Maturity Level of Kosovo Manufacturing Industry with regard to Industry 4.0

In this paper the concept of Maturity Level of Kosovo Industry will be presented according to the Industry 4.0. Digitalization of factory has impact the entire business environment and lead to Smart Enterprises. To create a model of Smart Factory, first we have analyzed the existing situation of Kosovo Manufacturing Industry with regard to revolution of Industry. In this paper we will describe the results of a recent research at the Kosovo manufacturing companies and are included metalworking and furniture industry, where is developed a Maturity Level for Kosovo Industry. To describe the Maturity Level of Kosovo Industry we have delivered questionnaire and have been done interviews with CEOs (Chief Executive Officer). The average score of Industrial Maturity Level for Kosovo Industry is 2.14 which represent 2nd Industrial Revolution, but some of enterprises belong to 3rd Industrial Revolution. Also, the main barriers of this low level of Maturity Level of Kosovo Industry are highlights based on questionnaire and interviews with CEOs, such as: lack of training programs, language barriers, high cost of purchasing/maintenance of technology, unskilled workers, and est.

State Feedback of Complex Systems Using Fuzzy Cognitive Maps

Complex systems have become a research area with increasing interest over the last years. The emergence of new technologies, the increase in computational power with reduced resources and cost, the integration of the physical world with computer based systems has created the possibility of significantly improving the quality of life of humans. While a significant degree of automation within these systems exists and has been provided in the past decade with examples of the smart homes and energy efficient buildings, a paradigm shift towards autonomy has been noted. The need for autonomy requires the extraction of a model; while a strict mathematical formulation usually exists for the individual subsystems, finding a complete mathematical formulation for the complex systems is a near impossible task to accomplish. For this reason, methods such as the Fuzzy Cognitive Maps (FCM) have emerged that are able to provide with a description of the complex system. The system description results from empirical observations made from experts in the related subject – integration of expert’s knowledge – that provide the required cause-effect relations between the interacting components that the FCM needs in order to be formulated. Learning methods are employed that are able to improve the formulated model based on measurements from the actual system. The FCM method, that is able to inherently integrate uncertainties, is able to provide an adequate model for the study of a complex system. With the required system model, the next step towards the development of a autonomous systems is the creation of a control scheme. While FCM can provide with a system model, the system representation proves inadequate to be utilized to design classic model based controllers that require a state space or frequency domain representation. In state space representation, the state vector contains the variables of the system that can describe enough about the system to determine its future behavior in absence of external variables. Thus, within the components – the nodes of the FCM, ideally those can be identified that constitute the state vector of the system. In this work the authors propose the creation of a state feedback control law of complex systems via Fuzzy Cognitive Maps. Given the FCM representation of a system, initially the components-states of the system are identified. Given the identified states, a FCM representation of the controller occurs where the controller parameters are the weights of the cause-effect relations of the system. The FCM of the system then is augmented with the FCM of the controller. An example of the proposed methodology is given via the use of the cart-pendulum system, a common benchmark system for testing the efficiency of control systems.

Underground houses - systematic approach toward underground construction of living space

The urgent need for energy consumption reduction and trends of global warming leads toward exploring possibilities to “hide” living space from explosion to climate changes as a result of global warming. This paper aims to present benefits of underground houses, underground living space. Housing is elementary process of mankind life that was performed from the existence of life in different forms, shapes, levels and social developments. House, as one used to get protected by phenomena of the nature, historically used in different shapes, levels and materials, created mentality that one percept as protective, and isolated space, for life activities. This paper treat possibilities, and priorities, of underground housing and construction of underground house in current development of technology, climate development impact, current development of mentality of society and approach of society toward energy efficiency, as underground house is one of the contribution. Paper as well analyze applicable standards and current legislation in Kosova for underground construction and housing.

Seismic actions induced by cladding panels on precast concrete frame structures

The strong earthquakes occurred in Southern Europe in the last decade pointed out a poor seismic performance of the connection system of the cladding of precast industrial structures. The cladding of these buildings usually consists of sandwich concrete panels of remarkable mass, connected to the frame structure with mechanical devices. The estimation of the out-of-plane seismic action on these connections is a key step for their correct proportioning. However, the formulation currently provided in the Eurocode 8 for the estimation of the seismic action on non-structural elements was calibrated with different objectives. Furthermore, given there is no in-plane structure-panel interaction, a quote of the panel mass is lumped in correspondence of their connection for a correct proportioning of the frame structure. The designers need to make assumptions on both aspects that often bring to remarkably different solutions. The paper presents a consistent dynamic formulation of the problem of the vibration of rigid bodies connected with cantilever columns. The solution brings to closed-form equations to evaluate the exact out-of-plane action on the connections and the correct amount of panel mass to be lumped.

Reducing the Porosity and Sealing Cracks by Using Crystalline Admixture in Conventional Concrete

There is a continuous increase of quality on civil engineering materials in developed countries and parallel increase of need for new constructions in developing countries. Professional community should propose solutions for the durability that can resist in different severe environments. The most important factor that can affect concrete durability is represented by the pore distribution. Transport properties can take place through the porous network inside the cementitious composites and the aggregates interface, permitting the ingress of aggressive agents damaging concrete function intrinsically as a material and the wellfunctioning of the entire structure. The use of a crystalline admixture during the mixing procedure can fill the pores and capillarity of the cement composites, while in case of the appearance of the cracks, can perform as sealing agent, representing a secondary innovative benefit. Concrete structure, in this case will be more durable and there will be no need for unplanned intervention.

The effect of elevated temperature on the lightweight concrete containing waste PET aggregate

In this study, the effect of waste PET as lightweight aggregate (WPLA) replacement with conventional aggregate on the some physical and mechanical properties and residual compressive strength of concrete was investigated. For this purpose, five different mixtures were prepared (the reference mixture and four WPLA mixtures including 30%, 40%, 50% and 60% waste PET aggregate by volume). The fresh and dry unit weights, compressive strengths, flexural-tensile strengths, water absorption and porosity ratios of the mixtures were measured. In addition the specimens exposed to elevated temperatures at 150, 300 and 450 °C and the residual compressive strengths were measured. Test results indicated that the unit weight, compressive strength and flexural-tensile strength of the specimens decreased as the amount of WPLA increased in concrete. After exposing to elevated temperature, WPLA mixtures retained their structural integrity and compressive strengths at 150 °C and 300 °C. However there was a significant decrease in the residual compressive strength values of WPLA mixtures at 450 °C.

Decision making based on data analyses using data warehouses

Data warehouses are a collection of several databases, whose goal is to help different companies and corporations make important decisions about their activities. These decisions are taken from the analyses that are made to the data within the data warehouse. These data are taken from data that companies and corporations collect on daily basis from their branches that may be located in different cities, regions, states and continents. Data that are entered to data warehouses are historical data and they represent that part of data that is important for making decisions. These data go under a transformation process in order to accommodate with the structure of the objects within the databases in the data warehouse. This is done because the structure of the relational databases is not similar with the structure of the databases (multidimensional databases) within the data warehouse. The first ones are optimized for transactions on daily basis like: entering, changing, deleting and retrieving data through simple queries, the second ones are optimized for retrieving data through multidimensional queries, which enable us to extract important information. This information helps to make important decisions by learning which are the weak points and the strong points of the company, in order to invest more on the weak points and to strengthen the strong points, increasing the profits of the company. The goal of this paper is to treat data analyses for decision making from a data warehouse by using OLAP (online analytical processing) analysis. For this treatment we used the Analysis Services of Microsoft SQL Server 2016 platform. We analyzed the data of an IT Store with branches in different cities in Kosovo and came to a conclusion for some sales trends. This paper emphasizes the role of data warehouses in decision making.

A need for an integrative security model for semantic stream reasoning systems

State-of-the-art security frameworks have been extensively addressing security issues for web resources, agents and services in the Semantic Web. The provision of Stream Reasoning as a new area spanning Semantic Web and Data Stream Management Systems has eventually opened up new challenges. Namely, their decentralized nature, the metadata descriptions, the number of users, agents, and services, make securing Stream Reasoning systems difficult to handle. Thus, there is an inherent need of developing new security models which will handle security and automate security mechanisms to a more autonomous system that supports complex and dynamic relationships between data, clients and service providers. We plan to validate our approach on a typical application of stream data, on Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). In particular, WSNs for water quality monitoring will serve as a case study. The paper describes the initial findings and research plan for building a consistent security model for stream reasoning systems.

Characteristics and Temporal Behavior of Internet Backbone Traffic

With the rapid increase demand for data usage, Internet has become complex and harder to analyze. Characterizing the Internet traffic might reveal information that are important for Network Operators to formulate policy decisions, develop techniques to detect network anomalies, help better provision network resources (capacity, buffers) and use workload characteristics for simulations (typical packet sizes, flow durations, common protocols). In this paper, using passive monitoring and measurements, we show collected data traffic at Internet backbone routers. First, we reveal main observations on patterns and characteristics of this dataset including packet sizes, traffic volume for inter and intra domain and protocol composition. Second, we further investigate independence structure of packet size arrivals using both visual and computational statistics. Finally, we show the temporal behavior of most active destination IP and Port addresses.

Implications of EU-GDPR in Low-Grade Social, Activist and NGO Settings

Social support services are becoming popular among the citizens of every country and every age. Though, social support services easily accessible on mobile phones are used in different contexts, ranging from extending your presence and connectivity to friends, family and colleagues to using social media services for being a social activist seeking to help individuals confined in miserable situations such as homeless community, drug addicts or even revolutionists fighting against dictatorships etc. However, a very recent development in the European Parliament’s law (2016/679) on the processing and free movement of personal data in terms of EU-GDPR (General data protection rules) considers the low funded social service development efforts unsafe. This article analyses a case study conducted at a shelter for homeless mothers in the United States to conceptualize the future similar development efforts from low end public activist groups within European union. This article aims to raise awareness on this issue and also puts forth a conceptual model to envision the possibilities of mitigating the risks attached to such development efforts under the light of EU-GDPR which will be implemented in may 2018.