• Clinical Endoscopy
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• 제57권4호
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• pp.424-433
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• 2024

Colonic stent placement is a commonly used bridging strategy for surgery in patients with obstructive colorectal cancer. The procedure involves the placement of a self-expandable metallic stent (SEMS) across the obstructive lesion to restore intestinal patency and alleviate the symptoms of obstruction. By allowing patients to receive surgery in a planned and staged manner with time for preoperative optimization and bowel preparation, stent placement may reduce the need for emergency surgery, which is associated with higher complication rates and poorer outcomes. This review focuses on the role of colon stenting as a bridge to surgery in the management of obstructive colorectal cancer. SEMS as a bridge to surgery for left-sided colon cancer has been demonstrated to be particularly useful; however, further research is needed for its application in cases of right-sided colon cancer. Colon stent placement also has limitations and potential complications including stent migration, re-obstruction, and perforation. However, the timing of curative surgery after SEMS placement remains inconclusive. Considering the literature to date, performing surgery at an interval of approximately 2 weeks is considered appropriate. Therefore, colonic stent placement may be an effective strategy as a bridge to surgery in patients with obstructive colorectal cancer.

• Earthquakes and Structures
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• 제1권1호
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• pp.43-67
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• 2010

A gradient-based evolutionary optimization methodology is presented for finding the optimal design of both the added dampers and their supporting members to minimize an objective function of a linear multi-storey structure subjected to the critical ground acceleration. The objective function is taken as the sum of the stochastic interstorey drifts. A frequency-dependent viscoelastic damper and the supporting member are treated as a vibration control device. Due to the added stiffness by the supplemental viscoelastic damper, the variable critical excitation needs to be updated simultaneously within the evolutionary phase of the optimal damper placement. Two different models of the entire damper unit are investigated. The first model is a detailed model referred to as "the 3N model" where the relative displacement in each component (i.e., the spring and the dashpot) of the damper unit is defined. The second model is a simpler model referred to as "the N model" where the entire damper unit is converted into an equivalent frequency-dependent Kelvin-Voigt model. Numerical analyses for 3 and 10-storey building models are conducted to investigate the characters of the optimal design using these models and to examine the validity of the proposed technique.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• 제47권2호
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• pp.227-245
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• 2013

The term "constructability" in regard to cast-in-place concrete construction refers mainly to the ease of reinforcing steel placement. Bar congestion complicates steel placement, hinders concrete placement and as a result leads to improper consolidation of concrete around bars affecting the integrity of the structure. In this paper, a multi-objective approach, based on the non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm (NSGA-II) is developed for optimal design of reinforced concrete cantilever retaining walls, considering minimization of the economic cost and reinforcing bar congestion as the objective functions. The structural model to be optimized involves 35 design variables, which define the geometry, the type of concrete grades, and the reinforcement used. The seismic response of the retaining walls is investigated using the well-known Mononobe-Okabe analysis method to define the dynamic lateral earth pressure. The results obtained from numerical application of the proposed framework demonstrate its capabilities in solving the present multi-objective optimization problem.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• 제12권3_4호
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• pp.235-250
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• 2013

Optimal sensor placement (OSP) technique plays a key role in the structural health monitoring (SHM) of large-scale structures. According to the mathematical background and implicit assumptions made in the triaxial effective independence (EfI) method, this paper presents a novel multi-dimensional OSP method for the Canton Tower focusing on application demands. In contrast to existing methods, the presented method renders the corresponding target mode shape partitions as linearly independent as possible and, at the same time, maintains the stability of the modal matrix in the iteration process. The modal assurance criterion (MAC), determinant of the Fisher Information Matrix (FIM) and condition number of the FIM have been taken as the optimal criteria, respectively, to demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed method. Numerical investigations suggest that the proposed method outperforms the original EfI method in all instances as expected, which is looked forward to be even more pronounced should it be used for other multi-dimensional optimization problems.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• 제55권2호
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• pp.690-695
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• 2023

Recommendations are given to improve the efficiency of radiation protection of transport casks for SNF transportation. The attenuation of ${\gamma}$-quanta of long-lived isotopes ¹³⁴Cs, ^137mBa(¹³⁷Cs), ¹⁵⁴Eu and ⁶⁰Co by optimizing the thicknesses and arrangement of layers of Fe and Pb radiation shields of transport casks is studied. The fixed radiation shielding mass (fixed mass thickness) is chosen as the main optimization criterion. The effect of the placement order of Fe and Pb layers in a combined two-layer radiation shield with an equivalent thickness of 30 cm is studied in detail. It is shown that with the same mass thicknesses of the Fe and Pb layers, the placement of Fe in the first layer, and Pb - in the second one provides more than twofold attenuation of ${\gamma}$-quanta compared to the reverse placement: Pb - in the first layer, Fe - in the second. The increase in the efficiency of attenuation of ${\gamma}$-quanta for TC with combined shielding of Fe and Pb is shown to be achieved by designing the first layer of radiation shielding around the canister with SNF from Fe of the maximum possible thickness.

• 한국통신학회논문지
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• 제27권2B호
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• pp.137-144
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• 2002

본 논문에서는 유전자 알고리즘의 진화 연산을 이용하여 기지국의 위치와 송신전력을 최적화하는 알고리즘을 구현하였다. 기지국의 위치와 송신 전력을 실수형 파라미터로 정의하며 관련된 유전 연산자를 설계하였다. 최적화의 방향은 커버리지, 송신 전력, 경제성 효율이 고려되도록 다중 목적함수를 제안하였다. 본 논문에서 구현한 알고리즘음 최적 해를 직관적으로 알 수 있는 상황에 적용하여 검증하였으며 비균일 트래픽 분포를 가정한 상황에 대해 목적함수의 가중치에 따라 최적화를 수행하였다.

• Journal of Mechanical Science and Technology
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• 제15권8호
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• pp.1119-1131
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• 2001

In this paper we formulate an optimization based approach to determining the maximally inscribed rectangle in a robots workspace. The size and location of the maximally inscribed rectangle is an effective index for evaluating the size and quality of a robots workspace. Such information is useful for, e. g., optimal worktable placement, and the placement of cooperating robots. For general robot workspaces we show how the problem can be formulated as a constrained nonlinear optimization problem possessing a special structure, to which standard numerical algorithms can be applied. Key to the rapid convergence of these algorithms is the choice of a starting point; in this paper we develop an efficient computational geometric algorithm for rapidly obtaining an approximate solution suitable as an initial starting point. We also develop an improved version of the algorithm of Haug et al. for calculating a robots workspace boundary.

• 한국소음진동공학회:학술대회논문집
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• 한국소음진동공학회 2012년도 추계학술대회 논문집
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• pp.733-738
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• 2012

This paper presents active noise control for the reduction of transmission noise passing through opening of enclosures. Enclosures are essential measure to protect noise propagation from operating machinery. Access openings of the enclosures are important path of noise leakage. First, we modeled and analyzed the noise characteristics passing through the openings of the enclosure generated by the operation of the machinery based on the finite element method. We then implemented a feedforward controller to actively control the acoustic power through the opening. Finally, we conducted optimization of placement of the reference sensors for several cases of the number of sensors. A good control performances were achieved using a minimum number of microphones arranged a optimal placement.

• Journal of Power Electronics
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• 제12권5호
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• pp.830-841
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• 2012

Active power filters (APF) can be employed for harmonic compensation in power systems. In this paper, a fuzzy based method is proposed for identification of probable APF nodes of a radial distribution system. The modified adaptive particle swarm optimization (MAPSO) technique is used for final selection of the APFs size. A combination of Fuzzy-MAPSO method is implemented to determine the optimal allocation and size of APFs. New fuzzy membership functions are formulated where the harmonic current membership is an exponential function of the nodal injecting harmonic current. Harmonic voltage membership has been formulated as a function of the node harmonic voltage. The product operator shows better performance than the AND operator because all harmonics are considered in computing membership function. For evaluating the proposed method, it has been applied to the 5-bus and 18-bus test systems, respectively, which the results appear satisfactorily. The proposed membership functions are new at the APF placement problem so that weighting factors can be changed proportional to objective function.

• 대한전기학회논문지:전력기술부문A
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• 제52권8호
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• pp.471-480
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• 2003

The design of a measurement system to perform Harmonic State Estimation (HSE) is a very complex problem. Among the reasons for its complexity are the system size, conflicting requirements of estimator accuracy, reliability in the presence of transducer noise and data communication failures, adaptability to change in the network topology and cost minimization. In particular, the number of harmonic instruments available is always limited. Therefore, a systematic procedure is needed to design the optimal placement of measurement points. This paper presents a new HSE algorithm which is based on an optimal placement of measurement points using Genetic Algorithms (GAs) which is widely used in areas such as: optimization of the objective function, learning of neural networks, tuning of fuzzy membership functions, machine learning, system identification and control. This HSE has been applied to the Simulation Test Power System for the validation of the new HSE algorithm. The study results have indicated an economical and effective method for optimal placement of measurement points using Genetic Algorithms (GAs) in the Harmonic State Estimation (HSE).