It is a usual practice for a contractor to deliver several projects at a time. Typically, the projects involve similar types of works and share the same pool of resources (i.e. construction crews). For this reason, the company’s portfolio of orders considered for a particular planning horizon can be modeled as a project with repeatable processes to be performed in heterogeneous units located in a number of construction sites. Its scheduling requires determining the best sequence of the resources’ moving from unit to unit while minding the due dates related with particular orders as well as resource continuity constraints. The authors present a model of this scheduling problem in the form of a mixed-integer linear program. The aim is to schedule a portfolio of projects in a way that minimizes the total of the resource idle time-related costs, the indirect costs, and the delay penalties. The model can be solved by means of a general-purpose solver. The model is applied to schedule a portfolio of multifamily housing projects.

In this research article, we present the concepts of fractional-order dynamical systems and synchronization methodologies of fractional order chaotic dynamical systems using slide mode control techniques. We have analysed the different phase portraits and time-series graphs of fractional order Rabinovich-Fabrikant systems. We have obtained that the lowest dimension of Rabinovich-Fabrikant system is 2.85 through utilization of the fractional calculus and computational simulation. Bifurcation diagrams and Lyapunov exponents of fractional order Rabinovich-Fabrikant system to justify the chaos in the systems. Synchronization of two identical fractional-order chaotic Rabinovich-Fabrikant systems are achieved using sliding mode control methodology.

This paper presents a Kalman filter based method for diagnosing both parametric and catastrophic faults in analog circuits. Two major innovations are presented, i.e., the Kalman filter based technique, which can significantly improve the efficiency of diagnosing a fault through an iterative structure, and the Shannon entropy to mitigate the influence of component tolerance. Both these concepts help to achieve higher performance and lower testing cost while maintaining the circuit.s functionality. Our simulations demonstrate that using the Kalman filter based technique leads to good results of fault detection and fault location of analog circuits. Meanwhile, the parasitics, as a result of enhancing accessibility by adding test points, are reduced to minimum, that is, the data used for diagnosis is directly obtained from the system primary output pins in our method. The simulations also show that decision boundaries among faulty circuits have small variations over a wide range of noise-immunity requirements. In addition, experimental results show that the proposed method is superior to the test method based on the subband decomposition combined with coherence function, arisen recently.

In the paper, the method of a numerical simulation concerning diagonal crack propagation in con-crete beams was presented. Two beams reinforced longitudinally but without shear reinforcement were considered during the Finite Element Method analysis. In particular, a nonlinear method was used to simulate the crack evaluation in the beams. The analysis was performed using the commercial program ANSYS. In the numerical simulation, the limit surface for concrete described by Willam and Warnke was applied to model the failure of concrete. To solve the FEM-system of equations, the Newton-Raphson method was used. As the results of FEM calculations, the trajectories of total stains and numerical images of smeared cracks were obtained for two analyzed beams: the slender beam S5 of leff = 1.8 m and the short beam S3k of leff = 1.1 m. The applied method allowed to generate both flexural vertical cracks and diagonal cracks in the shear regions. Some differences in the evaluation of crack patterns in the beams were observed. The greater number of flexural vertical cracks which penetrated deeper in the beam S5 caused the lower stiffness and the greater deformation in the beam S5 compared to the short beam S3k. Numerical results were compared with the experimental data from the early tests performed by Słowik [3]. The numerical simulation yielded very similar results as the experiments and it confirmed that the character of failure process altered according to the effective length of the member. The proposed numerical procedure was successfully verified and it can be suitable for numerical analyses of diagonal crack propagation in concrete beams.