Mehran University Research Journal of Engineering and Technology

6

Authors: Murtaza G., Hashmi H.N., Naeem U.A., Khan D., Ahmad N.

Bridge pier scouring may lead to the bridge failure and the shape of bridge pier itself is one of the main factor to control scouring around bridge pier. The amount of sediment which is removed from the boundary of bridge pier is called bridge pier scouring and the depth up to which sediment removed is called scour depth. Scouring results, the exposure of foundation, eventually leading to bridge failures. Assessment of the maximum scour that can be faced by pier has a vital role in the design of bridge foundation. Different techniques are used to minimize the scouring effect in order to control the bridge failure. In this study effect of bridge pier shape on scouring was checked on four different shape i.e. circular, oval, square and octagonal. Each pier shape was tested against three different values of flows i.e. 16, 22.50 and 29.50 liter/sec. Uniform bed material of standard deviation (sigma_g = 1.21) and median size (D50 = 0.28 mm) was used for all tests. Scour is measured with the help of point of gauge and bed is levelled before every experiment. Experimental results show that minimum scour is observed for octagonal bridge pier and maximum for square bridge pier while circular and oval faced intermediate scour depth relative to square and octagonal bridge pier. It is concluded that scour has reduced to 22% when octagonal pier was used compared to circular one.

8

Authors: Rauf M., Mirza J., Aziz M.H.

Assembly lines are usually used for the mass production. The dawn of mass customization has forced the industries to shift to MMAL (Mixed-Model Assembly Lines). ALBP (Assembly Line Balancing Problem) and MSP (Model Sequencing Problem) are two major problems in MMAL. Sequencing of models is an important aspect of MMAL because improper sequencing can lead to the production loses. This paper dealt with the MSP in MMAL. A modified INEH (Intelligent Nawaz, Enscore, and Ham) algorithm was developed to solve multi-objective MSP. For this purpose, a MCDM (Multi-Criteria Decision Making) techniquewas integrated with NEH. A mathematical model was presented for three performance measures; Idle time, Make-span and Flow Time. A case study of pumps assembly line was conducted. Proposed INEH simultaneously optimized all performance measures (Flow Time= 123.47min, Make-Span= 156.95min and Idle Time=1.67 min) while the traditional NEH variants only optimized single performance measure and ignoring the others. Performance of the proposed algorithm was compared with traditional NEH algorithm and its variants using TOPSIS (Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution), a MCDM technique. Results showed that proposed INEH outperformed rest of the NEH algorithms as TOPSIS ranked INEH first with the relative closeness of 97.3% while the NEH variant for flow time is worse algorithm with the relative closeness of 2.8%.

8

Authors: Qureshi R.F., Qureshi K., Bhatti I., Khatri Z.

The importance of statistical modeling is obvious because it imparts an imperative role in predicting the effects of significant factors on any experimental process. In recent days, ELMs (Emulsion Liquid Membranes) are considered as an effective technique for the treatment of industrial wastewater. Despite of many advantages over the other treatment methods, ELM technology encounters one serious drawback of the stability of emulsion. The subject of this research is to identify the factors which are important to study the stability of ELM and also to evaluate the response of these parameters on stability. The membrane used in this study consisted of Span-80 and Hexane as surfactant and diluent respectively. The internal aqueous phase was H2SO4. The experimental setup was designed by using a well-known statistical approach of DoE (Design of Experiment) and the data was analyzed by Taguchi Method using a fractional factorial design. All the parameters including aqueous phase concentration, surfactant concentration, volume ratio of organic to aqueous phase, emulsification speed and emulsification time were selected as key factors to study their effect on the stability of ELM. Using different statistical techniques, it was found that emulsification speed and volume ratio of organic to aqueous phase are two most significant parameters. The significance level of these factors i.e. emulsification speed and volume ratio of organic to aqueous phase was statistically found as 99.7 and 99.9% respectively. A statistical model was also developed and the experimental results were compared with estimated results. The value of correlation coefficient, R^2 was calculated as 0.997 indicating that the developed model fits the data very well.

10

Authors: Bibi S., Obaidullah M., Shami M.A.

This paper confers one of the three phases of tree multipliers, i.e. the Partial Product reduction phase. In this paper four types of hybrid tree multipliers are studied and proposed using parallel counters (full adders and half adders) for reduction of Partial Products in multiplication operation.After ANDing the bits of multiplier and multiplicand, the Partial Products are arranged into two groups for reduction, each group uses a different technique for reduction of Partial Products, resulting in a fewer gates than the parent tree reduction techniques. The results of the proposed tree reduction techniques are then tabulated and compared with the parent tree multipliers. The performance comparison is done in terms of number of gate counts of half adder and full adders used in the Partial Product reduction phase. Four types of hybrid tree multipliers are presented using CSA (Carry Save Adder) Array multiplier, Wallace Tree multiplier, Modified Wallace Tree multiplier and Dadda Tree Multiplier. The results show significant reduction in number of full adders and half adders with the slight overhead of increased final addition stage of the hybrid multiplier. The proposed multipliers can prove to be the better choice for digital signal processing designs, image processing designs and processor architecture.

10

Authors: Ahmed G.R., Shabbir F.

Optimization of steel moment resisting frames considering the displacement as the fundamental element is the main aim of the present study. DDBD (Direct Displacement Based Design) methodology have been used for the subject purpose. This design methodology have been developed to cater for the shortcomings in the current FBD (Force Based Design) methodology that is in practice. Steel moment frame have been analyzed and designed with both FBD and DDBD methodologies. Strength constraints imposed by AISCLRFD (American Institute of Steel Construction Load and Resistance Factor Design) and maximum allowable displacement constraints set forth by the FEMA-356 (Federal Emergency Management Agency) against the different performance levels are checked during the optimization process. Load combinations selected are in accordance with ASCE 7-05 (American Society for Civil Engineers) Numerical example presented exhibit the advantages of DDBD over FBD methodology. It was observed that the drift experienced by the structure designed according to DDBD varies more uniformly with height as compared to FBD.

10

Authors: Virtual Reality, Agent Interaction, Chatbots, Knowledge Based Systems.

It has been found that communication is actually important in our lives; without it is difficult to accomplish something. It becomes possible with the support of the technology that is being used today; now it is easy to communicate as faster and much easier. A type of an agent called Chatbot is a conversational agent or a special kind of a program which had been specifically designed to replicate an intelligent chat with a single or multiple human users by using auditory or text based techniques. Chatbots are become an innovative application of industrial and research domains which specifically represent human to machine interaction systems. In technical perspective, efficacy of chatbots can be enhanced by designing multiagent communication system using novel mechanisms. Although our study focuses on building chatbots that sustain agents in collaborative learning by interacting with one or more chat agents. The proposed research is based on client server chatbots so that they will be capable to communicate by sending and receiving questions and responses. In this article we have present the design and implementation of two chatbots interaction. This consists of KR (Knowledge Reorganization) system, NLP (Natural Language Processing), KB (Knowledge Base) to handle its intelligent capabilities and client server socket system for integration. It has been implemented through Java.

14

Authors: Hafiz T.M., Bhatti I.A., Hussain T.

Scarcity of resources is becoming a universal challenge for the world community. Conservation of resources could only be possible if the quality concept of waste reduction is introduced and implemented in utilization of existing resources. Out of the countless dimensions of resource conservation, this research focuses on formulation of maintenance model through human resource conservation and its optimum utilization in aviation industry. The research work remained converged to the basic managerial aspect of skill management for Multi-type rating certification. The paper introduces a new concept with enhanced managerial quality for the first line operations of Multi-type aircraft fleet. The concept has introduced synergy concept for human resource utilization to reduce the requirement of per aircraft technicians and engineers. The research has identified that quality enhancement in three major areas namely hiring process, skill development process and maintenance practices have major role to play for optimum utilization of human resource assets. The results finally achieved show remarkable reduction in overall cost effect even though with enhanced quality.

16

Authors: Awan M.A.

HAR (Human Activity Recognition) system becomes complex, inefficient and less accurate as we keep on adding new activities into the system; because it follows a specific procedure for activity recognition, from raw data collection to classification. In this study, we discuss an adaptive system to improve recognition accuracy. We developed a mathematical model to categorize the activities based on their data pattern. It observed that as we group the activities; although a separate classification model is required for each group, but it increases the recognition accuracy and efficiency of the system. The experiments on the data of eleven activities gathered from 10 volunteers proved the usability, scalability and effectiveness of our proposed methodology. The recognition accuracy of eleven activities was increased in total about 9- 37% and reached up to 90% in different cases, using different number of groups and classification algorithms.

16

Authors: Soomro B.N., Xiao L., Jawaid M.M., Soomro S.H., Jaffari N.A.

To effectively improve the performance of representation based classifier, a spatial spectral joint classification post-processing approach is proposed, based on the application of edge preserving BF (Bilateral Filtering) method. The proposed framework includes two key processes: (1) the classifier (such as SRC, CRC, or KSRC) based on sparse representation of each pixel is used to obtain softclassified probabilities belonging to each information class for each pixel; (2) spatial spectral joint BF for the soft-classified probabilities map. It is aimed to integrate context-aware information for each pixel class labels. Under the spatial guidance image, extracted from the three principle component, a BF is employed to get the refined probability maps. The BF considers not only the spatial distance but it also considers the image context-aware distance which significantly improves the classification results. Finally, the class label is obtained by choosing the maximum probability criteria. The experimental results on three benchmark hyperspectral data sets showed that the “local smoothing” is efficient and has a potential to achieve high classification accuracy. All the algorithms are implemented with equal number of labeled samples and comparative results are presented in terms of visual classification map and numerical classification results. The major advantages of proposed method are: it is simple, noniterative and easy to implement. Hence, the advantages lead to significant usage in real applications.

20

Authors: Khan H., Choudhry M.A.

Majority of the developing countries are facing problem of low supply voltage coupled with shortage of electrical energy. There is a growing concern for ways and means to preserve the existing resources and optimize the performance of EPDS (Electric Power Distribution System). Poor condition of distribution network, utilization of low current carrying capacity conductors with overloading is mainly causing the voltage drop, power loss and energy loss in the LVDN (Low Voltage Distribution Networks). Most of developing countriesare encountered with financial problems to ward up gradation of the existing network. Under such circumstances, it is essential to optimize the low voltage distribution network using innovative approach to design the LVDN. In thiswork, ahybrid rehabilitation techniqueis used for the performance improvement of LVD utilities network. Most of the availablealgorithms areconsidering the distribution networks with balance distributed load andunity power factor. The proposed methodology has been applied to LVDN, working under randomly distributed load with low power factor. The technique is applied to improve the efficiency of LVDN in terms of power loss and voltage drop reduction. Optimization of three different circuits of village QutabFerozal, Banth and Pothi Mandra of IESCO, has been selected as a case study. The analysis has been performed using ELR (Energy Loss Reduction) and CADPAD (Computer Aided Distribution Planning and Design) software. Field visits have been conducted to acquire the real data of various LVDN configurations. Simulation results are validated with the actual data of the selected LVDN feeders and found within the permissible limits.