• Women's Health Nursing
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• v.25 no.1
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• pp.31-45
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• 2019

Purpose: This study was designed to develop a valid and reliable scale for the evaluation of preconception health behavior in women preparing for pregnancy. Methods: The initial strategy included a literature review, interviews, and construction of a conceptual framework. The preliminary items were evaluated twice for content validity by experts, and modified two preliminary investigations. Participants in the 2 main investigations and the confirmation investigation were tested for reliability and validity of the preliminary scale in women preparing for pregnancy. The data were analyzed for different items exploratory and confirmatory factors. Results: The 5-point Likert scale consisted of 6 factors and 27 items. The 6-factors included 'hazardous substance factor,' 'medical management factor,' 'rest and sleep factor,' 'stress management factor,' 'information acquisition factor,' and 'resource preparation factor.' Goodness of fit of the final research model was very appropriate and based on the following measures: Q=1.98, comparative fit index=.91, Tucker-lewis index=.89, standardized root mean square residual=.07, and root mean square error of approximation=.07. The criterion validity was .64. The reliability coefficient was .92 and the test-retest reliability was .61. Conclusion: The study findings indicate that the scale can be used for the development of nursing interventions to promote preconception health behavior in women preparing for pregnancy.

• Computers and Concrete
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• v.23 no.4
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• pp.235-243
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• 2019

The discontinuous Galerkin method (DGM) has become widely used as it possesses several qualities, such as a natural ability to dealing with discontinuities. DGM has its major success related to fluid mechanics. Its major importance is the ability to deal with discontinuities and still provide high order of approximation. That is an important advantage when simulating cracking propagation. No remeshing is necessary during the propagation, since the crack path follows the interface of elements. However, DGM comes with the drawback of an increased number of degrees of freedom when compared to the classical continuous finite element method. Thus, it seems a natural approach to combine them in the same simulation obtaining the advantages of both methods. This paper proposes the application of the combined continuous-discontinuous Galerkin method (CDGM) to crack propagation. An important engineering problem is the simulation of crack propagation in concrete structures. The problem is characterized by discontinuities that evolve throughout the domain. Crack propagation is simulated using CDGM. Discontinuous elements are placed in regions with discontinuities and continuous elements elsewhere. The cohesive zone model describes the fracture process zone where softening effects are expressed by cohesive zones in the interface of elements. Two numerical examples demonstrate the capacities of CDGM. In the first example, a plain concrete beam is submitted to a three-point bending test. Numerical results are compared to experimental data from the literature. The second example deals with a full-scale ground slab, comparing the CDGM results to numerical and experimental data from the literature.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.24 no.2
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• pp.233-242
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• 2019

In this paper, an inverse approach based on uniform load surface (ULS) is presented for structural damage localization and quantification. The ULS is excellent approximation for deformed configuration of a structure under distributed unit force applied on all degrees of freedom. The ULS make use of natural frequencies and mode shapes of structure and in mathematical point of view is a weighted average of mode shapes. An objective function presented to damage detection is discrepancy between the ULS of monitored structure and numerical model of structure. Solving this objective function to find minimum value yields damage's parameters detection. The teaching-learning based optimization algorithm has been employed to solve inverse problem. The efficiency of present damage detection method is demonstrated through three numerical examples. By comparison between proposed objective function and another objective function which make use of natural frequencies and mode shapes, it is revealed present objective function have faster convergence and is more sensitive to damage. The method has good robustness against measurement noise and could detect damage by using the first few mode shapes. The results indicate that the proposed method is reliable technique to damage detection in structures.

• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.22 no.1
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• pp.35-43
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• 2019

Template tracking refers to the procedure of finding the most similar image patch corresponding to the given template through an image sequence. In order to obtain more accurate trajectory of the template, the template requires to be updated to reflect various appearance changes as it traverses through an image sequence. To do that, appearance images are used to model appearance variations and these are obtained by the computation of the principal components of the augmented image matrix at every iteration. Unfortunately, it is prohibitively expensive to compute the principal components at every iteration. Thus in this paper, we suggest a new Sliding Window based truncated URV Decomposition (TURVD) algorithm which enables updating their structure by recycling their previous decomposition instead of decomposing the image matrix from the beginning. Specifically, we show an efficient algorithm for updating and downdating the TURVD simultaneously, followed by the rank-one update to the TURVD while tracking the decomposition error accurately and adjusting the truncation level adaptively. Experiments show that the proposed algorithm produces no-meaningful differences but much faster execution speed compared to the typical algorithms in template tracking applications, thereby maintaining a good approximation for the principal components.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.15 no.9
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• pp.3138-3150
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• 2021

Multimedia services on the Internet are continuously increasing. Accordingly, the demand for a technology for efficiently delivering multimedia traffic is also constantly increasing. The multicast technique, that delivers the same content to several destinations, is constantly being developed. This technique delivers a content from a source to all destinations through the multicast tree. The multicast tree with low cost increases the utilization of network resources. However, the finding of the optimal multicast tree that has the minimum link costs is very difficult and its calculation complexity is the same as the complexity of the Steiner tree calculation which is NP-complete. Therefore, we need an effective way to obtain a multicast tree with low cost and less calculation time on SDN-based smart network platforms. In this paper, we propose a new multicast tree generation algorithm which produces a multicast tree using an agent trained by model-based meta reinforcement learning. Experiments verified that the proposed algorithm generated multicast trees in less time compared with existing approximation algorithms. It produced multicast trees with low cost in a dynamic network environment compared with the previous DQN-based algorithm.

• Journal of the Korean Physical Society
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• v.73 no.10
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• pp.1589-1595
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• 2018

Similarity index measures the topological proximity of node pairs in a complex network. Numerous similarity indices have been defined and investigated, but the dependency of structure on the performance of similarity indices has not been sufficiently investigated. In this study, we investigated the relationship between the performance of similarity indices and structural properties of a network by employing a two-state random network. A node in a two-state network has binary types that are initially given, and a connection probability is determined from the state of the node pair. The performances of similarity indices are affected by the number of links and the ratio of intra-connections to inter-connections. Similarity indices have different characteristics depending on their type. Local indices perform well in small-size networks and do not depend on whether the structure is intra-dominant or inter-dominant. In contrast, global indices perform better in large-size networks, and some such indices do not perform well in an inter-dominant structure. We also found that link prediction performance and the performance of similarity are correlated in both model networks and empirical networks. This relationship implies that link prediction performance can be used as an approximation for the performance of the similarity index when information about node type is unavailable. This relationship may help to find the appropriate index for given networks.

• International Journal of Internet, Broadcasting and Communication
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• v.13 no.3
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• pp.63-72
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• 2021

Mobile crowd-sensing (MCS) is a promising sensing paradigm that leverages mobile users with smart devices to perform large-scale sensing tasks in order to provide services to specific applications in various domains. However, MCS sensing tasks may not always be successfully completed or timely completed for various reasons, such as accidentally leaving the tasks incomplete by the users, asynchronous transmission, or connection errors. This results in missing sensing data at specific locations and times, which can degrade the performance of the applications and lead to serious casualties. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a missing data inference approach, called missing data approximation with probabilistic tensor factorization (MDI-PTF), to approximate the missing values as closely as possible to the actual values while taking asynchronous data transmission time and different sensing locations of the mobile users into account. The proposed method first normalizes the data to limit the range of the possible values. Next, a probabilistic model of tensor factorization is formulated, and finally, the data are approximated using the gradient descent method. The performance of the proposed algorithm is verified by conducting simulations under various situations using different datasets.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.53 no.2
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• pp.386-392
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• 2021

MACCS (MELCOR Accident Consequence Code System), WinMACCS, and MelMACCS now facilitate a multi-unit consequence analysis. MACCS evaluates the consequences of an atmospheric release of radioactive gases and aerosols into the atmosphere and is most commonly used to perform probabilistic safety assessments (PSAs) and related consequence analyses for nuclear power plants (NPPs). WinMACCS is a user-friendly preprocessor for MACCS. MelMACCS extracts source-term information from a MELCOR plot file. The current development can combine an arbitrary number of source terms, representing simultaneous releases from a multi-unit facility, into a single consequence analysis. The development supports different release signatures, fission product inventories, and accident initiation times for each unit. The treatment is completely general except that the model is currently limited to collocated units. A major practical consideration for performing a multi-unit PSA is that a comprehensive treatment for more than two units may involve an intractable number of combinations of source terms. This paper proposes and evaluates an approach for reducing the number of calculations to be tractable, even for sites with eight or ten units. The approximation error introduced by the approach is acceptable and is considerably less than other errors and uncertainties inherent in a Level 3 PSA.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.17 no.9
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• pp.2483-2504
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• 2023

Most existing low-light enhancement algorithms either use a large number of training parameters or lack generalization to real-world scenarios. This paper presents a novel lightweight and robust pixel-wise polynomial approximation-based deep network for low-light image enhancement. For mapping the low-light image to the enhanced image, pixel-wise higher-order polynomials are employed. A deep convolution network is used to estimate the coefficients of these higher-order polynomials. The proposed network uses multiple branches to estimate pixel values based on different receptive fields. With a smaller receptive field, the first branch enhanced local features, the second and third branches focused on medium-level features, and the last branch enhanced global features. The low-light image is downsampled by the factor of 2b-1 (b is the branch number) and fed as input to each branch. After combining the outputs of each branch, the final enhanced image is obtained. A comprehensive evaluation of our proposed network on six publicly available no-reference test datasets shows that it outperforms state-of-the-art methods on both quantitative and qualitative measures.

• Wind and Structures
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• v.38 no.5
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• pp.341-354
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• 2024

This paper presents a theoretical method to deal with the aerodynamic performance and pitch optimization of the horizontal axis wind turbine blades at low wind speeds. By considering a blade element, the functional relationship among the angle of attack, pitch angle, rotational speed of the blade, and wind speed is derived in consideration of a quasi-steady aerodynamic model, and aerodynamic loads on the blade element are then obtained. The torque and torque coefficient of the blade are derived by using integration. A polynomial approximation is applied to functions of the lift and drag coefficients for the symmetric and asymmetric airfoils respectively, where specific expressions of aerodynamic loads as functions of the angle of attack (which is a function of pitch angle) are obtained. The pitch optimization problem is investigated by considering the maximum value problem of the instantaneous torque of a blade as a function of pitch angle. Dynamic pitch laws for HAWT blades with either symmetric or asymmetric airfoils are derived. Influences of parameters including inflow ratio, rotational speed, azimuth, and wind speed on torque coefficient and optimal pith angle are discussed.