Applied Research Journal
Volume:3 Issue: 4, Apr 2017

Flexible pavements deterioration is expected due to loading and environmental effects. This deterioration leads to reduction in their strength, structural behavior, and serviceability. Diagnosing of deterioration types and applying of correct maintenance technique is an essential objective, especially in early stages, to control the problems and to provide safe and convenient road using. Selection of the optimum maintenance technique leads to functional and economic benefits. This selection is affected by several factors and requires high skills and experience. Therefore, development of an optimization system is very useful for selection of the best solution in the domain of this study. This study aims to develop a neural network system to select the optimum solution in this domain. The proposed system involved mathematical models coded tightly in software. In addition, the system has an attractive, interactive, flexible, and user friendly interface. The proposed system is verified by extensive testing to ensure its efficiency and flexibility.

At the moment in Baghdad City, the majority of people prefer to use private more than public transport. This fact causes several problems like traffic congestion, air pollution, fuel consumption and therefore serious consequences on the environment. The target of this work is to understand and classify the attributes, their influence on passenger satisfaction, opinions of users of public transit in order to give suggestions for better type of services. To get to this aim a questionnaire for a sampled community groups (students and academic staff) was conducted on University of AlMustansiryah and University of Baghdad, where both are located nearly in a CBD area. Then, a statistical data analysis was carried out. In addition, a Customer Satisfaction Index (CSI) was determined to provide an operationally appealing measure of current service effectiveness, the benefit of this direction of research is to make good sense to understand the relationships between the attributes, gives knowledge of the weights that individuals place on each one. These weights represent the relative importance of an attribute in the overall determination of the customer satisfaction index.

Exchange rates are important financial problem that receive attention globally. This study investigated the bureau de change of daily dollar/naira exchange rate using GARCH (1, 1), GJR-GARCH (I, 1), TGRACH (1, 1) and TS-GARCH (1, 1) bureau by using daily data over the period of June 2015 to July 2016. The aim of the study is to determine bureau de change of daily exchange rate between United States dollar and Nigeria naira. The results from the entire bureau show that bureau is persistent (i.e. exceed 1) indicating GARCH (I, 1), GJR-GARCH (1, 1), and TS-GARCH (I, I) 'bureau variances are not stationary but for TGARCH (1, 1) model (i.e. below 1) indicating the variance Is stationary. The GJR-GARCH (I, 1) and TGARCH (1, I) bureau show the existence of statistically significant asymmetry effect. The TGARCH (L I) and TS-GARCH (1, 1) bureau are found to be the best bureau because they have maximum likelihood and lower Akaike and Sckwarz information criteria.