Earth pressure balance tunnel boring machines (EPB-TBMs) are favorably applied in urban tunneling projects. Despite their numerous advantages, considerable delays and high maintenance cost are the main disadvantages these machines suffer from. Reliability, availability, and maintainability (RAM) analysis is a practical technique that uses failure and repair dataset obtained over a reasonable ti...

WORKING MEMORY (WM) INVOLVES THREE COGNITIVE EVENTS information encoding, maintenance, and retrieval; these are supported by brain activity in a network of frontal, parietal and temporal regions. Manipulation of WM load and duration of the maintenance period can modulate this activity. Although such modulations have been widely studied using the event-related potentials (ERP) technique, a preci...

A major key to success for case-based reasoning systems widely recognized are the definition of suitable case base maintenance policies. The aim of this paper is two fold: (1) to analyse global versus local case base maintenance policies and (2) to develop a unified technique between local and global policies. All the case base maintenance techniques studied in this paper share a common foundat...

A component based or module-based software system is considered in which the software reliability growth model (SRGM) follows a mixed distribution. We address the problem of determining the optimal testing time of software so that the total maintenance costs of the software could be minimized and a desired level of reliability could be achieved as well. The total maintenance costs of the softwa...

Adsorption mechanisms of Zn2+ and Ni2+ on hydrous manganese oxide (HMO) were investigated using XAS. Analyses reveal that both metal ions retain their primary hydration shell when sorbed to HMO, which is consistent with physical sorption. These local structures are invariant of pH (3.0-7.0) and adsorbate loading (10(-4) - 10(-2) mol (g of HMO)-1), suggesting one average type of adsorption mecha...