• International Journal of High-Rise Buildings
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• v.2 no.1
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• pp.49-62
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• 2013

Many previous tall building fires demonstrate that despite code compliant construction fires often spread vertically and burn over multiple floors at the same time. The collapses of the WTC complex buildings in 9/11 as well as other partial collapses like the ones of the Windsor Tower in Madrid and of the Technical University of Delft building posed new questions on the stability of tall buildings in fire. These accidents have shown that local or global collapse is possible in multi-floor fires. In most of the previous work involving multi-floor fires all floors were assumed to be heated simultaneously although in reality fires travel from one floor to another. This paper extends previous research by focusing on the collapse mechanisms of tall buildings in fire and performs a parametric study using various travelling rates. The results of the study demonstrate that vertically travelling fires have beneficial impact in terms of the global structural response of tall buildings in comparison to simultaneous fires. Contrary to the beneficial effect of the travelling fires in terms of the global structural response, it was noticed that higher tensile forces were also present in the floors compared to simultaneous multi-floor case. Designers are therefore advised to consider simultaneous multi-floor fire as an upper bound scenario. However, a scenario where a travelling fire is used is also suggested to be examined, as the tensile capacity of connections may be underestimated.

• International Journal of Railway
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• v.2 no.3
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• pp.118-123
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• 2009

Railway track alignment Standards set a minimum lenght value for straight and circular alignments (art. 5.2.9.), in order to ensure passenger ride comfort in railway vehicles of which dynamic oscillations will thus have to be limited. The transitions between alignments can cause abrupt changes (usually called discontinuities or singular points of the alignment) of curvature, of rate of change of curvature or of rate of change of cant. A passenger is likely to experience effects due to the excitation of the elastic suspension of the vehicle which generates oscillations that are damped as the vehicle moves away from the singularity. The amplitude of these oscillations should be adequately attenuated by the damping of the suspension system within the interval between two successive singular points, especially to avoid resonances. Therefore minimum lengths between two successive singular points are stated in alignment standards. Nevertheless, these nonnative values can be overly conservative in some cases. As an alternative, track alignment designers could try to assess how much the excitation has been attenuated between two successive singular points and thus assess at which point a new singularity may be present without affecting ride comfort. Although such assessment can be made with commercial SW packages which simulate the dynamic behavior of a vehicle considered as a set of rigid bodies interconnected with elastic elements simulating the suspension systems (such as SIMPACK, ADAMS or VAMPIRE), a simplified and user-friendly computation method (based upon the analytical solution of differential equations governing the phenomenon) is made available in this paper to track design engineers, not always used to working with full dynamic models.

• Computers and Concrete
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• v.32 no.6
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• pp.577-594
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• 2023

Engineered cementitious composites with calcined clay limestone cement (LC³-ECC) as a kind of green, low-carbon and high toughness concrete, has recently received significant investigation. However, the complicated relationship between potential influential factors and LC³-ECC compressive strength makes the prediction of LC³-ECC compressive strength difficult. Regarding this, the machine learning-based prediction models for the compressive strength of LC³-ECC concrete is firstly proposed and developed. Models combine three novel meta-heuristic algorithms (golden jackal optimization algorithm, butterfly optimization algorithm and whale optimization algorithm) with support vector regression (SVR) to improve the accuracy of prediction. A new dataset about LC³-ECC compressive strength was integrated based on 156 data from previous studies and used to develop the SVR-based models. Thirteen potential factors affecting the compressive strength of LC³-ECC were comprehensively considered in the model. The results show all hybrid SVR prediction models can reach the Coefficient of determination (R²) above 0.95 for the testing set and 0.97 for the training set. Radar and Taylor plots also show better overall prediction performance of the hybrid SVR models than several traditional machine learning techniques, which confirms the superiority of the three proposed methods. The successful development of this predictive model can provide scientific guidance for LC³-ECC materials and further apply to such low-carbon, sustainable cement-based materials.

• Journal of the Earthquake Engineering Society of Korea
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• v.7 no.1
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• pp.17-29
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• 2003

This paper preliminarily investigates the effectiveness of various control systems, such as passive, active, semiactive and hybrid control, for seismic protection of cable-stayed bridges by examining the ASCE first generation benchmark problem for a cable-stayed bridge. This benchm.0.00000ark problem considers the cable-stayed bridge that is scheduled for completion in Missouri, USA In 2003. Seismic considerations were strongly considered in the design of this bridge due to location of the bridge and its critical role as a principal crossing of the Mississippi River. Based on detailed drawings of this cable-stayed bridge, a three-dimensional linearized evaluation model has been developed to represent the complex behavior of the bridge. A set of eighteen evaluation criteria has been developed to evaluate the capability of each control system. In this study, four passive control systems, one active control system, two semiactive control systems and three hybrid control systems are considered. Numerical simulation results show that all the control systems are effective in reducing the responses of the benchmark cable-stayed bridge under the historical earthquakes. To get good performance, however, the passive control systems need quite large control forces compared to other control systems. The simulation results also demonstrate that the passive, semiactive and hybrid control systems are robust to the stiffness uncertainty of the structure. Therefore, the semiactive and hybrid control systems are more appropriate in real applications for full-scale civil infrastructures.

• The Journal of Art Theory & Practice
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• no.13
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• pp.97-132
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• 2012

1799 Francisco de Goya published Los Caprichos with 80 aquatint etchings. On 6 February he advertised it on the front page of the Diario de Madrid. The long advertisement which began with "a collection of prints of capricious subjects, invented and etched by Don Francisco Goya" informed purpose, themes and methods of this collection of prints. According to this advertisement Goya "has chosen as subjects for his work, from the multitude of follies and mistakes common in every civil society and from the vulgar prejudices and lies authorized by custom, ignorance or self-interest, those that he has thought most fit to provide material for ridicules, and at the same time to exercise the artist's imagination." The text emphasized that the 'author' of this series didn't to want to criticise any individual and to be a copyist. From his phantasy Goya invented many creatures like the anthropic, humanized animals etc.. With Los Caprichos he stood on the threshold to Romanticism. The early researchers of Los Caprichos classified its author, Goya as an enlightened intellectual. The similarity of the themes of the series with the subjects of the Enlightenment, his some enlightened 'friends' and the idea to avoid the prevalent mystification of his life supported this theory. But this trend became revised since the 80's of the last century. This made possible to research Goya's works in new perspective and to see that Goya didn't criticise the Spanish society and his contemporaries. Rather he showed its reality and parodied through creatures which are mixtures of the reality that he observed, and visions that he invented. Characters and scenes in Goya's prints are ambiguous and equivocal. They have the values which are defined by the dualistic metaphysic in Europe as oppositional, like good and evil for example, at the same time. Goya himself also appeared in various types in this series. This ambiguousness, or "polyphony", as Jennis Tomlinson defined, is a symptom of the decay of the belief in the Enlightenment which spreaded in Europe as a result of the attack of Bastille and the French Revolution. Goya's self-portrait in pl. 43 of this series, "El sue$\tilde{n}$o de la razon produce monstruos" shows the complex psychology of him and his contemporaries as well. As the rest etchings after this print show witchcraft and monsters reside in the world in which the reason of the Enlightenment and the through the reason weakened God's rule lost their authority. In this thesis I will examine and analyse how Goya represented in Los Caprichos the nature of man and its society, as complex being in which the 'antagonistic' value couple as good and evil couldn't be divided, but are united.

• Asia pacific journal of information systems
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• v.20 no.2
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• pp.125-155
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• 2010

Ontologies have been adopted in various business and scientific communities as a key component of the Semantic Web. Despite the increasing importance of ontologies, ontology developers still perceive construction tasks as a challenge. A clearly defined and well-structured methodology can reduce the time required to develop an ontology and increase the probability of success of a project. However, no reliable knowledge-engineering methodology for ontology development currently exists; every methodology has been tailored toward the development of a particular ontology. In this study, we developed a Graduation Screen Ontology (GSO). The graduation screen domain was chosen for the several reasons. First, the graduation screen process is a complicated task requiring a complex reasoning process. Second, GSO may be reused for other universities because the graduation screen process is similar for most universities. Finally, GSO can be built within a given period because the size of the selected domain is reasonable. No standard ontology development methodology exists; thus, one of the existing ontology development methodologies had to be chosen. The most important considerations for selecting the ontology development methodology of GSO included whether it can be applied to a new domain; whether it covers a broader set of development tasks; and whether it gives sufficient explanation of each development task. We evaluated various ontology development methodologies based on the evaluation framework proposed by G$\acute{o}$mez-P$\acute{e}$rez et al. We concluded that METHONTOLOGY was the most applicable to the building of GSO for this study. METHONTOLOGY was derived from the experience of developing Chemical Ontology at the Polytechnic University of Madrid by Fern$\acute{a}$ndez-L$\acute{o}$pez et al. and is regarded as the most mature ontology development methodology. METHONTOLOGY describes a very detailed approach for building an ontology under a centralized development environment at the conceptual level. This methodology consists of three broad processes, with each process containing specific sub-processes: management (scheduling, control, and quality assurance); development (specification, conceptualization, formalization, implementation, and maintenance); and support process (knowledge acquisition, evaluation, documentation, configuration management, and integration). An ontology development language and ontology development tool for GSO construction also had to be selected. We adopted OWL-DL as the ontology development language. OWL was selected because of its computational quality of consistency in checking and classification, which is crucial in developing coherent and useful ontological models for very complex domains. In addition, Protege-OWL was chosen for an ontology development tool because it is supported by METHONTOLOGY and is widely used because of its platform-independent characteristics. Based on the GSO development experience of the researchers, some issues relating to the METHONTOLOGY, OWL-DL, and Prot$\acute{e}$g$\acute{e}$-OWL were identified. We focused on presenting drawbacks of METHONTOLOGY and discussing how each weakness could be addressed. First, METHONTOLOGY insists that domain experts who do not have ontology construction experience can easily build ontologies. However, it is still difficult for these domain experts to develop a sophisticated ontology, especially if they have insufficient background knowledge related to the ontology. Second, METHONTOLOGY does not include a development stage called the "feasibility study." This pre-development stage helps developers ensure not only that a planned ontology is necessary and sufficiently valuable to begin an ontology building project, but also to determine whether the project will be successful. Third, METHONTOLOGY excludes an explanation on the use and integration of existing ontologies. If an additional stage for considering reuse is introduced, developers might share benefits of reuse. Fourth, METHONTOLOGY fails to address the importance of collaboration. This methodology needs to explain the allocation of specific tasks to different developer groups, and how to combine these tasks once specific given jobs are completed. Fifth, METHONTOLOGY fails to suggest the methods and techniques applied in the conceptualization stage sufficiently. Introducing methods of concept extraction from multiple informal sources or methods of identifying relations may enhance the quality of ontologies. Sixth, METHONTOLOGY does not provide an evaluation process to confirm whether WebODE perfectly transforms a conceptual ontology into a formal ontology. It also does not guarantee whether the outcomes of the conceptualization stage are completely reflected in the implementation stage. Seventh, METHONTOLOGY needs to add criteria for user evaluation of the actual use of the constructed ontology under user environments. Eighth, although METHONTOLOGY allows continual knowledge acquisition while working on the ontology development process, consistent updates can be difficult for developers. Ninth, METHONTOLOGY demands that developers complete various documents during the conceptualization stage; thus, it can be considered a heavy methodology. Adopting an agile methodology will result in reinforcing active communication among developers and reducing the burden of documentation completion. Finally, this study concludes with contributions and practical implications. No previous research has addressed issues related to METHONTOLOGY from empirical experiences; this study is an initial attempt. In addition, several lessons learned from the development experience are discussed. This study also affords some insights for ontology methodology researchers who want to design a more advanced ontology development methodology.