Prospects for Improving Building Maintenance Management in Nigerian Public Universities: A Case Study of Nnamdi Azikiwe University

Buildings are highly resourceful in the effective operation of tertiary institutions. It is imperative that these assets should be given good maintenance attention for effective performance. Public institutions have always been faced with ineffective maintenance of buildings due to bureaucratic constraints and poor maintenance culture. This study is aimed at establishing prospects for improving maintenance management and performance of buildings in public universities in Nigeria, using Nnamdi Azikiwe University as a case study. The study adopted a survey research approach using a structured questionnaire. A total of 148 responses were gotten from the Works and Services Department and Heads of academic departments out of 203 distributed questionnaires, being a 72.9% response rate. The questionnaire was analyzed using descriptive statistics technique. The study variables were examines using mean, with an acceptance benchmark of 3 and above. This implies that any issue that has the mean of the responses to be 3.0 will be regarded as “agreed”, while those whose mean of their responses are less than 3.0 will be regarded as “disagreed”. Mean and standard deviation of each item were determined, and ranking were then assigned to them. From the research findings, it is evident that there are statistically significant prospects for improving on the poor state of building maintenance management in the study area. The study therefore recommends that adoption and deployment of computerized maintenance management system that would handle all aspects of users’ reporting and feedback, scheduling and coordination of activities; intensive training and retraining program for the maintenance personnel, orientation programs for building users on healthy maintenance culture and regular building condition survey should be incorporated as prospects for improving building maintenance management in the study area.

Scheduling Concurrent Visual Feedback in Learning a Continuous Balance Task

This investigation held concurrent visual feedback frequency at 50% in the acquisition phase and manipulated three different feedback schedules while comparing those to a 0% feedback frequency. In an assessment of dynamic postural stability, young, healthy adults performed 20 acquisition trials and four retention trials 48-hr later on a circular platform that moved in the anterior/posterior and medial/lateral axes simultaneously. Three concurrent feedback schedules were manipulated: a fade schedule consisting of high relative frequency of concurrent feedback early in the acquisition phase which was systematically reduced throughout acquisition (e.g., 100%, 75%, 50%, 25%, 0%), a constant schedule consisting of a uniform scheduling of concurrent feedback on every other acquisition trial, and a reverse fade group consisting of a schedule exactly opposite to that of the fade group. A no concurrent feedback group was also utilized to determine if feedback was necessary to learn the balance task. Acquisition and retention results revealed the concurrent groups performed with significantly greater accuracy and stability than the no concurrent feedback group. There were no significant differences between the three concurrent feedback schedules. Results indicate that manipulating concurrent feedback scheduling did not produce similar results to those investigations manipulating knowledge of results scheduling.

Weight Feedback Adaptive Multi Objective Cooperative Scheduling in Smart Grid Application

Smart grid integration needs a highly accurate power scheduling to minimizes the losses and efficiently utilize the power supply to minimize the loss. Scheduling of a smart grid interface is monitored based on single or multiple objectives scheduler, where the smart grids are scheduled based on the measured parameters of power dispatch and the consumption model. Wherein, multi objective scheduling results in prominent result, the system is a linear monitoring model, where no previous observations are considered in making present decision. This constraint the accuracy of scheduling. In this paper, a new feedback scheduling operation based on feedback operation is proposed. the approach significantly feedbacks the past parameter variation and leads to an optimal power supply in smart grid interface. The experimental results obtained signifies a optimal improvement in the decision delay and power compensation.