (Economic Cost Scheduling), (ii) ES (Economic Emission Scheduling) and (iii) ECES (Economic Cost & Emission Scheduling). The results obtained show that WCA-ER is superior to many other methods in the literature in bringing lower fuel cost and emissions.