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An Integrated Outage Management System (IOMS) is a utility owned, centralized information system. Using the Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition (SCADA) methodology, the IOMS integrates different databases and components of outage management systems to improve the quality of service of electrical power to customers. This paper describes the development of an IOMS and its related utility functionality. The design considerations, salient features, component integration, functional aspects, and implementation issues of the IOMS are discussed. Evidence shows that the IOMS implementation would result in improving the overall quality of electric power supply and effective outage management significantly.

The purpose of this research is to automate the operations and real time monitoring and controlling of a marine loading arm.

A generic control strategy to automate the operation of manually controlled marine loading arms has been developed. This strategy employs state of the art, industry standard position sensors, PLC systems, interactive human machine interface (HMI) and integrates fail‐safe operation and emergency shutdown procedures.

This approach satisfies all the industry safety regulations and liminates the possible risks and/ or spurious trips during product loading. The overall engineering process is simpler, easier to implement and manage due to the fact the industry standard equipment and design tools have been used. Using this generic strategy, manually operated marine loading arms can be automated for effective monitoring and controlling purposes.

It is expected that engineers around the world can benefit by this approach and will be able to design similar control equipment to automate the functionality of loading arms in their organizations.

This work is the authors' own. Thoughts and designs belong to them and the ideas presented are completely original, developed, implemented and tested by them over years.

While shareholder wealth maximization is accepted by finance theoreticians as the financial goal of the firm, the implementation of this goal is not simple. There can be significant economic impacts of using an alternative goal such as return on investment (ROI) maximization instead of net present value maximization. Many areas of management discretion can be affected by the choice of ROI maximization versus profit maximization. Differential managerial decisions for these two alternative goals have been noted in such areas as investments in new plant and equipment, investments in research and development, and maintenance of plant and equipment. In addition, managers may have preferences among alternative accounting policies (depreciation schema and inventory valuation methods) that depend on their objective.

The effect of a horizontal partial porous partition on heat transfer and flow structure in a differentially heated square cavity is investigated. While the fluid flow is assumed to be governed by Navier—Stokes equations, fluid saturated porous media is assumed to be governed by Darcy’s equations. Standard Galerkin method of finite element formulation is applied for discretization of the system of equations. The non‐linearities in the discretized equations are treated with Newton‐Raphson scheme. The code developed is tested for validation for modified Rayleigh number Ra up to 400. The code is then applied to a differentially heated square cavity with a horizontal partial porous partition. While the thickness of the porous partition is found to have appreciable effect on heat transfer and flow field, width of the porous partition is found to have insignificant bearing on heat transfer except when the partition is very small and compatible to the thickness of the boundary layer developed. During the experimentation Darcy number and Rayleigh number are assumed to be constant at 10^–4 and 10⁶ respectively.

This paper explores the emergence and coordination of synchrony in networked groups like those that develop integrated product platforms in collaborative ecosystems. While synchronized actions are an important objective for many groups, interorganizational network theory has yet to explore synchrony in depth perhaps because it does not fit the typical diffusion models this research relies upon. By adding organizationally realistic features – sparse network structure and intentional coordination – to the firefly model from theoretical biology, I take some first steps in understanding synchrony in organizational groups. Like diffusion, synchrony is more effective in denser networks, but unlike diffusion clustering decelerates synchrony’s emergence. Coordination by a few group members accelerates group-wide synchrony, and benefits the coordinating organizations with a higher likelihood that it converges to the coordinating organization’s preferred rhythm. This likelihood of convergence to an organization’s preferred rhythm – what I term synchrony performance – increases in denser networks, but is not dependent on tie strength and clustering.

The learning outcomes of this study are as follows:

1. understand the role of financial inclusivity in the sustainable development of a nation;

2. examine the concept of social entrepreneurship and identify the skills needed to be a social entrepreneur;

3. analyze the opportunities and challenges faced by social entrepreneurs, especially in an emerging economy; and

4. assess the feasible options with respect to upscaling and expansion.

Yamuna Sastry, a young woman from a traditional Indian family, had set out to achieve her dream of financial inclusivity by helping the underprivileged in her country gain financial independence and credibility. When she was approached by a cab driver to file tax returns for him, a new venture took shape in her mind, and along with a partner, CabDost, a socially driven financial advisory start-up was created to provide financial advisory services exclusively for cab drivers. CabDost had been instrumental in making over 15,000 cab drivers financially literate, instilling in them a culture of compliance, getting them tax refunds and enabling the Indian Government recover eight crores in taxes. The success of financial inclusivity among cab drivers inspired CabDost to extend its financial services to truck drivers, auto drivers, housekeeping staff and other contractual workforce. The company found it challenging to address the demands of the increasing customer base with its available technical resources. The absence of an in-house tech team and the need for an all-in-one tech platform to provide a wide variety of financial services induced CabDost to explore other options. Dvara Money, a neo bank offering financial services, approached CabDost with a merger proposal. Though it was a lucrative offer, the founding members were apprehensive as they knew that most of the mergers failed because of myriad reasons. They were contemplating on their next move as they were in a dilemma about whether to develop a technical team in-house or to go ahead with the merger.

The case can be taught to business management students as a part of the introductory course on entrepreneurship or social entrepreneurship. The case can be used specifically to make the students understand the role of financial inclusivity in the sustainable development of a nation, the concept of social entrepreneurship, the journey of social entrepreneurs in the financial inclusivity space, right from ideation to execution, the challenges faced in the bargain, survival mechanisms adopted and the various options available for further growth and expansion.

Teaching notes are available for educators only.

CSS 3: Entrepreneurship.

A “state-driven” approach suggests that colonists use census categories to rule. However, a “society-driven” approach suggests that this state-driven perspective confers too much power upon states. A third approach views census-taking and official categorization as a product of state–society interaction that depends upon: (a) the population's lay categories, (b) information intellectuals' ability to take up and transform these lay categories, and (c) the balance of power between social and state actors. We evaluate the above positions by analyzing official records, key texts, travelogues, and statistical memoirs from three key periods in India: Indus Valley civilization through classical Gupta rule (ca. 3300 BCE–700 CE), the “medieval” period (ca. 700–1700 CE), and East India Company (EIC) rule (1757–1857 CE), using historical narrative. We show that information gathering early in the first period was society driven; however, over time, a strong interactive pattern emerged. Scribes (information intellectuals) increased their social status and power (thus, shifting the balance of power) by drawing on caste categories (lay categories) and incorporating them into official information gathering. This intensification of interactive information gathering allowed the Mughals, the EIC, and finally British direct rule officials to collect large quantities of information. Our evidence thus suggests that the intensification of state–society interactions over time laid the groundwork for the success of the direct rule British censuses. It also suggests that any transformative effect of these censuses lay in this interactive pattern, not in the strength of the British colonial state.

This paper aims to propose an innovative adaptive control method for lower-limb rehabilitation robots.

Despite carrying out various studies on the subject of rehabilitation robots, the flexibility and stability of the closed-loop control system is still a challenging problem. In the proposed method, surface electromyography (sEMG) and human force-based dual closed-loop control strategy is designed to adaptively control the rehabilitation robots. A motion analysis of human lower limbs is performed by using a wavelet neural network (WNN) to obtain the desired trajectory of patients. In the outer loop, the reference trajectory of the robot is modified by a variable impedance controller (VIC) on the basis of the sEMG and human force. Thenceforward, in the inner loop, a model reference adaptive controller with parameter updating laws based on the Lyapunov stability theory forces the rehabilitation robot to track the reference trajectory.

The experiment results confirm that the trajectory tracking error is efficiently decreased by the VIC and adaptively correct the reference trajectory synchronizing with the patients’ motion intention; the model reference controller is able to outstandingly force the rehabilitation robot to track the reference trajectory. The method proposed in this paper can better the functioning of the rehabilitation robot system and is expandable to other applications of the rehabilitation field.

The proposed approach is interesting for the design of an intelligent control of rehabilitation robots. The main contributions of this paper are: using a WNN to obtain the desired trajectory of patients based on sEMG signal, modifying the reference trajectory by the VIC and using model reference control to force rehabilitation robot to track the reference trajectory.

Natural convection in a square cavity with a centrally located partition is considered. While one of the side walls is fully active, the other is partly insulated. Numerical simulation, based on the finite element method, has been carried out for different lengths of the active surface. The results have been compared with the cases when the cavity is without partition as well as the case of a partitioned cavity with fully active side walls.