Hydrogels with organized structure have attracted remarkable attentions for bio-related applications. Among the preparation of hierarchical hydrogel materials, fabrication of hydrogel with multi-layers is an important branch. Although the generation mechanism of layers had been fully discussed, sub-layer structure was not sufficiently studied. In this research, multi-layered chitosan hydrogel w...

The aquifer thermal energy storage system (ATES) owing to growing demands for sustainable energy has become a popular technology in last few decades for long term storing of excess thermal energy. The efficiency of such a system depends entirely on the capacity of the aquifer to retain heat and hence modeling the heat transfer and transient temperature distribution in the aquifer due to hot wat...

This paper presents a new multi-layered artificial immune system architecture using the ideas generated from the biological immune system for solving combinatorial optimization problems. The proposed methodology is composed of five layers. After expressing the problem as a suitable representation in the first layer, the search space and the features of the problem are estimated and extracted in...

This paper presents algorithms and a prototype system for hand tracking and hand posture recognition. Hand postures are represented in terms of hierarchies of multi-scale colour image features at different scales, with qualitative inter-relations in terms of scale, position and orientation. In each image, detection of multi-scale colour features is performed. Hand states are then simultaneously...

Groundwater is the only source of water for domestic as well as agricultural purposes in the sand aquifer in between sea and lagoon configuration typically found in the eastern Sri Lanka. This study was carried out to estimate the safe yield and assess the vulnerability of the sandy aquifer on the eastern coastal belt of Sri Lanka by rapid urbanization, agriculture and as well as climate change...

In spite of the intense efforts of metrics researches, the impact of object-oriented software metrics is for the moment still quite reduced. The cause of this fact lies not in an intrinsic incapacity of metrics to help assessing and improving the quality of object-oriented systems, but in an unsystematic, dispersed and ambiguous manner of defining and using the metrics. In this paper we define ...

This paper presents the EarthTutor authoring tool, a multi-layered system designed to remove the technical hurdles preventing teachers from having full control over the structure of their lessons, without sacrificing the power and technical flexibility required for an effective ITS implementation. EarthTutor reduces the ITS design problem to a series of related but independent layers. Each laye...

Successful operation of micro aerial vehicles in partially known environments requires globally consistent plans based on incomplete environment models and quick reactions to unknown obstacles by means of real-time planning of collision-free trajectories. In this paper, we propose a complete layered mission and navigation planning system based on coarse prior knowledge and local maps from omnid...