Library: Engineering

The purpose of this thesis is to develop new hybrid admission decision prediction models by using different machine learning methods including Support Vector Machines (SVM), Multilayer Perceptron (MLP), Radial Basis Function (RBF) Network, TreeBoost (TB) and K-Means Clustering (KMC) combined with feature selection algorithms to investigate the effect of the predictor variables on the admission decision of a candidate to the School of Physical Education and Sports at Cukurova University. Three feature selection algorithms including Relief-F, F-Score and Correlation-based Feature Selection (CFS...

The purpose of this thesis is to forecast the amount of network traffic in Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) -based networks by using different time lags and various machine learning methods including Support Vector Machines (SVM), Multilayer Perceptron (MLP), Radial Basis Function (RBF) Neural Network, M5P (a decision tree with linear regression functions at the nodes), Random Forest (RF), Random Tree (RT), and Reduced Error Prunning Error (REPTree), and statistical regression methods including Multiple Linear Regression (MLR) and Holt-Winters and compare the performanc...

Generally, construction of dams is regarded as means of economic progress in many countries. However, major consequences of such projects are the inundation of upstream areas and the resettlement of entire communities in newly built environments where they experience dramatic transformation in their lifestyles. The present study takes the Nubian resettlement experience after the creation of Lake Nasser that submerged their old settlements, along the river Nile. Following their resettlement, the design of the newly-built environment disrupted the Nubian traditional lifestyles and patterns of...

This thesis focuses on the development of an artificial intelligence system for a heterogeneous ensemble of mobile robots. Many robots in the ensemble may have limited processing, communication, sensing, and/or actuation capabilities. This means that each robot may not be able to execute all tasks that are input to the system. A hierarchical system is proposed to permit robots with superior processing and communication abilities to assign tasks and coordinate the less computationally able robots. The limited processing robots may also utilise the resources of superior robots during task execut...

Before the seismic events of Northridge (Los Angeles, 17 January 1994) and Hyogoken-Nanbu (Kobe, 17 January 1995), MRFs were supposed to be the most reliable seismic resistant systems due to the high number of dissipative zones that are able to develop. Before these earthquakes, especially in the United States, MRFs were realized, generally, by adopting fully welded connections, which, at the time, were retained to perform better compared to other joint typologies. In addition, the economic advantages deriving from the adoption of field fully welded connections strongly influenced choices of b...

The aim of this project is to start creating awareness and to convey the idea that optical sensor technologies are now technically and economically mature enough to provide safety enhancement features in the residential environment and market. A first application of these technologies can be that of real time building structural health diagnosis: a utility company or telecommunications operator is in a position to provide it as a service by means of its urban optical fiber infrastructure and service management expertise. There are several advantages accruing from continuously monitoring the...

The Arabian Gulf oil and gas production reserves have made it one of the world's strategic producers since the early 1960s, with many of the existing platforms stretched beyond their original design life. Advances in drilling technology and reservoir assessments have extended the requirement for the service life of those existing platforms even further. Extension of the life span of an existing platform requires satisfactory reassessment of its various structural components, including piled foundations. The American Petroleum Institute Recommended Practice 2A (API RP2A) is commonly used in ...

Many company slogans and mantras profess that passion is part of the way they work and that it is important to them. Passion over the centuries has been defined as something that makes humans slaves to their emotions and exerts an almost overwhelming compulsion to participate in an activity or relationship. In a profession such as consultant civil engineering that is so strongly anchored in the objective and scientific, what place has a motivator such as passion? This research takes a sample of consultant civil engineers and assesses two types of passion, harmonious passion and obsessive pa...

The modern FPGAs enable system designers to develop high-performance computing (HPC) applications with a large amount of parallelism. Real-time image processing is such a requirement that demands much more processing power than a conventional processor can deliver. In this research, we implemented software and hardware based architectures on FPGA to achieve real-time image processing. Furthermore, we benchmark and compare our implemented architectures with existing architectures. The operational structures of those systems consist of on-chip processors or custom vision coprocessors implemented...

Trends and perspectives in dynamic environments point towards a need for optimal operating levels in reconfigurable manufacturing activities. Central to the goal of meeting this need is the issue of appropriate techniques for manufacturing process planning optimization in reconfigurable manufacturing, i.e. (i) what decision making models and (ii) what computational techniques, provide an optimal manufacturing process planning solution in a multidimensional decision variables space? Conventional optimization techniques are not robust, hence; they are not suitable for handling multidimensional s...