Evaluation of construction contract documents to be applied in modular construction focusing ambiguities; A text processing approach

Modular coordination in building construction has become increasingly popular, particularly in Northern Europe and North America. In Canada, modular construction came to considerable attention over the last decade due to its valuable effect on project constraints, safety, and preventing construction and demolition waste. However, the modular construction industry still adopts the same administrative procedures designed for the conventional construction industry, even though the features of modular and conventional construction are different in terms of construction processes and methods. Due to this trend, ambiguities in administrative documents are widely occurred and are one of the main causes to generate conflict, disputes, and claims between owners and modular suppliers as general contractors. As a first step in the this research to overcome this challenge, the research team focuses on investigating the contents and structures of the current standard contracts and modular RFPs, which are one of the major sources of confusion in modular construction, in order to mitigate and/or remove the ambiguities based on the considering the specifications of off-site construction procedures and system. In this case, this research illustrates a conceptual framework that has two parts: First, classification of the main sources of ambiguities in construction contracts (both Conventional and modular) and second, to identify the similarities and differences between Canadian documents (standard contracts and modular RFPs) and benchmark countries by applying through text processing and readability analysis. We applied text processing to find top terms, including terms with high frequency (TF) in each document, also high TF-IDF terms, which species occur in one document and not others then, we detected manually the three standard contracts and four RFPs and compare them with the output of literature review to identify the major issues that are common. The readability analysis shows the textual complexity of a document and to what extent the documents are difficult to read. The main findings indicate that the modular industry in Canada suffers from a lack of specific standard contract documents for modular construction

Petri nets, probability and event structures

Models of true concurrency have gained a lot of interest over the last decades as models of concurrent or distributed systems which avoid the well-known problem of state space explosion of the interleaving models. In this thesis, we study such models from two perspectives. Firstly, we study the relation between Petri nets and stable event structures. Petri nets can be considered as one of the most general and perhaps wide-spread models of true concurrency. Event structures on the other hand, are simpler models of true concurrency with explicit causality and conflict relations. Stable event structures expand the class of event structures by allowing events to be enabled in more than one way. While the relation between Petri nets and event structures is well understood, the relation between Petri nets and stable event structures has not been studied explicitly. We define a new and more compact unfoldings of safe Petri nets which is directly translatable to stable event structures. In addition, the notion of complete finite prefix is defined for compact unfoldings, making the existing model checking algorithms applicable to them. We present algorithms for constructing the compact unfoldings and their complete finite prefix. Secondly, we study probabilistic models of true concurrency. We extend the definition of probabilistic event structures as defined by Abbes and Benveniste to a newly defined class of stable event structures, namely, jump-free stable event structures arising from Petri nets (characterised and referred to as net-driven). This requires defining the fundamental concept of branching cells in probabilistic event structures, for jump-free net-driven stable event structures, and by proving the existence of an isomorphism among the branching cells of these systems, we show that the latter benefit from the related results of the former models. We then move on to defining a probabilistic logic over probabilistic event structures (PESL). To our best knowledge, this is the first probabilistic logic of true concurrency. We show examples of expressivity achieved by PESL, which in particular include properties related to synchronisation in the system. This is followed by the model checking algorithm for PESL for finite event structures. Finally, we present a logic over stable event structures (SEL) along with an account of its expressivity and its model checking algorithm for finite stable event structures

Benchmarking Approach for Empirical Comparison of Pricing Models in DRMS

emand response management systems often involve the use of pricing schemes to motivate the efficient use of electrical power. Achieving this efficiency requires the detection of electrical power patterns. The detection of these patterns normally involves use of non-linear, quasi-non-linear, and at times linear data pattern detection models. The behavioural disparities of these models and specifically when used for a specific set of data make it hard to select the most efficient model. The contribution of this study is devising an empirical benchmark (reference) ( perfect ) control pricing (PCP) model through which various models are compared in order to select the most efficient model. In this study, the authors elect neural networks, sliding window–multiple linear regression, and a proportional controller models to be representative of non-linear, quasi-non-linear, and linear models, respectively, in order to demonstrate the effectiveness of PCP. The dataset used for demonstrating both the operation of PCP and the elected models for comparisons is collected from Green Button project and Pacific Gas and Electric

Do Trait Emotional Intelligence and Dispositional Mindfulness Have a Complementary Effect on the Children's and Adolescents' Emotional States?

Mindfulness is both a non-judgmental and present-centered awareness, which has been applied to reduce negative emotions. On the other hand, Trait Emotional Intelligence (TEI) is the way of how good people perceive their emotional intelligence abilities (perceiving, expressing, understanding, and regulating emotions), which are involved in people's social functioning. This empirical study was designed to analyze whether dispositional mindfulness (DM) and TEI have a potential combined role for children and adolescent's emotional states. In a sample of primary school students (N = 318), age ranged from 8 to 16 years old (M = 11.25, SD = 2.20), participants filled a TEI measure (ESCQ, Emotional skills and competence questionnaire) and two measures of DM (CAMM, Child and Adolescent Mindfulness Measure and AFQ-Y, Avoidance and Fusion Questionnaire for Youth). Measures selected included: PANAS (Positive affect and negative affect schedule), White Bear Suppression Inventory (a thought suppression inventory), and STAIC (State-Trait Anxiety for Children). Findings pointed out that TEI measures (labeling and expression, understanding, and managing emotions) were positively and significantly related to positive emotional states (especially, positive affect and balance) and negatively with a lower association with state anxiety. However, DM measures were both negatively and strongly associated with negative emotional states (thought suppression, negative affect, and anxiety). Conclusions indicate that a combined effect of both TEI skills and DM based interventions would be more complete than each one separately for better social functioning of children and teenagers

Multiple Occupant Indoor Localization

Recognizing the indoor activities of people is a key functionality of smart homes, since it is a prerequisite for any supportive action in service of the occupants. In this thesis, we investigate the multiple occupant localization problem in indoor environments. We developed a method based on the use of inexpensive passive infrared motion sensors together with Radio Frequency IDentification (RFID) readers. In our method, the former type of sensors, placed throughout the space, recognize movement and RFID readers, placed selectively at key locations, unambiguously recognize individuals’ locations (some or all of the occupants are assumed to be wearing passive RFID tags) as they pass through their coverage area. Due to their high cost and generally cumbersome placement requirements, RFID readers must be judiciously placed. Thus, we study the placement of the readers such that the occupants trajectory ambiguity is reduced. We rely on a heat-map representing the frequency with which individuals visit locations as they move through the indoor space and on models of coverage for the Passive InfraRed (PIR) sensors and RFID readers and develop a heuristic for the RFID reader placement. We also revisit the problem of cost-efficient PIR sensor placement for high-quality in- door localization, extending it for sensors with diverse coverage footprints, and the oc- clusion effects due to obstructions typically found in indoor environments. The objective is the placement of the smallest number of sensors with the right combination of foot- prints. Given the vast search space of possible placement and footprint combinations, we adopt an evolutionary technique. We demonstrate that our technique performs faster and/or produces more accurate results when compared to previously proposed greedy methods. Furthermore, our technique is flexible in that adding new sensor footprints can be trivially accomplished. We evaluate the effectiveness of our method in both RFID reader and PIR sensor placement under different occupancy conditions with simulations

Investigation of the effective factors on branding in cosmetic and hygienic products (Case study: Ladies consuming cosmetic and hygienic products with local brands)

Despite the long history of brands, this concept has been considered in marketing literature for a long time such that it has attracted many experts' attention to this field as one of the most important concepts of modern marketing literature. This concept has become so important that wherever loyalty is mentioned, brand is undoubtedly considered too. This research aims to investigate the effect of marketing mixture (7Ps) on making brands of local hygienic and cosmetic products whose statistical society is ladies consuming hygienic and cosmetic products in Mashhad. The sample under analysis of this research consists of 381 people. It was identified after the analysis of their data using SPSS software and testing the research's assumptions that marketing mixture's factors are effective on making brands. In addition, the severity of the effect of each factor was identified

Investigation of the effective factors on branding in cosmetic and hygienic products (Case study: Ladies consuming cosmetic and hygienic products with local brands)

Despite the long history of brands, this concept has been considered in marketing literature for a long time such that it has attracted many experts' attention to this field as one of the most important concepts of modern marketing literature. This concept has become so important that wherever loyalty is mentioned, brand is undoubtedly considered too. This research aims to investigate the effect of marketing mixture (7Ps) on making brands of local hygienic and cosmetic products whose statistical society is ladies consuming hygienic and cosmetic products in Mashhad. The sample under analysis of this research consists of 381 people. It was identified after the analysis of their data using SPSS software and testing the research's assumptions that marketing mixture's factors are effective on making brands. In addition, the severity of the effect of each factor was identified

Investigation of the effective factors on branding in cosmetic and hygienic products (Case study: Ladies consuming cosmetic and hygienic products with local brands)

Despite the long history of brands, this concept has been considered in marketing literature for a long time such that it has attracted many experts' attention to this field as one of the most important concepts of modern marketing literature. This concept has become so important that wherever loyalty is mentioned, brand is undoubtedly considered too. This research aims to investigate the effect of marketing mixture (7Ps) on making brands of local hygienic and cosmetic products whose statistical society is ladies consuming hygienic and cosmetic products in Mashhad. The sample under analysis of this research consists of 381 people. It was identified after the analysis of their data using SPSS software and testing the research's assumptions that marketing mixture's factors are effective on making brands. In addition, the severity of the effect of each factor was identified