Norazlina Khamis

Ant colony optimisation for vehicle traffic systems: applications and challenges

Ant-based algorithms simulate the cooperative behaviour of real ants in finding food resources. A significant number of studies have focused on the self-organised behaviour of ants in the natural environment to develop effective systems for dynamic problems. Ant-based systems have special properties such as scalability, adaptability, and dynamicity, which are the main requirements for solving vehicle traffic congestion problem. Thus, ant-based algorithms are now being adopted by vehicle traffic systems VTSs to guide vehicles to less congested paths. However, literature shows that comprehensive reviews are lacking in this field. The main contribution of this paper is the review and classification of the most relevant systems based on novel taxonomy. A survey that includes statistical analyses on ant-based VTS was conducted to identify the limitations and evaluation process of VTS. This paper concludes by proposing a general framework in applying ant colony optimisation to VTS.

Using VANET to support green vehicle communications for urban operation rescue

The paper presents a model of operation rescue and group vehicle approach to support green vehicle communication for urban operation rescue. Using vehicular technology could benefit operation rescue vehicles by enabling each vehicle spreads the information related before arriving at the incident place. In an effort to understand the operation rescue activities, studies on the case study are briefly discussed. Green vehicle communications requirements are presented to show the significance of using vehicular technology. Experiments using NS-2 to measure the average delay time per trip and average throughput for three different scenarios are presented.

Towards sustainable software criteria: Rescue operation and disaster management system model

Currently there are systems which aimed at assisting rescue operators and disaster aid workers to perform rescue operation and disaster management (RODMS). These systems provide features such as to provide the relations between disasters, types of rescue operation, rescue operator and disaster aid organisations and persisting such information. The current RODMS is experiencing issues which categorised as sustainability. High cost of ownership, short product lifetime prior to its retirement, its capability to evolve abreast with current technological trends without getting obsolete easily and adapting to rapid changes in the deployed surrounding; all these non-functional requirements may be addressed under sustainability quality attribute. Unfortunately, sustainability has not been deemed as important quality attribute to be considered in most RODMS projects. Additionally, this may also due to less awareness in this subject amongst software engineers. Therefore, to apply sustainability measures which may pave the way to software that lasts, criteria and taxonomy defining it will have to be studied. This paper will explore the abovementioned issues as well as the readiness of current system design to handle frequent requirement changes by the client. Based on the review, a conceptual framework towards a sustainable software design for rescue operation and disaster management is also proposed.

Stemming Hausa text: using affix-stripping rules and reference look-up

Stemming is a process of reducing a derivational or inflectional word to its root or stem by stripping all its affixes. It is been used in applications such as information retrieval, machine translation, and text summarization, as their pre-processing step to increase efficiency. Currently, there are a few stemming algorithms which have been developed for languages such as English, Arabic, Turkish, Malay and Amharic. Unfortunately, no algorithm has been used to stem text in Hausa, a Chadic language spoken in West Africa. To address this need, we propose stemming Hausa text using affix-stripping rules and reference lookup. We stemmed Hausa text, using 78 affix stripping rules applied in 4 steps and a reference look-up consisting of 1500 Hausa root words. The over-stemming index, under-stemming index, stemmer weight, word stemmed factor, correctly stemmed words factor and average words conflation factor were calculated to determine the effect of reference look-up on the strength and accuracy of the stemmer. It was observed that reference look-up aided in reducing both over-stemming and under-stemming errors, increased accuracy and has a tendency to reduce the strength of an affix stripping stemmer. The rationality behind the approach used is discussed and directions for future research are identified.

Implementing executable graph based visual language in a distributed environment

One of the common difficulties in a graph based visual language is to develop its executable semantics and achieved its execution in a distributed environment. In order to address some of these issues, this paper outlines the general control flow semantics of a graph based visual language. In doing so, this paper also discusses a sound technique implementing such semantics permitting execution in a distributed environment. An implementation is sketched for a domain specific graph based visual language, called VRPML.

Energy Management Techniques for RF-Enabled Sensor Networks Based on Internet of Things

The vision of ubiquitous computing is based on the fact that future computers will merge up with the surrounding environment in IoT domain. Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) and Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) are two important cornerstones for pervasive computing as they combine the physical and virtual world, thereby bridging the gap between cyber space and physical world of real things. RFID enables the identification and detection of entities while WSN are used to sense the condition of the environment or object. The integration of RFID and WSN have paved way for the existence of RSN (RFID Sensor Networks), thereby providing extended capabilities, scalability, portability, lower cost and novel perspective towards a broad range of applications. This paper presents a brief introduction about the evolution of RSN, major issues in RSN and energy management with regards to Energy Harvesting (EH), energy request and transfer. It also investigates into the problems encountered for efficient energy transmission. Differently from the classic schemes in the literature that deals with scalability, security and communication protocol aspects, the proposed methodology focuses on energy management issue which is of utmost importance for wide area RSN. Furthermore, the paper provides insights into the preliminary experimental evaluation and its comparative analysis with existing schemes pertaining to performance metrics.

Cloud-Based Mobile Learning Adaptation in Nonformal Learning: A Review

The concept of learning using mobile and cloud is the latest technology which supports the development and implementation of learning. Even though the concept is still new, it has potential that will provide an impact to the learning environment such as nonformal learning setting. With later aim, this paper presents a review on the background of cloud-based mobile learning that consists of mobile learning and cloud computing technology, nonformal setting. It then discussed the issues and challenges on the adaptation with three identified factors: (1) cloud learning devices, (2) cloud learning services, (3) cloud learning environment. The rest of the paper will points out promising future research direction and conclusion.

Automated Call Receiving and Forwarding Mechanism for Supporting Integrated Disaster Management System.

Disasters have caused great loss of lives and economic loss besides disruption of services and infrastructure. In any case of a disaster, prolonged arrival of relevant agencies such as the rescue teams means delayed commencement of all restoration work that should be done after the incident. This prolonged arrival is one of the factors that delay in alerting the relevant agencies for them to commence in action. Currently in Malaysia, the call receiving and forwarding procedure is handled by MERS99 with human intervention, i.e telephone operators. This research proposed an algorithm which able to receive a call and identify the relevant agencies to be directed to the event based once the GPS location of the mobile user who made the report. Thus, human intervention in the current procedures is being minimized. The efficiency of the algorithm is evaluated by comparing the response time of the current procedures with the implementation of the algorithm in the proposed prototype. Based on the evaluation, it is shown that the proposed algorithm are able to shorten the length of time between and incident happens and relevant agencies being dispatched to the event.