A reconfigurable Stepped Frequency Continuous Wave (SFCW) radar prototype for supporting the italian financial police to contrast smuggling, is proposed in this work. In particular, the proposed radar can provide information related to the container contents and the presence of false bottoms speeding up the control operations at borders and ports. Moreover, it is able…

This article examines the operational performance of Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) before the pandemic and a new normal life. Overview of BRT operational performance in terms of the number of passengers transported, load factor and operating ratio. The method used is to compare the conditions before the pandemic and the new era of life. The…

Microcontrollers have revolutionized the field of Engineering Education. Their popularity and cost-effectiveness have opened a large door of activity for innovative projects at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. The purpose of this article is to review this activity in terms of where two of these microcontrollers have been used in Engineering Education so as…

The field of view (FOV) and spatial resolution (SR) are the major image quality parameters which are being optimized in neutron radiography (NR) technique. This requires effective components selection during the design of NR detector systems. The selection is a discouraging task owing to often having conflicting experimental requirements and related constraints. In this work,…

Fuel Cells (FCs) and Combined Cooling, Heating and Power (CCHP) systems are becoming very popular due to their environmental friendliness and immense applications. This extended review paper commenced by introducing the rampant South Africa’s electricity crisis as the basis for the study, followed by some structural analyses of up to forty-four miscellaneous power electronics converters…

Cloud is an Internet-based computing technology in which on-demand shared resources such as software, platforms, repositories, and information are delivered to customers. In the emerging era of computing cloud environment provide the use of resources with the concept of virtualization. Workflow of the tasks has vital role for the improvement of computing performance which leads…

The construction industry has undergone several changes in recent years linked to new laws and international conventions aimed at protecting the environment and combating pollution. Construction industry alone produces tons of waste annually due to debris produced either during construction or during deconstruction. To combat this, companies are forced to control their debris either by…

More than one year after the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic the behavior of figures published by official sources of the countries are skeptical for the public. Many probability tests are used to detect the reliability of information among which Benford’s Law. This study focused on the Western Balkan countries, as one of the foremost…

In recent days, the fast growth of populations leading to an increase in medically complicated cases, especially fast spread viral cases around the world. These phenomena increased demand on auto-diagnose systems to speed up the diagnosis process and reduce human contacts, especially for the COVID-19 pandemic using deep learning (DL). DL methods can successfully carry…

Early detection and proper management of adult degenerative scoliosis (ADS) are important for health promotion. This study aims to develop an ADS screening tool from markerless digital photography and verify its reliability. The study included 17 participants. Outer canthus–horizontal angle (OHA) and trapezius–horizontal angle (THA) were calculated from the image of the upper body of…

This paper presents a new observer-based method which deals with the extraction of amplitude of characteristic frequencies for the fault diagnosis in permanent magnet synchronous motors (PMSM). First, a pilot survey is made to investigate the typical harmonics in the line currents of PMSM. Second, an appropriate structure of observer is formulated with the input…

Before the COVID-19 crisis, the Southern African Developing Countries (SADC) had a varied energy mix including renewable energy, fossil fuels, and military energy production. The use of fossil fuels in the energy mix is known to be the source of the growing levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. However, there was a reduction in…

Fossil fuel can no longer supply the constantly spiking demands of energy around the world, hence the increasing research on renewable energies as an alternative. The Stirling Engine is an external combustion engine, giving us a wide range of heat sources: solar, nuclear. The Stirling engine makes best of use of solar sources in an…

Haze removal is an extremely challenging task, and object detection in the hazy environment has recently gained much attention due to the popularity of autonomous driving and traffic surveillance. In this work, the authors propose a multiple linear regression haze removal model based on a widely adopted dehazing algorithm named Dark Channel Prior. Training this…

Coordinated MultiPoint (CoMP) has been introduced for LTE-Advanced system to overcome the inter-cell interference problems and enhance the signal quality of cell-edge UEs (User Equipments). With such concept, the overall system performance should be improved considerably to support the significantly increasing amount of demand on data transmission via mobile communication that happens nowadays. Dynamic Point…

In the Internet of Things era it is expected that low-end processor domination of the embedded market will be further reaffirmed. Then, a question will arise, on whether it is possible to enhance performance of such processors without the cost of high-end architectures. In this work we propose a better-than-worst-case (BTWC) methodology which enables the…

Internet of Things provides the support for devices, people and things to collaborate in collecting, analyzing and sharing sensitive information from one device onto the other through the internet. The internet of things is thriving largely due to access, connectivity, artificial intelligence and machine learning approaches that it supports. The stability and enhanced speed of…

The Public Administration is forced to transform itself by taking advantage of the contribution of ICT to in the process of reducing bureaucracy and increase transparency, promoting the dematerialization of processes, increasing the quality of online services, allowing greater ubiquity of access, reducing response times, in the search for improvement of the quality of life…

Fresh water is already scarce in the world, especially in the Middle East (ME). Desalination industry is the main supplier of the potable water to the municipalities in the ME region. It is well known the high cost of a liter of water produced by the desalination process. Unfortunately, car-washing service consumes substantial amount of…

The article suggests four circuit topologies for the practical simulation of grounded and floating lossy inductors. All the suggested circuits use commercially available integrated circuit LT1228 chips as active elements, and only two passive elements, namely one resistor and one capacitor. The first two of the proposed circuits employ only a single LT1228 active element…

This study is a review of the literature on open access (OA), seeking to identify trends in research on the subject. This review was conducted in the SCOPUS database and focused on the following as the main topics: 1. Financial aspects, 2. Repositories, 3. Education, 4. Academic community’s perception of OA resources, 5. Tools, 6.…

Coronavirus pandemic and transition to distance learning have significantly accelerated the introduction of Education 3.0 – 4.0 technologies into traditional educational process. This paper discusses questions of training of IT- specialists in context of Education 4.0. Based on our experience, approaches to the organization of the educational process of IT- students are considered. It is…

Worldwide, the epidemiological situation is constantly changing and with the exponential increase in the number of confirmed coronavirus cases, the number of health care workers has decreased significantly and this is due to the direct and daily contact of patients. One of the major challenges of the last few months is to prevent the spread…

This paper describes a qualitative research design adopted in this study guided by deployment of a Grounded Theory (GT) methodology which was deployed to synthesize literature on technology adoption and digital transformation with an objective of developing theory. The philosophical worldview adopted was interpretivism/constructivist of a qualitative grounded theory inductive (theory building) approach where secondary…

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a promising trend in ship energy management systems (EMS). The motivations of this work are designing and implementation of an intelligent energy management system for ship’s electric power system based on an adaptive Neuro-Fuzzy Inference System (ANFIS) and the ship power source is an environmental friend system consists of proton exchange…