Ruslan Rainis

Rice farming sustainability assessment in Bangladesh

Farming sustainability is primordial to long-term socioeconomic development. This study assesses rice farming sustainability in Bangladesh by developing a composite indicator (CI) under the four pillars of sustainability and examines the main determining factors. The assemblage of top-down and bottom-up approaches were applied to generate an essential set of indicators and data were collected through a household survey from 15 villages of three major rice growing ecosystems. The results revealed that less than half of the rice growers were sustainable in terms of economical viability, ecological benefits, and quality of life. By category, Boro rice farming was found to be the most sustainable, followed by Aman and Aus rice farming. Human capital development, increasing land productivity, use of resource conserving practices and technologies, and information availability and accessibility were the main factors promoting rice farming sustainability. The findings indicated that the construction of CI by employing several methodologies such as normalisation provide straightforward and clear-cut policy inputs. The major policy implications that emerged from the findings of the study are outlined to actualise rice farming sustainability, which contributes to sustainable development in Bangladesh.

Development of the Klang Valley Regional Planning Support System

The regions in Malaysia are facing rapid changes due to globalisation. These changes callfor a new approach in local and regional planning in the country, an approach that requires the ability to continuously monitor and even predict the dynamics of each region. Previous regional plans thatfocus on end-states as opposed to processes have been deemed not to address these changes. A test case for such a need is the Klang Valley Region. The development of the Klang Valley Regional Planning Support System (KV-RPSS) is a move towards addressing this issue. Using technology adapted to local needs, the focus of this planning support system is to assist federal level regional planners to work with local authorities in identifying and predicting urban changes.

Investigation on selection schemes and population sizes for genetic algorithm in unmanned aerial vehicle path planning

Genetic algorithm has been widely used in numerous fields. Recently, researchers have developed significant interest in applying GA in unmanned aerial vehicle path planning. However, experiments should be conducted to determine selection schemes and population sizes. This process is time consuming and inconvenient for users. Thus, a study is conducted on the performance of GA at various selection schemes and population sizes. Results show that large population sizes do not contribute in improving the performance of GA. Tournament selection shows the highest performance in terms of path cost, whereas the weakest performance is in terms of computational cost. Truncation selection shows the optimum performance among the selection schemes.

Spatial analysis of development pressure in the Langat Basin, Selangor, Malaysia

The process of globalization and urbanization is growing rapidly in Southeast Asia. In Malaysia, one of the fastest growing areas is in Langat Basin, Selangor. Outrageous process the city to the periphery is now growing towards the southern corridor. This article discusses the use of geographical information system to spatially analyze the development of the built-up area in the north of Selangor. The purpose is to identify areas experiencing high-intensity development. The development of the built-up area has affected the environment, society and economic development of the area. The result shows rapid development has increased pressure to the Langat basin since the 1990s. In 1996 the built-up area is about 23017.8 square km. It had increased to 119587 sq km in 2016. This shows that developed areas had increased 40.70% over the period of 20 years from 1996 to 2016. This indicates that the area has been experiencing high development pressure over the period. More importantly, the pattern of urban development was not evenly distributed throughout the study area. This situation needs to be addressed so that rural area is protected from further development pressure.