Publications by authors named "K el-Rayes"

Office space designers encounter a challenge in identifying the optimal set of noise control materials to improve the acoustic quality while keeping the cost of selected acoustic materials to a minimum. To address this challenge, this paper presents a novel optimization model that provides the capability of minimizing the cost of acoustic materials while satisfying all designer-specified acoustic quality requirements. The model is developed in five main stages that focus on (1) identifying the correlated designer decisions that influence the model objective function; (2) formulating an optimization objective function; (3) identifying the model constraints that are organized into acoustic quality and materials selection constraints; (4) implementing the model using genetic algorithms (GA); and (5) evaluating the performance of the model using an office space design that is under construction to assess and improve the model feasibility and performance.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

In the aftermath of catastrophic natural disasters such as hurricanes, tsunamis and earthquakes, emergency management agencies come under intense pressure to provide temporary housing to address the large-scale displacement of the vulnerable population. Temporary housing is essential to enable displaced families to reestablish their normal daily activities until permanent housing solutions can be provided. Temporary housing decisions, however, have often been criticized for their failure to fulfil the socioeconomic needs of the displaced families within acceptable budgets.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

The deformations of orthodontic appliances used for space closure are large so that any mathematical analysis will require a nonlinear approach. Existing incremental finite element and finite difference numerical methods suffer from excessive computational effort when analyzing these problems. An accurate segmental technique is proposed to handle these difficulties in an extremely efficient fashion.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF