ALBERT

Beschreibung: When preserving perishable goods, maintaining a constant temperature over the cold supply chain is essential. Therefore, refrigerated vehicles are an important part of the cold supply chain system. However, many traditional refrigerated cargo systems are not designed to support the homogeneity of the temperature inside cargo trailers. Indeed, refrigerating equipment is usually placed on one side of transportation systems as this is considered to be more practical. Such a configuration thus leads to significant temperature differences in the two distinct parts of a refrigerated cargo trailer, which might affect the quality, safety, and shelf life of perishable foods. This research aims to improve the temperature distribution of refrigerated trailers. In this study, it is highlighted that in the most commonly used traditional refrigerated trailer models, lower air velocity and higher product temperature are observed at the rear. There is also a partial product chilling risk at the front of the refrigerated trailer. This study investigates and reports significant differences among the three airflow design models of refrigerated cargo systems by applying turbulence flow, heat, and mass transfer models. The analyses of these three models reveal that significant improvement could be achieved by applying the proper arrangements of inlets on the ceiling of the trailer body.

Beschreibung: Professional truck drivers are prone to both physical and psychological stress. Such stress can lead to burnout. Drawing on Job Demands Resources literature and stress research, we investigate the relationship between job related role stressors and three components of burnout, among professional truck drivers who are based in the Netherlands. They were surveyed with a time-lagged design (interval of two months). In the first wave, the different potential causes of burnout were measured (role conflict, role ambiguity, quality of sleep, and the perceived emotional intelligence of the dispatcher). In the second wave, the three elements of burnout were measured: emotional exhaustion, depersonalization, and low personal accomplishment. The results of our study indicate that role conflict relates positively to all three components of a burnout. The emotional intelligence of the dispatcher—as perceived by the truck drivers—was negatively related with the three components of a burnout. Finally, the quality of sleep had an impact on depersonalization and emotional exhaustion. Theoretically, several job specific role stressors are confirmed to play a role in truck driver burnout. However, the top three role stressors all appeared to be related to the trucking industry, instead of a particular employer, and they may therefore require national policy measures.

Beschreibung: Accurate travel time prediction is of high value for freight transports, as it allows supply chain participants to increase their logistics quality and efficiency. It requires both sufficient input data, which can be generated, e.g., by mobile sensors, and adequate prediction methods. Machine Learning (ML) algorithms are well suited to solve non-linear and complex relationships in the collected tracking data. Despite that, only a minority of recent publications use ML for travel time prediction in multimodal transports. We apply the ML algorithms extremely randomized trees (ExtraTrees), adaptive boosting (AdaBoost), and support vector regression (SVR) to this problem because of their ability to deal with low data volumes and their low processing times. Using different combinations of features derived from the data, we have built several models for travel time prediction. Tracking data from a real-world multimodal container transport relation from Germany to the USA are used for evaluation of the established models. We show that SVR provides the best prediction accuracy, with a mean absolute error of 17 h for a transport time of up to 30 days. We also show that our model performs better than average-based approaches.

Beschreibung: Economic potential of feedstock generated low-valued forest residue can be enhanced by emerging biomass conversion technologies (BCT), such as torrefaction, briquetting, and gasification. However, for implementing these emerging processes within the woods, several hurdles are to be overcome, among which a balanced supply chain is pivotal. Centralized biomass recovery operation (CBRO) could be an economically viable solution in accessing harvesting sites and allows integration of BCT into forest management. The goal of this study was to examine the logistic effects of integrating a BCT into a CBRO, under different in-wood scenarios based on variations in travel time between the facility locations, amount of raw materials handled, intermediate storage capacity, and duration (number of days) of annual operations. Specific objectives included analyzing the effects of forest residue recoverability (BDMT, bone dry metric ton/ha), total transportation time from the harvest unit to the market, and the annual number of in-woods production sites on the overall efficiency of the BCT operations. Concurrently, this study examined the forest managerial impacts due to such an integration. Location-allocation tool (maximize market share problem type) within the ArcGIS Network Analyst platform was utilized to model the scenarios and generate one-way travel times from the harvest site to final markets. Results from geospatial analysis showed that there were 89–159 and 64–136 suitable locations for the BCT for logistics model (LM) I and II, respectively. Total one-way travel time for all the models ranged between 1.0–1.7 h. Additionally, the annual numbers of BCT sites was inversely proportional to the total one-way travel time (i.e., harvest unit to market). Arranging CBRO and BCT operations to occur at the same in-woods site returned shorter total and average travel times than arranging the two activities at separate in-woods sites. The model developed for this study can be used by forest managers and entrepreneurs to identify sites for placing BCTs in the forest that minimizes transportation times.

Beschreibung: This article presents the results of theoretical and empirical studies on the search for new logistics development paradigms needed to meet the challenges of the twenty-first century global economy. The author reviews the major factors determining the effectiveness of international processes and operations, including logistics success potentials in supply chains. Furthermore, the article proposes methods for measuring logistics performance, specifically the logit model and the model of fuzzy logic, which could be used to assess whether a firm’s planned investments in logistics infrastructure will end in success or failure. The article also evaluates the impact of logistics on the development of international trade in the practice of Polish firms. The studies cover a period before Poland’s accession to the European Union (EU) (2000 to 2004), and after the accession, from 2005 to 2016, and are supplemented with a forecast for logistics development in Polish firms until 2020.

Beschreibung: The Internet of Things (IoT) is an emerging paradigm branded by heterogeneous technologies composed of smart ubiquitous objects that are seamlessly connected to the Internet. These objects are deployed as Low power and Lossy Networks (LLN) to provide innovative services in various application domains such as smart cities, smart health, and smart communities. The LLN is a form of a network where the interconnected devices are highly resource-constrained (i.e., power, memory, and processing) and characterized by high loss rates, low data rates, and instability in the communication links. Additionally, IoT devices produce a massive amount of confidential and security-sensitive data. Various cryptographic-based techniques exist that can effectively cope with security attacks but are not suitable for IoT as they incur high consumption of resources (i.e., memory, storage and processing). One way to address this problem is by offloading the additional security-related operations to a more resourceful entity such as a fog-based node. Generally, fog computing enables security and analysis of latency-sensitive data directly at the network’s edge. This paper proposes a novel Fog Security Service (FSS) to provide end-to-end security at the fog layer for IoT devices using two well-established cryptographic schemes, identity-based encryption, and identity-based signature. The FSS provides security services such as authentication, confidentiality, and non-repudiation. The proposed architecture would be implemented and evaluated in an OPNET simulator using a single network topology with different traffic loads. The FSS performed better when compared with the APaaS and the legacy method.

Beschreibung: Counterfeiting has always been a concern, costing a significant amount of money and causing losses in international trading markets. Radio frequency identification (RFID) tag Anti-counterfeiting is a conceptual solution that has received attention in the past few years. In this article, we present a survey study on the research topic of anti-counterfeiting products using RFID tags on merchandise. As this issue evolved in industry, there were several techniques used to address the problem; each technique uses a different concept and mechanism in resolving the issue. Each technique also has different pros and cons which we will address at the end of this paper with our findings. As we explore RFID technology and its implementation, we will discuss previous research before proceeding to the core of the topic of RFID Anti-counterfeiting based on the methods used. We compare the different techniques used at the end of the paper.

Beschreibung: Thanks to their arising abilities to influence the human lifestyle, along with reducing the healthcare systems’ cost, wireless body area networks (WBANs) still form a strongly growing research field. Recent advances focus on the opportunities of coexistence and communication between a group of WBANs, that will forward the sensing data, using persons as network relays, until reaching a remote analysis server or cloud servers via the Internet, forming thus a body-to-body network (BBN). Such new-style networks support a range of innovative and promising applications, including ubiquitous healthcare (U-health), interactive games, and military, to cite a few. In this paper, we first present the evolution of the single WBAN concept to the cooperative network of multiple WBANs, giving rise to the BBN concept. A synopsis of the WBAN and BBN respective standards and applications is given, and the emerging BBN challenges are highlighted. Then, we present and discuss the existing WBAN proposals, especially the candidate WBAN protocols that could be adapted and used in BBNs, focusing on four intrinsically related axes of great importance for BBN design: energy efficiency, mobility prediction, quality of service (QoS) and security. Further BBN open issues are also investigated, namely, the wireless propagation between humans carrying wearable devices, the interference, storage and privacy issues as well as the heterogeneity of BBN devices and traffic.

Beschreibung: A service function chain (SFC) is an ordered virtual network function (VNF) chain for processing traffic flows to deliver end-to-end network services in a virtual networking environment. A challenging problem for an SFC in this context is to determine where to deploy VNFs and how to route traffic between VNFs of an SFC on a substrate network. In this paper, we formulate an SFC placement problem as an integer linear programing (ILP) model, and propose an availability-enhanced VNF placing scheme based on the layered graphs approach. To improve the availability of SFC deployment, our scheme distributes VNFs of an SFC to multiple substrate nodes to avoid a single point of failure. We conduct numerical analysis and computer simulation to validate the feasibility of our SFC scheme. The results show that the proposed scheme outperforms well in different network scenarios in terms of end-to-end delay of the SFC and computation time cost.

Beschreibung: The tremendous increase in the urban population highlights the need for more efficient transport systems and techniques to alleviate the increasing number of the resulting traffic-associated problems. Modeling and predicting road traffic flow are a critical part of intelligent transport systems (ITSs). Therefore, their accuracy and efficiency have a direct impact on the overall functioning. In this scope, a new approach for predicting the road traffic flow is proposed that combines the Petri nets model with a dynamic estimation of intersection turning movement counts to ensure a more accurate assessment of its performance. Thus, this manuscript extends our work by introducing a new feature, namely turning movement counts, to attain a better prediction of road traffic flow. A simulation study is conducted to get a better understanding of how predictive models perform in the context of estimating turning movements.

Beschreibung: Continuous monitoring of breathing activity plays a major role in detecting and classifying a breathing abnormality. This work aims to facilitate detection of abnormal breathing syndromes, including tachypnea, bradypnea, central apnea, and irregular breathing by tracking of thorax movement resulting from respiratory rhythms based on ultrasonic radar detection. This paper proposes a non-contact, non-invasive, low cost, low power consumption, portable, and precise system for simultaneous monitoring of normal and abnormal breathing activity in real-time using an ultrasonic PING sensor and microcontroller PIC18F452. Moreover, the obtained abnormal breathing syndrome is reported to the concerned physician’s mobile telephone through a global system for mobile communication (GSM) modem to handle the case depending on the patient’s emergency condition. In addition, the power consumption of the proposed monitoring system is reduced via a duty cycle using an energy-efficient sleep/wake scheme. Experiments were conducted on 12 participants without any physical contact at different distances of 0.5, 1, 2, and 3 m and the breathing rates measured with the proposed system were then compared with those measured by a piezo respiratory belt transducer. The experimental results illustrate the feasibility of the proposed system to extract breathing rate and detect the related abnormal breathing syndromes with a high degree of agreement, strong correlation coefficient, and low error ratio. The results also showed that the total current consumption of the proposed monitoring system based on the sleep/wake scheme was 6.936 mA compared to 321.75 mA when the traditional operation was used instead. Consequently, this led to a 97.8% of power savings and extended the battery life time from 8 h to approximately 370 h. The proposed monitoring system could be used in both clinical and home settings.

Beschreibung: Mobile health research field aims to provide access to healthcare anytime and anywhere through mobile computing technologies while using a cost-effective approach. Mobile health is closely related to ambient assisted living as both research fields address independence in elderly adults. Aging has become a relevant challenge, as it is anticipated that 20% of world population will be aged 60 years and older in 2050. Most people spend more than 90% of their time indoors, therefore the indoor environmental quality has a relevant impact on occupant’s health and well-being. We intended to provide real-time indoor quality monitoring for enhanced living environments and occupational health. This paper presents the AirPlus real-time indoor environmental quality monitoring system, which incorporates several advantages when compared to other systems, such as scalability, flexibility, modularity, easy installation, and configuration, as well as mobile computing software for data consulting and notifications. The results that were obtained are promising and present a significant contribution to the monitoring solutions available in the literature. AirPlus provides a rich dataset to plan interventions for enhanced indoor quality, but also to support clinical diagnostics and correlate occupant’s health problems with their living environment conditions.

Beschreibung: The increasing demand for location-dependent services in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) calls for solutions capable of handling the diversified demands and the unique challenges presented in WSNs. In most applications, nodes need to determine their locations in a reliable manner while operating under stringent constraints in computation, communication, and energy resources. This paper offers a novel solution to bridge the gap between the high accuracy demand and low resources available for range-based localization. We propose KickLoc, a fully distributed scheme, which considers the uncertainty of the distance measurements to minimize localization errors introduced from the range measurement, and leverages information from all neighboring nodes for better position estimations. Our work is evaluated via extensive simulations, with comparisons to other well-known localization schemes, and the Cramér-Rao lower bound (CRLB). In addition, we implement and evaluate the proposed system on sensor platforms with different range measurement mechanisms. The results show that this localization solution outperforms existing methods in various scenarios, while remains lightweight and suitable for small, low resources WSNs.

Beschreibung: The term smart grid (SG) has been used by many government bodies and researchers to refer to the new trend in the power industry of modernizing and automating the existing power system. SGs must utilize assets optimally by making use of the information, like equipment capacity, voltage drop, radial network structure, minimizing investment and operating costs, minimizing energy loss and reliability indices, and so on. One way to achieve this is to re-route or reconfigure distribution systems (DSs). Distribution systems are reconfigured to choose a switching combination of branches of the system that optimize certain performance parameters of the power supply, while satisfying some specified constraints. In this paper, a blended biased and unbiased weightage (BBUW) multiple attribute decision-making (MADM) method is proposed for finding the compromised best configuration and compared it with other decision-making methods, such as the weighted sum method (WSM), weighted product method (WPM), and the Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) method. The BBUW method is implemented for two distribution systems, and the result obtained shows a good co-relationship between BBUW and other decision-making methods. Further weights obtained from the BBUW method are used for the WSM, WPM and TOPSIS methods for decision making. Examples of the distribution system are worked out in this paper to demonstrate the validity and effectiveness of the method.

Beschreibung: This study investigated the relationship between open innovation and the radicalness of innovation. The balance between radical and incremental innovation is an essential part of the ambidextrous use of explorative and exploitative strategies, and this study assumed that open innovation is usually interlinked with explorative strategies and is thus related to radical innovation performance. Accordingly, following an empirical investigation, we demonstrate that the balance of open innovation firms is slightly skewed toward explorative radical innovation. Using the Korean version of the community innovation survey, we show that the relative radicalness that is projected on innovation output exhibits an inverted-U curve. Furthermore, the curve shifts based on the level of inbound open innovation. Our results suggest that there is an ambidextrous balance between radical and incremental innovation while implementing open innovation. In addition, the research results imply that firms placing greater weight on explorative radical innovations need to consider in-depth open innovation strategies.

Beschreibung: This study aims to identify, from among business strategies presented in Miles and Snow (1978, 2003), those that increase the future performance or growth sustainability of unlisted small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in Korea. (This study applied the scope of SMEs based on Article 2 of the Enforcement Decree of the Tax Exemption Restriction Act in Korea. The Korean tax law sets the scope of SMEs based on independence criteria set by the scale of sales, assets, and affiliation, and subordination. For example, the size standard of a manufacturing industry can be regarded as a small business if the average sales amount is less than 150 billion won or the total amount of assets is less than 500 billion won for three years.) In addition, it analyzes measured variables of business strategy for factors influencing unlisted SMEs’ future performance and growth potential. The objective is to determine a business strategy for unlisted SMEs, which are small, financially challenged, and have shorter lifespans and faster growth rates. The results highlight that investment in research and development (R&D) for new products influences both future performance and growth sustainability. R&D is an important intangible resource of the firm, which increases future risk due to high future uncertainty, but it is also an important factor to increase future performance or value based on resource-based theory. In the accounting field, research and development expenditure also provided evidence of future excess return or performance. This study is meaningful because it identifies the role of research and development in increasing future growth sustainability in SMEs, thus emphasizing change and innovation.

Beschreibung: Commercialization strategy is an all-encompassing plan that organizes technology transfer office goals to commercialize a university’s technologies. Measurement strategy requires feasible variables that make up those goals. This strategy also ensures that all variables that are important in measuring contribute to the larger goals. A useful way to assess and explain the effectiveness of the technology transfer office (TTO) of universities is to model this within a production function/frontier framework. Such a production function is typically estimated econometrically. This study presents evidence on the relative efficiency of research commercialization in the university through the data envelopment analysis (DEA) model. The implication of the DEA efficiency result is to derive the efficiency level of the TTO’s strategy from the observed performance. It also helps in identifying the benchmarking of other TTOs, which would be valuable information for improving their new technology commercialization strategy. In detail, a benchmark is provided to improve the weakness of strategy and resource allocation of a poorly performing TTO. The proposed matrix of indicators is an exploit of how performance could be measured within the decision-making units that have been chosen. By introducing the measure to commercialization strategy framework the development of technology transfer offices policies are considered.

Beschreibung: This research aims to forecast future economic and environmental growth for the next 16 years (2020–2035) according to the government’s strategic framework by applying the second order autoregressive-structural equation model (second order autoregressive-SEM). The model is validated by various measures, fits with the best model standards, meets all criteria of the goodness of fit, and is absent from any issues of heteroskedasticity, multicollinearity, autocorrelation, and non-normality. The proposed model is very distinct from other alternatives in that it produces the optimal outcome. Its mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) is 1.02% while the root mean square error (RMSE) is 1.51%. A comparison of the above results is carried out to compare the same values from other models, namely the regression linear model (ML model), back propagation neural network (BP model), artificial neural natural model (ANN model), gray model, and the autoregressive integrated moving average model (ARIMA model). The second order autoregressive-SEM is a model that is appropriate for long-term forecasting (2020–2035), and accounts for the specifics of the Thai government strategy set under the Industry 4.0 policy framework. The results of the long-term analysis indicate that the current political policy will result in continuous economic growth, where the gross national product (GNP) growth rate will climb up to 6.45% per annum by 2035, while the environment is being negatively affected. The study predicts that CO2 emissions will rise up to 97.52 Mt CO2 Eq. (2035). The forecasting model also reflects that the economy factor has an adjustment ability to equilibrium stronger than that of the environment factor; further, it shows that the relationship between the factors is causal. In addition, the political policy , economy , and environment factors are found to have both direct and indirect effects. As to the results, this study illustrates that the Industry 4.0 policy is still inefficient, as the carbon dioxide emissions are projected to be higher than the threshold for environment hazards and disasters which set to the limit of 80 Mt CO2 Eq. by 2035. The effect of such policy will put the environment at risk, and the government must take immediate action to respond to this urgency. Thus, the second order autoregressive-SEM model remains a significant model embedded with the adjustment ability to equilibrium and the applicability for various contexts in different sectors. This introduced model is a vital tool for assisting the national government to create policy that is effective and sustainable, and lead to positive development of the nation. This second order autoregressive-SEM model can be used as a resource for the management of both public policy and private enterprise.

Beschreibung: Today’s dynamic and complex environment means that companies are trying to develop entrepreneurial thinking as a competitive advantage. Universities around the world are simultaneously increasing entrepreneurial training across a broad array of majors. However, the entrepreneurial training is not heavily connected to industry needs. This paper focuses on how industry and universities can cooperate to prepare students for corporate entrepreneurial thinking. The research is based on extensive literature, reports, and in-depth interviews with 28 people from various parts of the RTP (Research Triangle Park), including companies, government agencies, and numerous programs at multiple universities. The major finding from this study is that the strength of entrepreneurial education in the regional innovation system reinforces the companies’ open innovation capacity and their performance. To be successful at launching campus-wide entrepreneurship education to increase understanding of corporate entrepreneurship, Corporate Entrepreneurship Education (CEE) must include (1) entrepreneurial leadership; (2) faculty champions; (3) student-focused policies; (4) engagement with the community; and (5) a decentralized, autonomous structure of entrepreneurship programs.

Beschreibung: This paper extends resource dependence logic by investigating the antecedents of technological diversification and further identifies its boundary condition. We argue that this resource dependence logic is bound by state ownership through coalitions with firms, a less discussed component of interdependence. The empirical results, based on a panel data analysis of Chinese listed firms, suggest that environmental dynamism positively relates to technological diversification, while environmental munificence negatively relates to technological diversification. These relationships changed when state ownership is considered. The theoretical implications for resource dependence theory and diversification research are discussed.

Beschreibung: Industry 4.0, started in Germany in 2011, was fervently promoted by various advanced countries and followed by the introduction of “smart manufacturing”. As an innovative strategy of the manufacturing industry “smart manufacturing” has attracted considerable attention in the field of academics and practice. However, the issues of huge investment and differentiation of individual enterprises have created a big gap between policy promotion and production at the site of actual industrial manufacturing and resulted in limited progress in smart manufacturing. In view of the situation, the authors have previously developed in relation to the practice of individual companies in the industry a practical structure of “Lean Smart Manufacturing: a conceptual framework and solution based co-creative platform” combining Lean Production with smart manufacturing to achieve customer value. In addition to filling the gap between government policy and industry in Industry 4.0, the practical structure suggests the possibility of balancing differentiation and open innovation. Taiwan’s bicycle industry is one of Taiwan's most internationally competitive industries. GIANT, the leading manufacturer of bicycles in Taiwan, has been actively promoting TPS since 2000. With the development of Industry 4.0, GIANT has been working on the application of Industry 4.0 related technologies in order to further enhance customer value. In the application of the practical structure of “Lean Smart Manufacturing”, there are few cases of corporate practice. This study focuses on the A-Team which is constructed by the bicycle industry in Taiwan and GIANT for empirical research, to see how GIANT implement the “Lean Smart Manufacturing” and construct the co-creative platform, to balance differentiation and open innovation, then strengthen its competitiveness. The research results show that although this case is still in the development stage, it has the basic form of “Lean Smart Manufacturing: a conceptual framework and solution based co-creative platform”. This case, as we advocate the use of differentiated advantages of “Lean Smart Manufacturing”, pragmatically from the establishment of the smart factory platform on the physical system, gradually extended to the strategic co-creative platform of the cyber system.

Beschreibung: The purpose of this study is to reveal the effect of personal value as a part of creating shared value (CSV). We extracted factors of personal value through a literature review. Personal value consists of social commitment, self-actualization, goal setting, and solidarity. Self-actualization is the universal motivation of the individual, goal setting is the basis for the occurrence of action, and solidarity is the relationship factor that defends competition and personalization. This study was conducted on three hypotheses. Hypothesis 1 is that self-actualization will have an effect on CSV. Hypothesis 2 is that goal setting will have an effect on CSV. Hypothesis 3 is that solidarity will have an effect on CSV. The proxy of CSV is social commitment. We examine the effects of these personal values on CSV by surveying 557 university students. This study applied the regression model to test the hypotheses. The empirical results are as follows. CSV increases when we are more self-actualized. Goal setting positively affects CSV. CSV goes up as we have many relationships with organizations and are more cooperative in work. This study suggests the important elements of personal values in a university setting for CSV, and enables setting the direction of the education by setting the index of the attitude to increase the value of the individual in CSV.

Beschreibung: This study aims to develop a Modular Object-Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment (Moodle)-based online learning system and derive a class model to enhance learners’ creative collaboration capabilities. The research method for this is first to analyze the functional elements of the online learning system to enhance creative collaboration among the functions of the Moodle online learning system. Second, a class model is derived to enhance creative collaboration by applying the constructivist teaching–learning principle. Third, we conduct a verification of the effectiveness of the Moodle-based class model that was developed to enhance creative collaboration. The results of the study show that, among the functions of the Moodle online learning system, forms, real-time conferencing, reciprocal evaluation, Wiki, and blogs have the ability to enhance creative collaboration. Second, the class model for promoting creative collaboration based on a mood-based online learning system consists of self-reflections, learner-driven learning, professional learning, practical task, and the role of the processor. Third, after verifying the application effect of the Moodle-based class model for university students, a significant effect is found in the creative collaboration of university students. The results of this study suggest that: First, the Moodle online learning system should be utilized to provide learners with a variety of online learning opportunities to promote creative collaboration. Second, the teaching–learning operation manual needs to be developed later in order for the class model to be effectively implemented at the classroom site to promote creative collaboration based on the Moodle online learning system.

Beschreibung: Given the dearth of studies in developing and Asian countries’ context, the present study attempts to excavate the predictors of enterprise resource planning (ERP) adoption and implementation. Based on the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT) model and open innovation literature, an extended model is proposed encompassing mediator and moderator variables. The study follows the deducting reasoning approach with the positivism paradigm. Out of 235 responses, the study used 225 replies collected through a self-administered sampling, and the data were analyzed by using PLS-based structural equation modeling. The study revealed that the hypothesized direct influences are significant except the influence of facilitating conditions on actual use. Likewise, the intention to use mediates the impact of facilitating conditions on the actual use of ERP. However, there is no moderating effect of education and firms’ size among the hypothesized influence. The study contributes to advance the previous findings by using an extended UTAUT model and validates results with the rest of the world.

Beschreibung: The purpose of this study is to explore the relationships between three intangible resources and the innovation performance of Chinese high-tech firms, and the moderating effect of internationalization on these relationships. We implement a hierarchical multiple regression analysis using data for 274 Chinese high-tech firms. The results show that all three intangible resources, measured by top management team diversity, research and development intensity, and government subsidies, positively influence Chinese high-tech firm innovation performance. We find the relationships between these intangible resources and the innovation performance of Chinese high-tech firms are significantly positively moderated by internationalization. These findings have important implications, as follows. First, they provide evidence of the strategic value of intangible resources and their effects on innovation performance. Second, our results show that increasing internationalization alone does not guarantee performance improvement. Firms should consider their internal and external environments and the complex relationships among factors when they make decisions about internationalization investments. Prior research does not provide an explanation for how internationalization affects performance, because it primarily focuses on the direct relationship between internationalization and performance. This study overcomes this limitation by examining the indirect effect of internationalization on performance.

Beschreibung: In Korean society, where aging is rapidly progressing, the happiness of the elderly is no longer an economic issue. An esthetics program has the effect of improving depression or low self-esteem to increase psychological and physical satisfaction, which is a good way to raise the happiness index of the elderly. However, there is a lack of esthetics education or esthetics programs in Korea to train estheticians to serve elderly people. This study confirmed the possibility of open innovation through esthetics education to increase the happiness index of the elderly. As a research method, a self-administered questionnaire was used to survey 572 estheticians and analyzed statistically. In this study, Korean estheticians were very positive about the need for the development of professional care programs for the elderly, and it was found that they are willing to care for the elderly. Developing a variety of esthetic programs through the training of professional manpower for the elderly in the future will contribute to enhancing the happiness index of elderly Korean people.

Beschreibung: This paper considers a carbon emission cap and trade market, where the carbon emission cap for each entity (either government or firm) is allocated first and then the carbon trading price is decided interdependently in the carbon trading market among the non-cooperative entities which make their production decision. We assume that there are n entities emitting carbon during the production process. After allocating the carbon (emission) cap for each participating entity in the carbon cap and trade market, each participant makes a production decision using the Newsvendor model given carbon trading price determined in the carbon trading market and trades some amount of its carbon emission, if its carbon emission is below or above its own carbon cap. Here, the carbon trading price depends on how carbon caps over the entities are allocated, since the carbon trading price is determined through the carbon (emission) trading market, which considers total amount of carbon emission being equal to total carbon caps over entities and some fraction of total carbon emission should be from each entity participating in the carbon cap and trade market. Thus, we can see the interdependency among the production decision, carbon cap and carbon trading price. We model this as a non-cooperative Stackelberg game in which carbon cap for each entity is allocated in the first stage and each entity’s production quantity is decided in the second stage considering the carbon trading price determined in the carbon trading market. First, we show the monotonic property of the carbon trading price and each entity’s production over the carbon cap allocation. In addition, we show that there exists an optimality condition for the carbon cap allocation. Using this optimality condition, we provide various results for carbon cap and trade market.

Beschreibung: Integrating the relational approach and social exchange theory, the authors conceptualize the quality of leader‒member and team member exchanges as mediators for understanding the role of transformational leadership in employee proactive behaviors (e.g., voice, taking charge, and innovative behaviors). The results based on data collected from 352 full-time employees working in pharmaceutical companies in Vietnam largely support the proposed theoretical framework and shed light on the mechanism through which leadership style influences employee proactivity in a manufacturing context. Using the results, the authors discuss research limitation and, managerial implications, and suggest future research directions for the relationship between leadership style and employee proactive behavior.

Beschreibung: This study investigates whether higher start-up intention leads to innovative behavior and whether innovative behavior is increased by the medium of entrepreneurship. This study tested the hypotheses by conducting a survey on students participating in entrepreneurship club activities in university. The results showed that start-up intention affects innovative behavior and has a significant effect on the sub-factors of entrepreneurship, such as innovation, risk taking, and proactiveness. The result of an analysis of the mediating effect of entrepreneurship on innovative behavior showed that all sub-factors performed a partially mediating role. It can therefore be said that higher start-up intention leads to more innovative behavior and that entrepreneurship serves as an important link in this relationship. These results show that increasing start-up intention may lead to innovative behavior and imply that this has educational relevance in cultivating entrepreneurship. However, this study is limited in terms of the generalizability of the results, as the subjects are university students participating in entrepreneurship club activities in Korea. Therefore, more significant outcomes can be obtained in further research by targeting a broader scope of subjects.

Beschreibung: The pharmaceutical industry is a high-technology industry that requires a combination of in-depth knowledge from various fields. It is characterized by high cost, high risk and a long-term perspective due to the high level of regulation. In addition, it is known that research and development (R&D) productivity is deteriorating in the industry. Under these conditions, the importance of open innovation strategies has been emphasized. Under an open innovation system, it is essential for firms to develop several dynamic capabilities to effectively manage their resources both internally and externally. Using a systematic framework of dynamic capabilities suggested by previous studies, this study focuses on the determinants affecting firms’ desorptive capacities, which are measured as the number of out-licensing deals, as an indicator for the performance of their outbound innovation. For the analysis, negative binomial regression is employed and inventive capacity and connective capacity are selected as the determinants of the licensors’ desorptive capacity. The results of regression analysis reveal that inventive capacity does not have a significant effect on desorptive capacity and that only connective capacity has a significant positive effect on desorptive capacity.

Beschreibung: This study presents the Location Routing Problem (LRP) for which we have created a model for the integration of locating facilities and vehicle routing decisions to solve the problem. The case study is the Palm Oil Collection Center, which is also important for the supply chain system. A mathematical model was made to minimize the total cost of a facility-opening cost, fixed cost of vehicle uses and fuel consumption cost. The fuel consumption cost relies on the distance and road conditions, in case of poor physical condition of a road, and its width, which can be affected the speed of the vehicle as well as the used fuel. Thus, we propose an Adaptive Large Neighborhood Search (ALNS) based on heuristic for solving the LRP. The ALNS method was tested with three datasets of samples divided into small, medium and large problems. Then, the results were compared with the results from the exact method by the Lingo program. The computational study indicated that the ALNS algorithm was competitive to the results of the Lingo for all instance sizes. Moreover, the ALNS was more effective than the exact method; approximately 99% in terms of processing time. We extended this approach to solve the case study, which was considered to be the largest problem, and the ALNS algorithm was efficient with acceptable solutions and short processing time. Therefore, the proposed method provided an effective solution to manage location routing decision of the palm oil collection center.

Beschreibung: The article deals with the issue of knowledge spillovers in the European regions. For this purpose, a standard Knowledge Production Function (KPF) approach was extended by the application of spatial econometrics methods. Our analysis started from the construction of the alternative structures of the spatial weight matrices. These matrices were based on technological and institutional proximities, which represent compelling alternatives to geographic proximity regarded as a kind of all-encompassing connectivity measure. The next step in our analysis was the modeling of regional knowledge generation processes. We treated R&D expenditures and human resources in science and technology as the input measures and patent applications to the European Patent Office as the output measure in our basic and extended models. The results show that the scope and direction of knowledge spillovers are sensitive to the type of knowledge (tacit vs. codified) and proximity dimension engaged. These findings contribute to the current debate in the geography of innovation and economics of knowledge literature.

Beschreibung: The aim of the paper is to provide an analysis of news and financial data using their network representation. The formation of network structures from data sources is carried out using two different approaches: by building the so-called market graph in which nodes represent financial assets (e.g., stocks) and the edges between nodes stand for the correlation between the corresponding assets, by constructing a company co-mention network in which any two companies are connected by an edge if a news item mentioning both companies has been published in a certain period of time. Topological changes of the networks over the period 2005–2010 are investigated using the sliding window of six-month duration. We study the stability of the market graph and the company co-mention network over time and establish which of the two networks was more stable during the period. In addition, we examine the impact of the crisis of 2008 on the stability of the market graph as well as the company co-mention network. The networks that are considered in this paper and that are the objects of our study (the market graph and the company co-mention network) have a non-changing set of nodes (companies), and can change over time by adding/removing links between these nodes. Different graph similarity measures are used to evaluate these changes. If a network is stable over time, a measure of similarity between two graphs constructed for two different time windows should be close to zero. If there was a sharp change between the graphs constructed for two adjacent periods, then this should lead to a sharp increase in the value of the similarity measure between these two graphs. This paper uses the graph similarity measures which were proposed relatively recently. In addition, to estimate how the networks evolve over time we exploit QAP (Quadratic Assignment Procedure). While there is a sufficient amount of works studying the dynamics of graphs (including the use of graph similarity metrics), in this paper the company co-mention network dynamics is examined both individually and in comparison with the dynamics of market graphs for the first time.

Beschreibung: This article proposes a methodology to resolve the advertising method selection problem (AdSP). The use of different advertising methods for the same product can generate different responses in terms of the product’s sales volume. Companies selling products have limited resources for advertising, with challenges such as budget and time constraints. It is necessary that the correct advertising method is selected in order to increase the maximum profit, given these limited resources. In the present study, a mathematical model was developed to represent the AdSP, and optimization software (OS) was utilized to optimally resolve it. However, a larger problem can prevent OS from optimally resolving the problem within a reasonable timeframe. To overcome this challenge, the authors developed a metaheuristic called the improved differential evolution algorithm (IDE), which combines three metaheuristics: (1) The differential evolution algorithm (DE); (2) the iterated local search (ILS); and (3) the adaptive large neighborhood search (ALNS). The performance of IDE reflects the best elements of these three methods. The computational results show that IDE can generate solutions that are similar to the optimal solutions obtained by OS while using 69.25% less computational time than OS. IDE improved the efficiency compared with the three original component methods. Moreover, IDE also found better solutions than those found by the original DE, ILS, and ALNS.

Beschreibung: Recently, a lot of small- and mid-sized companies have emerged through continuous technological development and start-up successes despite insufficient scales and resources compared to medium companies or conglomerates in fierce market competition. Technological development capability, which is required to acquire, select, or utilize source technology for company competitiveness, becomes the competitive edge and key capability to gain distinctiveness. Accordingly, the objective of this research was to investigate the influential factors on performance by suggesting technological development results and technology commercialization as the outcome of technological development capability and to identify the capability required for successful technological development performance and technology commercialization for companies through previous academic research. Moreover, the study aimed to investigate performance differences according to technology business groups by dividing the groups into high-technology companies, medium-technology companies, and low-technology companies. As a result of the analysis, among the indicators constituting technological development capability, manpower in technological development and technological development-specialized research centers had a positive influence on the product competitiveness of technological development performance. Also, technological development expenses and technology skill levels were verified to have positive impacts on the technology competitiveness of technological development performance. As for technology commercialization performance, the more manpower that is in research and development, the higher the sales amounts by technological development; also, the higher the technology skill levels, the higher the export amounts by technological development. Moreover, technology business groups had differences in performance. This research has significance in focusing on the influence of the technological development capability of companies on technological development performance and technology commercialization performance. Future research is expected to draw new variations different from the analysis results from existing studies by setting variations, investigating complementary relationships among variations in detail, and utilizing statistical techniques that can control mutual relationships among variations.

Beschreibung: The main purpose of this study was to find out the perceived impacts on the garment and textile industry of Vietnam from the Belt and Road Initiative (the BRI), a global-scale developmental and trade facilitation policy of China. The research applied both desk review and in-depth interviews with 54 leaders and high-ranked officials from public and private sectors in 2017 to identify potential impacts of the BRI on the Vietnam textile and garment industry. In addition, perceived challenges and opportunities of the BRI were also examined. Respondents from both sectors agreed that the initiative could foster textile export and the development of infrastructure. Apart from that, the main challenge is recognized as the poor competitiveness of Vietnamese textile firms on the international commercial playground. Solution insights that were offered through interviews suggested that the competence of domestic apparel brands and establishment of ODM (Original Design Manufacturing) and OBM (Own Brand Manufacturing) business models in Vietnamese textile producers may play the key roles in coping with the new challenges and in grasping opportunities that the initiative has to offer. From the perspective of the state, an improved public administration system is perceived as the key element in supporting the enterprises for upcoming challenges.

Beschreibung: In recent years, the construction industry faced major challenges in ensuring a balance between environmental, economic, and social aspects. There are a lot of different studies on different aspects of the construction industry. Most of the available studies look at the construction supervision process mainly from the constructor’s point of view. However, there is little research on the market surveillance and supervision process performed by the government and its role in ensuring sustainability in a particular area. The aim of this study was to identify the main activities within the construction supervision process to achieve the sustainability of construction. The theoretical framework of the concept of sustainability in construction and in the activities of the supervision process was analyzed on the basis of a literature survey. The research revealed a connection between sustainability elements and the construction supervision activities. The results of the survey identified the most important factors that influence, negatively as well as positively, the achievements of sustainability in the supervision process. The research results are significant in order to create a construction supervision process which would not only ensure the compliance with the set requirements but also help achieve sustainability in the particular area. Research Limitations/Implications: Research is focused on the supervision process of public building construction in Latvia.

Beschreibung: Accounting education focuses on delivering knowledge to students. Most student are passive, behaving as bystanders or listeners in lecturer-oriented learning. However, student-centered learning requires active and positive engagement from students to generate effective learning. Board games represent a key driving tool in inducing student participation and interest in active learning. This study investigates whether the active participation of students in class activities has positive effects on accounting education. Specifically, it tests whether active student involvement in board game activities in introductory accounting courses contributes to effective learning. There were a few key findings. Firstly, the more actively that students participate in the game, the higher their favorable changes are in terms of perception of accounting. Secondly, the higher their positive perceptions are, the higher the effects of accounting education are. These results imply that the active involvement of learners is a precondition for the effect of accounting education activities, and that positive perception is a mediator for learning effects.

Beschreibung: In Korea, cooperation between university and company is mainly encouraged by government policy as the Triple Helix’s statist model. Since 2003, the government started a variety of university financial support program, and in 2014, it reached to the point that 31 ministries conducted 408 programs in total. Most projects focused on training human resources and supporting Research and development, which is considered as the core function of universities, but some of the projects are designed to support the industry–academia cooperation. For instance, the Ministry of Education ran ‘Leaders in University and Industry Cooperation (LINC)’ program. LINC is a follow-up project of Human Resources Development for the Leading Industries, Industry–Academia Cooperation-oriented University, and Focal Point Research program. Accordingly, it aimed to create university–industry cooperative models, and nurture talents based on regional economy’s demand. The program provided approximately $230M per year for over 50 universities across the country. It was one of the highly influential grant programs considering the fact that there are about 200 universities nationwide and an annual budget of university is $900 billion on average. In this context, this study is to assess the influence of resources of universities capacity on the achievement of university–industry cooperation and explore whether a government-initiated policy has a significant effect using data from government information disclosure system on education.

Beschreibung: Stochastic computing (SC) is an emerging low-cost computation paradigm for efficient approximation. It processes data in forms of probabilities and offers excellent progressive accuracy. Since SC’s accuracy heavily depends on the stochastic bitstream length, generating acceptable approximate results while minimizing the bitstream length is one of the major challenges in SC, as energy consumption tends to linearly increase with bitstream length. To address this issue, a novel energy-performance scalable approach based on quasi-stochastic number generators is proposed and validated in this work. Compared to conventional approaches, the proposed methodology utilizes a novel algorithm to estimate the computation time based on the accuracy. The proposed methodology is tested and verified on a stochastic edge detection circuit to showcase its viability. Results prove that the proposed approach offers a 12–60% reduction in execution time and a 12–78% decrease in the energy consumption relative to the conventional counterpart. This excellent scalability between energy and performance could be potentially beneficial to certain application domains such as image processing and machine learning, where power and time-efficient approximation is desired.

Beschreibung: In this paper, the performance of coded systems is considered in the presence of Suzuki fading channels, which is a combination of both short-fading and long-fading channels. The problem in manipulating a Suzuki fading model is the complicated integration involved in the evaluation of the Suzuki probability density function (PDF). In this paper, we calculated noise PDF after the zero-forcing equalizer (ZFE) at the receiver end with several approaches. In addition, we used the derived PDF to calculate the log-likelihood ratios (LLRs) for turbo-coded systems, and results were compared to Gaussian distribution-based LLRs. The results showed a 2 dB improvement in performance compared to traditional LLRs at 10 - 6 of the bit error rate (BER) with no added complexity. Simulations were obtained utilizing the Matlab program, and results showed good improvement in the performance of the turbo-coded system with the proposed LLRs compared to Gaussian-based LLRs.

Beschreibung: In this research work, the threshold voltage and subthreshold swing of cylindrical surrounding double-gate (CSDG) MOSFET have been analyzed. These analyses are based on the analytical solution of 2D Poisson equation using evanescent-mode analysis (EMA). This EMA provides the better approach in solving the 2D Poisson equation by considering the oxide and Silicon regions as a two-dimensional problem, to produce physically consistent results with device simulation for better device performance. Unlike other models such as polynomial exponential and parabolic potential approximation (PPA) which consider the oxide and silicon as one-dimensional problem. Using the EMA, the 2D Poisson equation is decoupled into 1D Poisson equation which represent the long channel potential and 2D Laplace equation describing the impacts of short channel effects (SCEs) in the channel potential. Furthermore, the derived channel potential close-form expression is extended to determine the threshold voltage and subthreshold behavior of the proposed CSDG MOSFET device. This model has been evaluated with various device parameters such as radii Silicon film thickness, gate oxide thickness, and the channel length to analyze the behavior of the short channel effects in the proposed CSDG MOSFET. The accuracy of the derived expressions have been validated with the mathematical and numerical simulation.

Beschreibung: Ultrasonic power transfer (UPT) is a promising method for wireless power transfer technology for low-power medical applications. Most portable or wearable medical devices are battery-powered. Batteries cannot be used for a long time and require periodic charging or replacement. UPT is a candidate technology for solving this problem. In this work, a 40-KHz ultrasound transducer was used to design a new prototype for supplying power to a wearable heart rate sensor for medical application. The implemented system consists of a power unit and heart rate measurement unit. The power unit includes an ultrasonic transmitter and receiver, rectifier, boost converter and super-capacitors. The heart rate measurement unit comprises measurement and monitoring circuits. UPT-based transfer power and efficiency were achieved using 1-, 4- and 8-Farad (F) super-capacitors. At 4 F, the system achieved 69.4% transfer efficiency and 0.318 mW power at 4 cm. In addition, 97% heart rate measurement accuracy was achieved relative to the benchmark device. The heart rate measurements were validated with statistical analysis. Our results show that this work outperforms previous works in terms of transfer power and efficiency with a 4-cm gap between the ultrasound transmitter and receiver.

Beschreibung: This discussion develops a theoretical analog architecture framework similar to the well developed digital architecture theory. Designing analog systems, whether small or large scale, must optimize their architectures for energy consumption. As in digital systems, a strong architecture theory, based on experimental results, is essential for these opportunities. The recent availability of programmable and configurable analog technologies, as well as the start of analog numerical analysis, makes considering scaling of analog computation more than a purely theoretical interest. Although some aspects nicely parallel digital architecture concepts, analog architecture theory requires revisiting some of the foundations of parallel digital architectures, particularly revisiting structures where communication and memory access, instead of processor operations, that dominates complexity. This discussion shows multiple system examples from Analog-to-Digital Converters (ADC) to Vector-Matrix Multiplication (VMM), adaptive filters, image processing, sorting, and other computing directions.

Beschreibung: Due to the huge requirements in terms of both computational and memory capabilities, implementing energy-efficient and high-performance Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) by exploiting embedded systems still represents a major challenge for hardware designers. This paper presents the complete design of a heterogeneous embedded system realized by using a Field-Programmable Gate Array Systems-on-Chip (SoC) and suitable to accelerate the inference of Convolutional Neural Networks in power-constrained environments, such as those related to IoT applications. The proposed architecture is validated through its exploitation in large-scale CNNs on low-cost devices. The prototype realized on a Zynq XC7Z045 device achieves a power efficiency up to 135 Gops/W. When the VGG-16 model is inferred, a frame rate up to 11.8 fps is reached.

Beschreibung: The Internet-of-Things (IoT) revolution has shaped a new application domain where low-power RISC architectures constitute the standard computational backbone. The current de-facto design practice for such architectures is to extend the ISA and the corresponding microarchitecture with custom instructions to efficiently manage the complex tasks imposed by IoT applications, i.e., augmented reality, artificial intelligence and autonomous driving, within narrow energy and area budgets. However, the new IoT application domain also offers a unique opportunity to revisit and optimize the RISC microarchitectural design flow from a more communication- and memory-centric viewpoint. This manuscript critically explores and optimizes the design of a RISC CPU front-end for IoT delivering a two-fold objective: (i) provide an optimized CPU microarchitecture; and (ii) present a set of three design guidelines to steer the implementation of IoT CPUs. The exploration sits on a newly proposed Systems-on-Chip (SoC) and RISC CPU implementing the RISC-V/IMF ISA and accounting for area, timing, and performance design metrics. Such SoC offers a reference design to evaluate pros and cons of different microarchitectural solutions. A wide combination of microarchitectures considering different branch prediction schemes, cache design architectures and on-chip bus solutions have been evaluated. The entire exploration is focused on the FPGA-based implementation due to the renewed interest for this technology demonstrated by both the research community and companies. We note that ARM launched the DesignStart FPGA program to make available the Cortex-M microcontrollers on Xilinx FPGAs in the form of IP blocks.

Beschreibung: Magnetic tunnel junction (MTJ) with a voltage-controlled magnetic anisotropy (VCMA) effect has been introduced to achieve robust non-volatile writing control with an electric field or a switching voltage. However, continuous technology scaling down makes circuits more susceptible to temporary faults. The reliability of VCMA-MTJ-based magnetoelectric random access memory (MeRAM) can be impacted by environmental disturbances because a radiation strike on the access transistor could introduce write and read failures in 1T-1MTJ MeRAM bit-cells. In this work, Single-Event Transient (SET) effects on a VCMA-MTJ-based MeRAM in 28 nm FDSOI CMOS technology are investigated. Results show the minimum SET charge Q c required to reach the access transistor associated with the striking time that can lead to an unsuccessful switch, that is, an error in the writing process (write failure). The synchronism between the fluctuations of the magnetic field in the MTJ free layer and the moment of the write pulse is also analyzed in terms of SET robustness. Moreover, results show that the minimum Q c value can vary more than 100 % depending on the magnetic state of the MTJ and the width of the access transistor. In addition, the most critical time against the SET occurrence may be before or after the write pulse depending on the magnetic state of the MTJ.

Beschreibung: The increasing complexity and modularity of contemporary systems, paired with increasing parameter variabilities, makes the availability of flexible and robust, yet efficient, module-level interconnections instrumental. Delay-insensitive codes are very attractive in this context. There is considerable literature on this topic that classifies delay-insensitive communication channels according to the protocols (return-to-zero versus non-return-to-zero) and with respect to the codes (constant-weight versus systematic), with each solution having its specific pros and cons. From a higher abstraction, however, these protocols and codes represent corner cases of a more comprehensive solution space, and an exploration of this space promises to yield interesting new approaches. This is exactly what we do in this paper. More specifically, we present a novel coding scheme that combines the benefits of constant-weight codes, namely simple completion detection, with those of systematic codes, namely zero-effort decoding. We elaborate an approach for composing efficient “Partially Systematic Constant Weight” codes for a given data word length. In addition, we explore cost-efficient and orphan-free implementations of completion detectors for both, as well as suitable encoders and decoders. With respect to the protocols, we investigate the use of multiple spacers in return-to-zero protocols. We show that having a choice between multiple spacers can be beneficial with respect to energy efficiency. Alternatively, the freedom to choose one of multiple spacers can be leveraged to transfer information, thus turning the original return-to-zero protocol into a (very basic version of a) non-return-to-zero protocol. Again, this intermediate solution can combine benefits from both extremes. For all proposed solutions we provide quantitative comparisons that cover the whole relevant design space. In particular, we derive coding efficiency, power efficiency, as well as area effort for pipelined and non-pipelined communication channels. This not only gives evidence for the benefits and limitations of the presented novel schemes—our hope is that this paper can serve as a reference for designers seeking an optimized delay-insensitive code/protocol/implementation for their specific application.

Beschreibung: Rigorous peer-review is the corner-stone of high-quality academic publishing [...]

Beschreibung: Low power consumption has become one of the major requirements for most microelectronic devices and systems. Increasing power dissipation may lead to decreasing system efficiency and lifetime. The BULK metal oxide semiconductor field-effect transistor (MOSFET) has relatively high power dissipation and low frequency response due to its internal capacitances. Although the silicon-on-insulator (SOI) MOSFET was introduced to resolve these limitations, other challenges were introduced including the kink effect in the current-voltage characteristics. The selective buried oxide (SELBOX) MOSFET was then suggested to resolve the problem of the kink effect. The authors have previously investigated and reported the characteristics of the SELBOX structure in terms of kink effect, frequency, thermal and static power characteristics. In this paper, we continue our investigation by presenting the dynamic power characteristics of the SELBOX structure and compare that with the BULK and SOI structures. The simulated fabrication of the three devices was conducted using Silvaco TCAD tools in 90 nm complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) technology. Simulation results show that the average dynamic power dissipation of the CMOS BULK, SOI and SELBOX are compatible at high frequencies with approximately 54.5 µW. At low frequencies, the SOI and SELBOX showed comparable dynamic power dissipation but with lower values than the BULK structure. The difference in power dissipation between the SELBOX and BULK is in the order of nano watts. This power difference becomes significant at the chip level. For instance, at 1 MHz, SOI and SELBOX exhibit an average dynamic power consumption of 0.0026 µW less than that of the BULK structure. This value cannot be ignored when a chip operates using thousands or millions of SOI or SELBOX MOSFETs.

Beschreibung: Multiple-output converters have been widely used where individual outputs are required. Compared with conventional separate converters, the advantage of multiple outputs is to have a lower number of active and passive components. In this paper, first, a pulse-width-modulation (PWM)-pulse-frequency-modulation (PFM) method is used for two-output converters that have only one coil and one active switch. Secondly, three-output converter topologies are proposed where the third output is controlled by phase delay (PD). These converters need only two coils and two active switches to regulate three outputs. How to obtain PD at different switching frequencies is discussed next, and a PWM-PFM-PD controlled five-output buck converter is presented. The proposed solution uses only two active switches and two magnetic cores to adjust five-output voltages independently. A modeling and digital control method are proposed in order to regulate the five output voltages. A prototype circuit with independent 15 V/1.5 A, 12 V/1.5 A, 5 V/0.8 A, −5 V/0.6 A and 3.3 V/0.45 A outputs is assembled to validate the analysis, and it was proved that it regulates the output voltages at different loads.

Beschreibung: With the continuous growth of energy consumption, the rationalization of energy has become a priority. The photovoltaic energy sector remains a major occupation for researchers in the field of production optimization or storage methods. The concept developed in this work is a mixed optimization approach for energy management during battery charging with a duty cycle. A selective collaborative algorithm intervenes to choose and use the appropriate results of the few techniques to optimize the charging time of a battery and estimate its state of charge by using the minimum possible tools. This is done using a collective database that is accessible in real time. It also effectively allows the synchronization of information between several customers. This approach is performed on a mobile application on android, through a Google Firebase platform that allows us to secure collaborative access between multiple customers and use the results of the calculations of some algorithms. It gives us the values obtained by the various sensors in real time to accelerate the charging speed of the battery. The validation of this approach led us to practice a few scenarios using an Arduino board to show that this approach has a better performance.

Beschreibung: Wearable medical devices, wireless sensor networks, and other energy-constrained sensing devices are often concerned with finding specific data within more-complex signals while maintaining low power consumption. Traditional analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) can capture the sensor information at a high resolution to enable a subsequent digital system to process for the desired data. However, traditional ADCs can be inefficient for applications that only require specific points of data. This work offers an alternative path to lower the energy expenditure in the quantization stage—asynchronous content-dependent sampling. This asynchronous sampling scheme is achieved by pairing a flexible analog front-end with an asynchronous successive-approximation ADC and a time-to-digital converter. The versatility and reprogrammability of this system allows a multitude of event-driven, asynchronous, or even purely data-driven quantization methods to be implemented for a variety of different applications. The system, fabricated in standard 0.5 μ m and 0.35 μ m processes, is demonstrated along with example applications with voice, EMG, and ECG signals.

Beschreibung: Scan-based structural testing methods have seen numerous inventions in scan compression techniques to reduce TDV (test data volume) and TAT (test application time). Compression techniques lead to test coverage (TC) loss and test patterns count (TPC) inflation when higher compression ratio is targeted. This happens because of the correlation issues introduced by these techniques. To overcome this issue, we propose a new hybrid scan compression technique, the aggressive exclusion (AE) of scan cells from compression for increasing overall TC and reduce TPC. This is achieved by excluding scan cells which contribute to 12% to 43% of overall care bits from compression architecture, placing them in multiple scan chains with dedicated scan-data-in and scan-data-out ports. The selection of scan cells to be excluded from the compression technique is done based on a detailed analysis of the last 95% of the patterns from a pattern set to reduce correlations. Results show improvements in TC of up to 1.33%, and reductions in TPC of up to 77.13%.

Beschreibung: Since the CMOS technology scaling has focused on improving digital circuit, the design of conventional analog circuits has become more and more difficult. To overcome this challenge, there have been a lot of efforts to replace conventional analog circuits with digital implementations. Among those approaches, this paper gives an overview of the latest achievement on utilizing a CMOS inverter as an analog circuit. Analog designers have found that a simple resistive feedback pulls a CMOS inverter into an optimum biasing for analog operation. Recently developed applications of the resistive-feedback inverter, including CMOS inverter as amplifier, high-speed buffer, and output driver for high-speed link, are introduced and discussed in this paper.

Beschreibung: Due to the reduction in technology scaling, gate capacitance and charge storage in sensitive nodes are rapidly decreasing, making Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor (CMOS) circuits more sensitive to soft errors caused by radiation. In this paper, a low-power and high-speed single event upset radiation hardened latch is proposed. The proposed latch can withstand single event upsets completely when the high energy particle hit on any one of its intermediate nodes. The proposed latch structure comprises of four CMOS feedback schemes and a Muller C-element with clock gating technique. For the sake of comparison, the proposed and the existing latches in the literature are implemented in 45nm CMOS technology. From the post layout simulation results, it may be noted that the proposed latch achieves 8% low power consumption, 95% less delay, and a 94% reduction in power-delay-product compared to the existing single event upset resilient and single event tolerant latches. Monte Carlo simulations show that the proposed latch is less sensitive to process, voltage, and temperature variations in comparison with the existing hardened latches in the literature.

Beschreibung: Flexible electronics is a field gathering a growing interest among researchers and companies with widely varying applications, such as organic light emitting diodes, transistors as well as many different sensors. If the circuit should be portable or off-grid, the power sources available are batteries, supercapacitors or some type of power generator. Thermoelectric generators produce electrical energy by the diffusion of charge carriers in response to heat flux caused by a temperature gradient between junctions of dissimilar materials. As wearables, flexible electronics and intelligent packaging applications increase, there is a need for low-cost, recyclable and printable power sources. For such applications, printed thermoelectric generators (TEGs) are an interesting power source, which can also be combined with printable energy storage, such as supercapacitors. Poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene)-poly(styrenesulfonate), or PEDOT:PSS, is a conductive polymer that has gathered interest as a thermoelectric material. Plastic substrates are commonly used for printed electronics, but an interesting and emerging alternative is to use paper. In this article, a printed thermoelectric generator consisting of PEDOT:PSS and silver inks was printed on two common types of paper substrates, which could be used to power electronic circuits on paper.

Beschreibung: Deep submicron technologies continue to develop according to Moore’s law allowing hundreds of processing elements and memory modules to be integrated on a single chip forming multi/many-processor systems-on-chip (MPSoCs). Network on chip (NoC) arose as an interconnection for this large number of processing modules. However, the aggressive scaling of transistors makes NoC more vulnerable to both permanent and transient faults. Permanent faults persistently affect the circuit functionality from the time of their occurrence. The router represents the heart of the NoC. Thus, this research focuses on tolerating permanent faults in the router’s input buffer component, particularly the virtual channel state fields. These fields track packets from the moment they enter the input component until they leave to the next router. The hardware redundancy approach is used to tolerate the faults in these fields due to their crucial role in managing the router operation. A built-in self-test logic is integrated into the input port to periodically detect permanent faults without interrupting router operation. These approaches make the NoC router more reliable than the unprotected NoC router with a maximum of 17% and 16% area and power overheads, respectively. In addition, the hardware redundancy approach preserves the network performance in the presence of a single fault by avoiding the virtual channel closure.

Beschreibung: In order to fit circuit electromagnetic emissions within a spectral mask, a design flow based on high level current modeling for micropipeline circuits is proposed. The model produces a quick and rough estimation of the circuit current, thanks to a Timed Petri Net determining the activation instants of the different micropipeline stages and an asymmetric Laplace distribution modeling the current peaks of the activated stages. The design flow exploits this current estimation for shaping the electromagnetic emissions by setting the controller delays of the micropipeline circuits. The delay adjustment is performed by a genetic algorithm, which iterates until the electromagnetic emissions match the targeted spectral mask. In order to evaluate the technique, an Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) circuit has been designed. We first observed that the obtained current curve fits well with a gate simulation. Then, after shaping the electromagnetic emissions, the simulation shows that the spectrum fits within the spectral mask.

Beschreibung: Recently, the multi-bit flip-flop (MBFF) technique was introduced as a method for reducing the power consumption and chip area of integrated circuits (ICs) during the physical implementation stage of their development process. From the perspective of the consumer, the main requirements for such an optimization method are high performance, low power usage and small area (PPA). Therefore, any new optimization technique should improve at least one, if not all, of these requirements. This paper proposes a new low-power methodology, applying a MBFF merging solution during the physical implementation of an IC to achieve better power consumption and area reduction. The aim of this study is to prove the benefit of this methodology on the power saving capability of the system while demonstrating that the proposed methodology does not have a negative impact on the circuit performance and design routability. The experimental results show that MBFF merging of 76% can be achieved and preserved throughout the entire physical implementation process, from cell placement to the final interconnection routing, without impacting the system’s performance or routability. Moreover, the clock wirelength, nets and buffers needed to balance the clock network were reduced by 11.98%, 3.82% and 9.16%, respectively. The reduction of the clock tree elements led to a reduction of the power consumption of the clock nets, registers and cells by 22.11%, 20.84% and 12.38%, respectively. The total power consumption of the design was reduced by 2.67%.

Beschreibung: Energy efficient semiconductor chips are in high demand to cater the needs of today’s smart products. Advanced technology nodes insert high design margins to deal with rising variations at the cost of power, area and performance. Existing run time resilience techniques are not cost effective due to the additional circuits involved. In this paper, we propose a design time resilience technique using a clock stretched flip-flop to redistribute the available slack in the processor pipeline to the critical paths. We use the opportunistic slack to redesign the critical fan in logic using logic reshaping, better than worst case sigma corner libraries and multi-bit flip-flops to achieve power and area savings. Experimental results prove that we can tune the logic and the library to get significant power and area savings of 69% and 15% in the execute pipeline stage of the processor compared to the traditional worst-case design. Whereas, existing run time resilience hardware results in 36% and 2% power and area overhead respectively.

Beschreibung: Adaptive Voltage Over-Scaling can be applied at run-time to reach the best tradeoff between quality of results and energy consumption. This strategy encompasses the concept of timing speculation through some level of approximation. How and on which part of the circuit to implement such approximation is an open issue. This work introduces a quantitative comparison between two complementary strategies: Algorithmic Noise Tolerance and Approximate Error Detection. The first implements a timing speculation by means approximate computing, while the latter exploits a more sophisticated approach that is based on the approximation of the error detection mechanism. The aim of this study was to provide both a qualitative and quantitative analysis on two real-life digital circuits mapped onto a state-of-the-art 28-nm CMOS technology.

Beschreibung: The quantum-dot cellular automata (QCA) nano-technique has attracted computer scientists due to its noticeable features such as low power consumption and small size. Many papers have been published in the literature about the utilization of this technology for de-signing many QCA circuits and for presenting logic gates in an optimal structure. The T flip-flop, which is an essential part of digital designs, can be used to design synchronous and asynchronous counters. This paper presents a novel T flip-flop structure in an optimal form. The presented novel gate was used to design an N-bit binary synchronous counter. The QCADesigner software was used to verify the designed circuits and to present the simulation results, while the QCAPro tool was used for the power analysis. The proposed design required minimal power and showed good improvements over previous designs.

Beschreibung: Denial of Service (DoS) attacks are an increasing threat for Multiprocessor System-on-Chip (MPSoC) architectures. By exploiting the shared resources on the chip, an attacker is able to prevent completion or degrade the performance of a task. This is extremely dangerous for MPSoCs used in critical applications. The Network-on-Chip (NoC), as a central MPSoC infrastructure, is exposed to this attack. In order to maintain communication availability, NoCs should be enhanced with an effective and precise attack detection mechanism that allows the triggering of effective attack mitigation mechanisms. Previous research works demonstrate DoS attacks on NoCs and propose detection methods being implemented in NoC routers. These countermeasures typically led to a significantly increased router complexity and to a high degradation of the MPSoC’s performance. To this end, we present two contributions. First, we provide an analysis of information that helps to narrow down the location of the attacker in the MPSoC, achieving up to a 69% search space reduction for locating the attacker. Second, we propose a low cost mechanism for detecting the location and direction of the interference, by enhancing the communication packet structure and placing communication degradation monitors in the NoC routers. Our experiments show that our NoC router architecture detects single-source DoS attacks and determines, with high precision, the location and direction of the collision, while incurring a low area and power overhead.

Beschreibung: Automotive manufacturers are competing to be the first to introduce customer-ready autonomous vehicles. Some manufacturers are claiming to launch their first self-driving cars as early as 2020. Which all sounds very good and futuristic; however, the question arises, are customers even ready to adopt this new technological advancement? Therefore, this pilot study is aimed at finding out the answer to this question in the Austrian market. This study discovers the standpoint of Austrian consumers concerning the acceptance of self-driving cars for daily usage and gives an overview of the current point of view regarding autonomous vehicles (AVs). The data for this study was collected using an online, user-friendly, Likert scale survey. The collected data were processed and analyzed for empirical significance in SPSS using Spearman’s rank correlation and the Mann–Whitney U test supported by descriptive analysis. The results of the study indicate that Austrian consumers are well aware of autonomous vehicles and their technology. However, they have specific concerns about reliability, cybersecurity, and futuristic car-sharing models. Therefore, these concerns about AVs should be addressed by auto manufactures in order to gain consumers’ trust and sell them a new form of mobility.

Beschreibung: Rigorous peer-review is the corner-stone of high-quality academic publishing [...]

Beschreibung: A large body of literature has studied supply chain integration (SCI) at the macro (firm or dyad) level. However, the micro-foundations of SCI that highlight the range of different activities and choices firms have in implementing integration have not been studied. This paper identifies and analyzes integrative activities or practices that form the micro-units of firm-level SCI. Qualitative analysis yields nine elements of integration that emerge from the large number of integrative practices. In doing so, the paper maps out the structure of the broad SCI construct and discusses the theoretical repercussions of this new approach. New theoretical insights and research directions are identified based on this new micro-level activity-based view of SCI. This paper shifts the focus from where integration is done (customer vs. supplier integration) to what integration entails. SCI has become a very broad construct over time. This paper is a significant and systematic step in unraveling the structure of this broad conceptual domain. It improves nascent ideas about the multiple dimensions of integration by identifying elements based on a comprehensive list of different integrative activities that firms undertake.

Beschreibung: Integrating triple bottom line (TBL) goals into supply chains (SCs) is a challenging task which necessitates the careful coordination of numerous stakeholders’ individual interests. Recent technological advancements can impact TBL sustainability by changing the design, structure, and management of modern SCs. Blockchain technology enables immutable data records and facilitates a shared data view along the supply chain. The Physical Internet (PI) is an overarching framework that can be applied to create a layered and comprehensive view of the SC. In this conceptual paper, I define and combine these technologies and derive several high-level research areas and research questions (RQ) to investigate adoption and management as well as structural SC issues. I suggest a theory-based research agenda for the years to come that exploits the strengths of rigorous academic research, while remaining relevant for industry. Furthermore, I suggest various well-established theories to tackle the respective research questions and provide specific directions for future research.

Beschreibung: Additive Manufacturing (AM) is a digital manufacturing technology that enables companies to rethink their supply chain (SC) design. By means of literature synthesis, we build new knowledge about the mechanisms AM induces to improve SC design and performance, as well as the disruptive changes AM can cause. We investigate opportunities to optimize SC design for manufacturing purposes by exploiting the characteristics of AM, e.g., its freedom in terms of shape design and complexity and the absence of a need for object-specific tools. We study the roles of demand, assortment, IT systems, sourcing, manufacturing, knowledge, warehousing, and transportation, and explore the effects and tradeoffs on various SC performance outcomes, including cost, assets, and responsiveness. The contribution of this article is twofold. First, through literature synthesis, we construct six AM SC mechanisms that can be used in SC design to achieve desired SC outcomes for AM production applications in certain (business) contexts. Second, we identify the disruptive ‘game-changing’ effects of AM for SC stakeholders. This knowledge can be used by other researchers to develop further research. Moreover, general and logistics managers can use the results to fully exploit the potential of AM for designing much improved supply chains. Innovators and policy makers can use the results to understand the potential game-changing consequences of AM.

Beschreibung: In a distributed system, a common time reference allows each component to associate the same timestamp to events that occur simultaneously. It is a design option with benefits and drawbacks since it simplifies and makes more efficient a number of functions, but requires additional resources and control to keep component clocks synchronized. In this paper, we quantify how much power is spent to implement such a function, which helps to solve the dilemma in a system of low-power sensors. To find widely applicable results, the formal model used in our investigation is agnostic of the communication pattern that components use to synchronize their clocks, and focuses on the scheduling of clock synchronization operations needed to correct clock drift. This model helps us to discover that the dynamic calibration of clock drift significantly reduces power consumption. We derive an optimal algorithm to keep a software defined clock (SDCk) synchronized with the reference, and we find that its effectiveness is strongly influenced by hardware clock quality. To demonstrate the soundness of formal statements, we introduce a proof of concept. For its implementation, we privilege low-cost components and standard protocols, and we use it to find that the power needed to keep a clock within 200 ms from UTC (Universal Time Coordinate) as on the order of 10−5 W . The prototype is fully documented and reproducible.

Beschreibung: Information fusion has been a topic of immense interest owing to its applicability in various applications. This brings to the fore the need for a flexible and accurate fusion algorithm that can be versatile. The Brooks–Iyengar algorithm is one such fusion algorithm. It has since its inception found numerous applications that deal with the fusion of data from multiple sources. The uniqueness of the Brooks–Iyengar algorithm is the ease with which the data from multiple sensors in a local system can be fused and also reach consensus in a distributed system with the added capability of fault tolerance. Blockchain has found its use as a distributed ledger and has successfully supported and fueled many crypto-currencies over the years. Information fusion with regards to Blockchains is a topic of great research interest in the past couple of years. Since blockchain has no official node, the introduction of a decentralized network and a consensus algorithm is required in making the interactions and exchanges between multiple suppliers easier and thus leads to business being carried out without any hassles. In this paper, we attempt to understand and describe the deployment of multiple sensors to measure various aspects of the physical world. We discuss a novel technique of employing the Brooks–Iyengar algorithm in the design of the system that would decentralize the data source from the corresponding measurements and thus ensure the integrity of the transactions in the Blockchain. Finally, a theoretical analysis of the performance of the algorithm when used in a blockchain based decentralized environment is also discussed.

Beschreibung: Security of IoT devices is getting a lot of attention from researchers as they are becoming prevalent everywhere. However, implementation of hardware security in these devices has been overlooked, and many researches have mainly focused on software, network, and cloud security. A deeper understanding of hardware Trojans (HTs) and protection against them is of utmost importance right now as they are the prime threat to the hardware. This paper emphasizes the need for a secure hardware-level foundation for security of these devices, as depending on software security alone is not adequate enough. These devices must be protected against sophisticated attacks, especially if the groundwork for the attacks is already laid in devices during design or manufacturing process, such as with HTs. This paper will discuss the stealthy nature of these HT, highlight HT taxonomy and insertion methods, and provide countermeasures.

Beschreibung: Connected cars and vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communication scenarios are attracting more researchers. There will be numerous possibilities offered by V2X in the future. For instance, in the case of vehicles that move in a column, they could react to the braking of those in front of it through the rapid information exchanges, and most chain collisions could be avoided. V2X will be desiderated for routes optimizations, travel time reductions, and accident rate decrease in cases such as communication with infrastructures, traffic information exchanges, functioning of traffic lights, possible situations of danger, and the presence of construction sites or traffic jams. Furthermore, there could be massive conversations between smartphones and vehicles performing real-time dialogues. It is relatively reasonable to expect a connection system in which a pedestrian can report its position to all surrounding vehicles. Regarding this, it is compelling to perceive the positive effects of the driver being aware of the presence of pedestrians when vehicles are moving on the roads. This paper introduces the concepts for the development of a solution based on V2X communications aimed at vehicle and pedestrian safety. A potential system architecture for the development of a real system, concerning the safety of vehicles and pedestrians, is suggested to draft some guidelines that could be followed in new applications.

Beschreibung: The Quantum Double Delta Swarm (QDDS) Algorithm is a networked, fully-connected novel metaheuristic optimization algorithm inspired by the convergence mechanism to the center of potential generated within a single well of a spatially colocated double–delta well setup. It mimics the wave nature of candidate positions in solution spaces and draws upon quantum mechanical interpretations much like other quantum-inspired computational intelligence paradigms. In this work, we introduce a Chebyshev map driven chaotic perturbation in the optimization phase of the algorithm to diversify weights placed on contemporary and historical, socially-optimal agents’ solutions. We follow this up with a characterization of solution quality on a suite of 23 single–objective functions and carry out a comparative analysis with eight other related nature–inspired approaches. By comparing solution quality and successful runs over dynamic solution ranges, insights about the nature of convergence are obtained. A two-tailed t-test establishes the statistical significance of the solution data whereas Cohen’s d and Hedge’s g values provide a measure of effect sizes. We trace the trajectory of the fittest pseudo-agent over all iterations to comment on the dynamics of the system and prove that the proposed algorithm is theoretically globally convergent under the assumptions adopted for proofs of other closely-related random search algorithms.

Beschreibung: Rigorous peer-review is the corner-stone of high-quality academic publishing [...]

Beschreibung: Sensors and intelligent applications enabling smart vehicular traffic create an opportunity for improving the welfare of people, from the viewpoints of efficiency, sustainability, and social inclusivity. Like the opportunities, challenges of such an endeavour are multifaceted, including the scalable collection and processing of the hefty data volumes generated by sensors, and the coordinated operation between selfish agents. The purpose of this work is to survey recent literature with an emphasis on applications and a multidisciplinary eye, with the aim of stimulating discussion and reflection in the scientific communities. The principal application areas of smart traffic and smart mobility are discussed, synthesizing different perspectives. Many intriguing areas for future research exist besides those relative to connectivity, data fusion, and privacy. Some research challenges pertinent to sustainability, insurance, simulation and the handling of ambiguous information are highlighted.

Beschreibung: Enabling haptic communication as well as voice and data over the future 5G cellular system has become a demand. Tactile Internet is one of the main use cases of the 5G system that will allow the transfer of haptic communications in real time. Latency, availability, reliability, and security are the main design challenges of the tactile Internet system and haptic based bilateral teleoperation systems. An end-to-end latency of 1 ms remains the main challenge toward tactile Internet system realization, not only for the processing and coding delays but mainly for the limitations of light. In this work, we analyze the key solutions to overcome the light limitations and enable the tactile Internet over any distances with the required latency. Building a virtual model or model mediated for the remote environment at the edge cloud unit near to the end user is the main solution. By means of AI, the virtual model can predict the behavior of the remote environment and thus, the end user can interact with the virtual environment with a high system experience. This literature review covers the existing work of the model mediated bilateral teleoperated systems and discusses its availability for the tactile Internet system. Furthermore, the security issues of tactile Internet system and the effect of model mediated system on the required security level of tactile Internet applications are discussed. Finally, a structure for the tactile Internet system, with the deployment of model mediation, is suggested.

Beschreibung: To provide accurate activity recognition within a smart environment, visible spectrum cameras can be used as data capture devices in solution applications. Privacy, however, is a significant concern with regards to monitoring in a smart environment, particularly with visible spectrum cameras. Their use, therefore, may not be ideal. The need for accurate activity recognition is still required and so an unobtrusive approach is addressed in this research highlighting the use of a thermopile infrared sensor as the sole means of data collection. Image frames of the monitored scene are acquired from a thermopile infrared sensor that only highlights sources of heat, for example, a person. The recorded frames feature no discernable characteristics of people; hence privacy concerns can successfully be alleviated. To demonstrate how thermopile infrared sensors can be used for this task, an experiment was conducted to capture almost 600 thermal frames of a person performing four single component activities. The person’s position within a room, along with the action being performed, is used to appropriately predict the activity. The results demonstrated that high accuracy levels, 91.47%, for activity recognition can be obtained using only thermopile infrared sensors.

Beschreibung: Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) are used to prevent attacks by detecting potential harmful intrusion attempts. Currently, there are a set of available Open Source IDS with different characteristics. The Open Source Host-based Intrusion Detection System (OSSEC) supports multiple features and its implementation consists of Agents that collect and send event logs to a Manager that analyzes and tests them against specific rules. In the Manager, if certain events match a specific rule, predefined actions are triggered in the Agents such as to block or unblock a particular IP address. However, once an action is triggered, the systems administrator is not able to centrally check and obtain detailed information of the past event logs. In addition, OSSEC may assume false positive or negative detections and their triggered actions: previously harmless but blocked IP addresses by OSSEC have to be unblocked in order to reestablish normal operation or potential harmful IP addresses not previously blocked by OSSEC should be blocked in order to increase protection levels. These operations to override OSSEC actions must be manually performed in every Agent, thus requiring time and human resources. Both these limitations have a higher impact on large scale OSSEC deployments assuming tens or hundreds of Agents. This paper proposes an extension to OSSEC that improves the administrator analysis capability by maintaining, organizing and presenting Agent logs in a central point, and it allows for blocking or unblocking IP addresses in order to override actions triggered by false detections. The proposed extension aims to increase efficiency of time and human resources management, mainly considering large scale OSSEC deployments.

Beschreibung: One of the most common forgotten things of adults is that they go to the shops and completely forget what they went for. The solution to this problem is to carry a shopping list. In this project, a novel Internet of Things (IoT)-connected smart canister system is developed, which automatically senses the item quantity in the canisters using proximity sensor, sends the data to a hub using Bluetooth Low Energy, and then the hub sends a cloud message to the consumer’s smartphone app using the Internet. The hub and the smartphone app display the item quantities and automatically add the items that are about to finish to a digital shopping list. The automatic generation of the shopping list removes the burden of manually checking each item before going to the shops and gives peace of mind to the consumers. A prototype of the proposed system with three canister devices, one hub, and the smartphone app is developed and tested successfully. The canister device consumes ultra-low power and has a battery life of more than a year.

Beschreibung: Monitoring and interpreting structural response using structural-identification methodologies improves understanding of civil-infrastructure behavior. New sensing devices and inexpensive computation has made model-based data interpretation feasible in engineering practice. Many data-interpretation methodologies, such as Bayesian model updating and residual minimization, involve strong assumptions regarding uncertainty conditions. While much research has been conducted on the scientific development of these methodologies and some research has evaluated the applicability of underlying assumptions, little research is available on the suitability of these methodologies to satisfy practical engineering challenges. For use in practice, data-interpretation methodologies need to be able, for example, to respond to changes in a transparent manner and provide accurate model updating at minimal additional cost. This facilitates incremental and iterative increases in understanding of structural behavior as more information becomes available. In this paper, three data-interpretation methodologies, Bayesian model updating, residual minimization and error-domain model falsification, are compared based on their ability to provide robust, accurate, engineer-friendly and computationally inexpensive model updating. Comparisons are made using two full-scale case studies for which multiple scenarios are considered, including incremental acquisition of information through measurements. Evaluation of these scenarios suggests that, compared with other data-interpretation methodologies, error-domain model falsification is able to incorporate, iteratively and transparently, incremental information gain to provide accurate model updating at low additional computational cost.

Beschreibung: The use of Internet of Things (IoT) with medical devices within a connected health environment promotes the quick flow of information and enables easy access to it [...]

Beschreibung: The rabid growth of today’s technological world has led us to connecting every electronic device worldwide together, which guides us towards the Internet of Things (IoT). Gathering the produced information based on a very tiny sensing devices under the umbrella of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). The nature of these networks suffers from missing sharing among them in both hardware and software, which causes redundancy and more budget to be used. Thus, the appearance of Shared Sensor Networks (SSNs) provides a real modern revolution in it. Where it targets making a real change in its nature from domain specific networks to concurrent running domain networks. That happens by merging it with the technology of virtualization that enables the sharing feature over different levels of its hardware and software to provide the optimal utilization of the deployed infrastructure with a reduced cost. This article is concerned with surveying the idea of SSNs, the difference between it and the traditional WSNs, the requirements for its construction, challenges facing it, and the opportunities that are provided by it, then describing our proposed architectures. As a result of using virtualization technology as a basic block in building SSNs, using different types of virtualization will produce different types of SSNs that will give different usages to it. This article proposes a novel approach of taxonomy for SSNs that is based on the used virtualization techniques, and it describes the needs and usages of each one. It presents a wide array of previously proposed solutions comparing them to each other and a brief description of the issues addressed by each category of that taxonomy. Additionally, the shared sensor architecture and shared network architecture were depicted. Finally, some of its applications in some daily life fields are listed.

Beschreibung: Various technologies and standards for the Internet of Things (IoT) have defined the way devices should interact with each other to provide an intelligent IoT service to users in an efficient manner. Although the usability of system interface between the platform and users is one of the key factors for the success of IoT ecosystems, the manner in which IoT platforms should interact with users has not been well studied. Current IoT platforms provide a simple list-based interface to manage devices, which result in the degradation of their usability as the number of devices increases. In this paper, we propose an interactive web-based IoT management system where deep object detection techniques are adopted to facilitate user’s device selection and management. The proposed system automatically recognizes the device type from video streams and accordingly generates smart controllers. The users can choose a device by touching an object in the video stream and use a smart controller to control the selected device. Finally, we show the feasibility of the proposed system through the implementation of a prototype which demonstrates a set of user scenarios.

Beschreibung: This study provides a mathematical model and theoretical analysis of an interference cancellation system combining an orthogonal matched filter (OMF) and adaptive array antenna that is called the extended OMF (EOMF). In recent years, an increase in the number of applications of mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) is expected. To realize a highly reliable MANET, it is essential to introduce a method for cancelling the interference from other nodes. This research focuses on a scheme based on Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) that enables simultaneous multiple access and low latency communication. However, there are problems with deteriorating performance due to the near–far problem and the increase in the amount of interference as the number of users increases. Additionally, another problem is that the spreading sequence of each user is unknown in a MANET. The OMF is expected to be a solution to these problems. The OMF performs interference cancellation by generating and subtracting a replica of the interference signal that is contained in the received signal. However, the OMF may generate an incorrect replica in the near–far problem. The EOMF compensates for the OMF’s weakness by combining the OMF with an adaptive array antenna. In this research, optimal parameters are derived from mathematical modelling and theoretical analysis of the EOMF. Specifically, the optimal weight vector and the minimum mean squared error that allow the adaptive algorithm to converge are derived and obtained from the numerical results.

Beschreibung: This paper presents a framework to accurately and non-intrusively detect the number of people in an environment and track their positions. Different from most of the previous studies, our system setup uses only ambient thermal sensors with low-resolution, using no multimedia resources or wearable sensors. This preserves user privacy in the environment, and requires no active participation by the users, causing no discomfort. We first develop multiple methods to estimate the number of people in the environment. Our experiments demonstrate that algorithm selection is very important, but with careful selection, we can obtain up to 100% accuracy when detecting user presence. In addition, we prove that sensor placement plays a crucial role in the system performance, where placing the sensor on the room ceiling yields to the best results. After accurately finding the number of people in the environment, we perform position tracking on the collected ambient data, which are thermal images of the space where there are multiple people. We consider position tracking as static activity detection, where the user’s position does not change while performing activities, such as sitting, standing, etc. We perform efficient pre-processing on the data, including normalization and resizing, and then feed the data into well-known machine learning methods. We tested the efficiency of our framework (including the hardware and software setup) by detecting four static activities. Our results show that we can achieved up to 97.5% accuracy when detecting these static activities, with up to 100% class-wise precision and recall rates. Our framework can be very beneficial to several applications such as health-care, surveillance, and home automation, without causing any discomfort or privacy issues for the users.