Meta-heuristic search methods are used to find near optimal global solutions for difficult optimization problems. These meta-heuristic processes usually require some kind of knowledge to overcome the local optimum locations. One way to achieve diversification is to start the search procedure from a solution already obtained through another method. Since this solution is already validated the algorithm will converge easily to a greater global solution. In this work, several well-known meta-heuristics are used to solve the problem of electricity markets participation portfolio optimization. Their search performance is compared to the performance of a proposed hybrid method (ad-hoc heuristic to generate the initial solution, which is combined with the search method). The addressed problem is the portfolio optimization for energy markets participation, where there are different markets where it is possible to negotiate. In this way the result will be the optimal allocation of electricity in the different markets in order to obtain the maximum return quantified through the objective function.

A hybrid fuzzy MADM method is proposed in this paper for evaluating airline service quality. Fuzzy set theory is used since it helps in measuring the ambiguity of concepts associated with human being’s subjective judgment. After reviewing service quality evaluation models especially in the airline industry, SSQAI model was adopted as a construct for evaluating airline service quality in Iran. Fuzzy DEMATEL was applied to determine the degree of influence and impact of criteria on each other and extract cause and effect relations between them that helped in ranking criteria based on the degree of relationship. Then, ANP network map was constructed based on the relation map generated from Fuzzy DEMATEL analysis. Fuzzy ANP approach assisted in prioritizing criteria based on the need for improvement and enabled in a more accurate measurement in decision-making process taking the advantage of using linguistic variables. Fuzzy DEMATEL results demonstrate that expertise, Problemsolving, and conduct has the most influence on other factors and in opposite Valence, Waiting Time, Comfort are the factors which get the most impact from other factors and according to Fuzzy ANP analysis Valence, Convenience, Problem-solving, and Safety&Security are the factors with most priorities that need improvement.

: A new proprietary herbomineral formulation was formulated, consisting of herbal root extract ashwagandha and minerals (zinc, magnesium, and selenium). The objective of this study was to evaluate the immunomodulatory effect of the Biofield Energy Healing (The Trivedi Effect®) Treatment on the test herbomineral formulation in male Sprague Dawley rats. The test formulation was divided into two parts; one was represented as control, while the other part was treated with the Biofield Energy Healing Treatment by eighteen renowned Biofield Energy Healers and defined as the Biofield Energy Treated formulation. Besides, one group of animals was also received Biofield Energy Treatment by same Biofield Energy Healers under similar conditions. The effect of the test formulation was monitored by an estimation of humoral immune response, delay type hypersensitivity, hematology, biochemistry, body weight, feed intake, relative organ weight, and histopathology in male Sprague Dawley rats. The primary antibody titre level was significantly increased by 36.36% in the Biofield Energy Treated formulation (G3); while decreased by 15.09% in the untreated test formulation (G4) compared to the disease control group (G2). The paw volume was significantly increased by 75% in the Biofield Energy Treated group per se at day -15 (G6) compared to the disease control. The level of red blood corpuscle (RBC) was significantly increased by 14.45% in the G6 group compared to the G2 group. The platelet count was significantly increased by 10.32% in the G3 group; while it was decreased by 5.71% in the G4 group compared with the G2 group. There was a significant elevation of serum phosphorus by 6.04% in the G3 group compared to the G2 group. The concentration of magnesium in serum was increased by 13.00% in the Biofield Energy Treated formulation (G3) compared to the disease control group (G2). The concentration of uric acid was significantly decreased by 8.05% in the Biofield Energy Treated formulation (G3) compared to the G2 group. Further, the change in body weight, feed consumption, organ to body weight ratio data, and histopathology examination did not suggest any statistical difference, which depicts that the Biofield Energy Treated test formulation was found to be safe. These data suggest that the Biofield Treated test formulation can be used for autoimmune and inflammatory diseases such as Rheumatoid arthritis, Alzheimer’s disease, Atherosclerosis, Dermatitis, Diverticulitis, Diabetes, etc. along with stress prevention and management and anti-aging by improving overall health.

—Biologically inspired design inspires inventions and new technologies in the field of engineering by mimicking functions, principles, and structures in the biological domain. To deal with the obstacles of cross-domain knowledge acquisition in the existing biologically inspired design process, functional semantic clustering based on functional feature semantic correlation and environmental constraint clustering composition based on environmental characteristic constraining adaptability are proposed. A knowledge cell clustering algorithm and the corresponding prototype system is developed. Finally, the effectiveness of the method is verified by the visual prosthetic device design. Keywords—Knowledge based engineering, biologically inspired design, knowledge cell, knowledge clustering, knowledge acquisition. I.

: The use of an herbomineral formulation in the healthcare sector for different chronic diseases is gaining popularity due to its fewer side-effects, high safety profile, and cost effectiveness. A new proprietary herbomineral formulation was formulated, consisting of four essential ingredients viz. herbal (ashwagandha root extract) and minerals (zinc chloride, magnesium gluconate, and sodium selenate). The objective of this study was to evaluate the immunomodulatory effect of the Biofield Energy Treated test formulation on female Sprague Dawley (SD) rats. The test formulation was divided into two parts; one was represented as control, while the other part was treated with the Biofield Energy Healing Treatment remotely by renowned Biofield Energy Healers (The Trivedi Effect®) and defined as the Biofield Energy Treated formulation. The effect of the test formulation was monitored using humoral immune response, delayed type hypersensitivity, hematology, biochemistry, relative organ weight, and histopathology. The primary hemagglutination (HA) antibody titre level was significantly (p≤0.05) increased by 185.88% in the Biofield Energy Treated group (G3); while 41.18% increased in the untreated test formulation group (G4) as compared to the disease control group (G2). The secondary HA titre was significantly increased by 540% (p≤0.001) and 166.7% in the G3 and G4 groups, respectively as compared to the G2 group. The secondary HA titre was also increased significantly (p≤0.05) by 193% in the Biofield Energy Treated group per se at day -15 (G6), as compared to the G2 group. The paw volume data showed an alteration in the G3 and G6 groups as compared to the G2 group. The platelet count was significantly increased by 11.16% and 8.69% in the G3 and G4 groups, respectively as compared to the G2 group. The magnesium level was increased by 9.31% in the G3 group as compared to the G2 group. The uric acid was significantly reduced by 23.88% in the G3 group; while it was increased by 17.47% in the G4 group as compared to the G2 group. Since, the relative organ weight and histopathological findings did not produce any signs of toxicity as compared to the normal control group (G1). These data suggested that the Biofield Energy Treated herbomineral formulation was found to be safe and showed better immunomodulatory response as compared to the untreated formulation. Thus, it is assumed that the Biofield Energy Treated herbomineral formulation could be better and more useful to boost-up the immune system in healthy human and patients.

—ENTICE is a set of innovative software services currently being developed to facilitate efficient operations of distributed Virtual Machine and container images (VMI/CI) repositories. Its operation necessitates various decision making for which a solver for Multi-Objective Optimisation (MOO) problems is used. However, the solver is a bottleneck due to its computational complexity. In order to be able to reduce the search space for the solver, we have developed an ontology and corresponding Knowledge Base (KB) that underpins the operation of the ENTICE environment. The Knowledge Base is developed based on the Jena Fuseki technology. To address the problem of computational complexity, constraint based queries and different reasoning mechanisms are applied. The Knowledge Base services are then integrated with other ENTICE services including the MOO solver. It is shown that this approach significantly reduces the computational complexity for the MOO, thus it shortens the optimisation time, and makes it possible to use the MOO for both strategic (decisions that can be made up to one day in advance) and dynamic (decisions requiring response within one minute) decision making possible. I.

Although, genetically modified (GM) crops have to be a broadly debated topic in different countries, there has been much less attention devoted to farmer attitudes towards GM crops. This paper attempts to research farmers’ insights on GM crops in Georgia through February-March 2014. An in-depth survey of 611 farmers revealed that respondents lack sufficient knowledge about genetic engineering. They tend to have a negative attitude towards GM crops and are strongly against of import and adoption of GM seeds. An empirical examination based on analysis of variance and Pearson’s correlation coefficient verified that both education and age were significant determinants of awareness of farmers about genetically engineered crops, while income used to have no significant influence on the farmers’ decision to adopt GM crops. In addition, relationship between awareness about genetic engineering and farmers’ decision to adopt GM crops has to be insignificant, as well.

—In this study, we investigated the buckling performance of basalt fiber reinforced polymer (BFRP) sandwich infill panels. Fiber Reinforced Polymer (FRP) is a major evolution for energy dissipation when used as infill material of frame structure, a basic Polymer Matrix Composite (PMC) infill wall system consists of two FRP laminates surrounding an infill of foam core. Furthermore, this type of component is for retrofitting and strengthening frame structure to withstand the seismic disaster. In- plane compression was considered in the numerical analysis with ABAQUS platform to determine the buckling failure load of BFRP infill panel system. The present result shows that the sandwich BFRP infill panel system has higher resistance to buckling failure than those of glass fiber reinforced polymer (GFRP) infill panel system, i.e. 16% increase in buckling resistance capacity. Keywords—Basalt fiber reinforced polymer, buckling performance, FEM analysis, sandwich infill panel. I.

In this article we present the first steps in developing an NLP algorithm for automatic detection of inadequate reporting of research results (known as spin) in biomedical articles. Inadequate reporting consists in presenting the experimental treatment as having a greater beneficial effect than it was shown by the research results. We propose a scheme for an algorithm that would automatically identify important claims in the articles abstracts, extract possible supporting information from the article and check the adequacy of the claims. We present the state of the art and our first experiments for three tasks related to spin detection: classification of articles according to the type of reported clinical trial; classification of sentences in the abstracts aimed at identifying mentions of the Results and Conclusions of the experiment; and extraction of some trial characteristics. For each task, we outline possible directions of further work.

: A new proprietary herbomineral formulation was formulated, consisting of herbal root extract ashwagandha and minerals (zinc, magnesium, and selenium). The objective of this study was to evaluate the immunomodulatory effect of the Biofield Energy Healing (The Trivedi Effect®) Treatment on the test herbomineral formulation in male Sprague Dawley rats. The test formulation was divided into two parts; one was represented as control, while the other part was treated with the Biofield Energy Healing Treatment by eighteen renowned Biofield Energy Healers and defined as the Biofield Energy Treated formulation. Besides, one group of animals was also received Biofield Energy Treatment by same Biofield Energy Healers under similar conditions. The effect of the test formulation was monitored by an estimation of humoral immune response, delay type hypersensitivity, hematology, biochemistry, body weight, feed intake, relative organ weight, and histopathology in male Sprague Dawley rats. The primary antibody titre level was significantly increased by 36.36% in the Biofield Energy Treated formulation (G3); while decreased by 15.09% in the untreated test formulation (G4) compared to the disease control group (G2). The paw volume was significantly increased by 75% in the Biofield Energy Treated group per se at day -15 (G6) compared to the disease control. The level of red blood corpuscle (RBC) was significantly increased by 14.45% in the G6 group compared to the G2 group. The platelet count was significantly increased by 10.32% in the G3 group; while it was decreased by 5.71% in the G4 group compared with the G2 group. There was a significant elevation of serum phosphorus by 6.04% in the G3 group compared to the G2 group. The concentration of magnesium in serum was increased by 13.00% in the Biofield Energy Treated formulation (G3) compared to the disease control group (G2). The concentration of uric acid was significantly decreased by 8.05% in the Biofield Energy Treated formulation (G3) compared to the G2 group. Further, the change in body weight, feed consumption, organ to body weight ratio data, and histopathology examination did not suggest any statistical difference, which depicts that the Biofield Energy Treated test formulation was found to be safe. These data suggest that the Biofield Treated test formulation can be used for autoimmune and inflammatory diseases such as Rheumatoid arthritis, Alzheimer’s disease, Atherosclerosis, Dermatitis, Diverticulitis, Diabetes, etc. along with stress prevention and management and anti-aging by improving overall health.

—To obtain the high quality and essential workability of mortar, different types of superplasticizers are used. The superplasticizers are the chemical admixture used in the mix to improve the fluidity of mortar. Many factors influenced the superplasticizer to disperse the cement particle in the mortar. Nature and amount of replaced cement by slag, mixing procedure, delayed addition time, and heat stimulation technique of superplasticizer cause the varied effect on the fluidity of the cementitious material. In this experiment, the superplasticizers were heated for 1 hour under 60 °C in a thermostatic chamber. Furthermore, the effect of delayed addition time of heat stimulated superplasticizers (SP) was also analyzed. This method was applied to two types of polycarboxylic acid based ether SP (precast type superplasticizer (SP2) and readymix type superplasticizer (SP1)) in combination with a partial replacement of normal Portland cement with blast furnace slag (BFS) with 30% w/c ratio. On the other hands, the fluidity, air content, fresh density, and compressive strength for 7 and 28 days were studied. The results indicate that the addition time and heat stimulation technique improved the flow and air content, decreased the density, and slightly decreased the compressive strength of mortar. Moreover, the slag improved the flow of mortar by increasing the amount of slag, and the effect of external temperature of SP on the flow of mortar was decreased. In comparison, the flow of mortar was improved on 5-minute delay for both kinds of SP, but SP1 has improved the flow in all conditions. Most importantly, the transition points in both types of SP appear to be the same, at about 5±1 min. In addition, the optimum addition time of SP to mortar should be in this period. Keywords—Combined effect, delayed addition, heat stimulation, flow of mortar. I.

—This paper proposes a new model to allocate reserve costs among the involved players, considering the characteristics of the several entities, and the particular circumstances at each moment. The proposed model is integrated in the Multi-Agent Simulator of Competitive Electricity Markets (MASCEM), which enables complementing the multi-agent simulation of diverse electricity market models, by including the co-simulation of energy and reserve markets. In this context, the proposed model allows allocating the payment of reserve costs that result from the reserve market. A simulation based on real data from the Iberian electricity market – MIBEL, is presented. Simulation results show the advantages of the proposed model in sharing the reserve costs fairly and accordingly to the different circumstances. This work thus contributes the study of novel market models towards the evolution of power and energy systems, with the objective of adapting current and future models to the new paradigm of high renewable energy generation penetration. Index Terms—Electricity markets, MIBEL, Multi-Agent simulation, Reserve costs allocation. I.