International border security operations are diverse and include tasks to facilitate the legitimate movement of goods, thwart crime, maintain safety around borders and safeguard natural resources. All these operations are vital and enduring; however, three operations are currently of exceptional concern to countries around the world: counterterrorism, illegal drug control and illegal migration. The usage of flying ad hoc networks promises new ways for both military and civilian applications, such as border surveillance and remote sensing. Many systems were developed to assist border authorities with more effective surveillance and reliable decision-making support. Such systems vary in terms of the used technology, accuracy, types of events that can be detected and monitoring continuity. This article investigates the technical capabilities of existing and emerging surveillance technologies used for international border monitoring applications. It describes the effectiveness of these systems along with the technological infrastructure required for their implementation. Particular attention has been given to identifying the strengths and weaknesses of these systems and their ability to meet current and future challenges. Our analysis shows that flying ad hoc networks can be used to deliver a rapidly deployable, self-configurable, flexible and relatively small operating cost network for border surveillance.
Trains have a key role in transporting people and goods with the option of moving from source to destinations by passing through several stations, with time-based features like date scheduling and known arrival times, which makes time a critical factor. The main challenge here, is to ensure that the train trip or train schedules are not affected or delayed in any way during the whole train trip; by giving the control unit in the railway system, the required time to process requests regarding all collected data. This an NP-hard problem with an optimal solution of handling all collected data and all service requests by the control unit of the railway system. Operational research will be used to solve this problem by developing many heuristics to deal with tasks of real-time systems, to produce a significant time optimization in the railway systems. To solve this problem, the proposed approach employs optimization by adapting 22 heuristics based on two categories of algorithms, the separated blocks category algorithm and the blocks interference category algorithm. The proposed approach receives data from many different sources at the same time, then collects the received data and save it to a data base in the railway system control unit. Experimental results showed the effectiveness of the developed heuristics, more over the proposed approach minimized the maximum completion time that was elapsed in handling the received requests.
The study aimed to review the best international practices for the consolidation of public schools in areas with low population density in order to improve the efficiency of public education expenditure. The study used the descriptive analysis method by analyzing documents from the best international practices on the consolidation of public schools. The study used two tools, namely, analyzing documents and interviews with 20 experts. The study found that the best international practices for consolidating schools with a small number of students are based on a national consolidation manual, diversity in standards of consolidation and its alternatives, raising the awareness of the local community, and provision of safe and comfortable school transportation. Finally, the study provided suggestions for consolidating schools to improve the efficiency of public education expenditure in Saudi Arabia.
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