• Safety and Health at Work
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• v.10 no.4
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• pp.420-427
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• 2019

Introduction: To prevent and manage the societal and economic burden of occupational diseases (ODs), countries should develop strong prevention policies, health surveillance and registry systems. This study aims to contribute to the improvement of OD surveillance at national level as well as to identify priority actions in Turkey. Methods: The history and current status of occupational health studies were considered from the perspective of OD surveillance. Interpretative research was done through literature review on occupational health at national, regional and international level. Analyses were focused on countries' experiences in policy development and practice, roles and responsibilities of institutions, multidisciplinary and intersectoral collaboration. OD surveillance models of Turkey, Belgium and the Netherlands were examined through exchange visits. Face-to-face interviews were conducted to explore the peculiarities of legislative and institutional structures, the best and worst practices, and approach principles. Results: Some countries are more focused on exploring OD trends through effective and cost-efficient researches, with particular attention to new and emerging ODs. Other countries try to reach every single case of OD for compensation and rehabilitation. Each practice has advantages and shortcomings, but they are not mutually exclusive, and thus an effective combination is possible. Conclusion: Effective surveillance and registry approaches play a key role in the prevention of ODs. A well-designed system enables monitoring and assessment of OD prevalence and trends, and adoption of preventive measures while improving the effectiveness of redressing and compensation. A robust surveillance does not only provide protection of workers' health but also advances prevention of economic losses.

• Journal of Communications and Networks
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• v.16 no.4
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• pp.407-414
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• 2014

The Internet is a highly distributed and complex system consisting of billion devices and has become the field of various kinds of conflicts during the last two decades. As a matter of fact, various actors utilise the Internet for illicit purposes, such as for performing distributed denial of service attacks (DDoS) and for spreading various types of aggressive malware. Despite the fact that numerous services provide information regarding the threat level of the Internet, they are mostly based on information acquired by their sensors or on offline statistical sampling of various security applications (antivirus software, intrusion detection systems, etc.). This paper introduces proactive threat observatory system (PROTOS), an open-source early warning system that does not require a commercial license and is capable of estimating the threat level across the Internet. The proposed system utilises both a global and a local approach, and is thus able to determine whether a specific host is under an imminent threat, as well as to provide an estimation of the malicious activity across the Internet. Apart from these obvious advantages, PROTOS supports a large-scale installation and can be extended even further to improve the effectiveness by incorporating prediction and forecasting techniques.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.17 no.6
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• pp.981-994
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• 2016

Two field research stations based upon atmospheric corrosivity monitoring combined with reinforced concrete corrosion rate sensors have been established in Kuwait. This was established for the purpose of remote monitoring of building materials performance for concrete under Kuwait atmospheric environment. The two field research sites for concrete have been based upon an outcome from a research investigation intended for monitoring the atmospheric corrosivity from weathering station distributed in eight areas, and in different regions in Kuwait. Data on corrosivity measurements are essential for the development of specification of an optimized corrosion resistance system for reinforced concrete manufactured products. This study aims to optimize, characterize, and utilize long-term concrete structural health monitoring through on line corrosion measurement and to determine the feasibility and viability of the integrated anode ladder corrosion sensors embedded in concrete. The atmospheric corrosivity categories supported with GSM remote data acquisition system from eight corrosion monitoring stations at different regions in Kuwait are being classified according to standard ISO 9223. The two nominated field sites where based upon time of wetness and bimetallic corrosion rate from atmospheric data where metals and rebar's concrete are likely to be used. Eight concrete blocks with embeddable anodic ladder corrosion sensors were placed in the atmospheric zone adjacent to the sea shore at KISR site. The anodic ladder corrosion rate sensors for concrete were installed to provide an early warning system on prediction of the corrosion propagation and on developing new insights on the long-term durability performance and repair of concrete structures to lower labor cost. The results show the atmospheric corrosivity data of the environment and the feasibility of data retrieval of the corrosion potential of concrete from the embeddable sets of anodic ladder corrosion sensors.

• Animal cells and systems
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• v.16 no.4
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• pp.329-336
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• 2012

This study evaluated ecological health, using various biomarkers and bioindicators, of pale chub (Zacco platypus) as a sentinel species, in Daejeon Stream, South Korea, during AprilMay 2011. The biomarkers and bioindicators were compared among three sites of control: Reference ($C_z$), transition ($T_z$), and the urban zones ($U_z$); and the 7-Ethoxyresorufin-O-deethylase (EROD) activity, DNA damage, acetylcholinesterase (AChE) activity, and vitellogenin (VTG) concentrations were more significantly increased in the $U_z$ than in the $C_z$. Also, physiological markers such as condition factor, liver somatic index, visceral somatic index, and gonad somatic index were significantly increased in the $U_z$ than in the $C_z$. For the health assessments, three categorized parameters of blood chemistry, molecular biomarkers, and physiological bioindicators were standardized and calculated as a star-plot, representing values of Integrated Health Response (IHR). Values of IHR had more significant (P<0.05) increases in the $U_z$ than any other zones, indicating an impairment of ecological health by organic matter, nutrients (N, P), and toxic chemicals. This study is based on low levels of biological organization approach of molecular and physiological biomarkers and bioindicators, so further study of high-levels of biological organization approach such as community and population is required for overall range of health assessments. The approach of IHR values, however, may be useful in providing early warning of future impacts on ecological health.

• 한국정보통신설비학회:학술대회논문집
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• 2008.08a
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• pp.262-267
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• 2008

Recently, landslides frequently occur on natural slope and/or man-made cut slope during periods of intense rainfall. With a rapidly increasing population on or near steep terrain, landslides have become one of the most significant natural hazards. Thus, it is necessary to protect people from landslides and to minimize the damage of houses, roads and other facilities. To accomplish this goal, many landslide monitoring systems have been developed throughout the world. In this paper, a simple landslide detection system that enables people to escape the endangered area is introduced. The system is focused on the debris flows which happen frequently during periods of intense rainfall. The system is based on the wireless sensor network (WSN) that is composed of wireless sensor nodes, gateway, and remote server system. Wireless sensor nodes and gateway are deployed by commercially available Microstrain G-Link products. Five wireless sensor nodes and one gateway are installed at the test slope for detecting ground movement. The acceleration and inclination data of test slope can be obtained, which provides a potential to detect landslide. In addition, thresholds to determine whether the test slope is stable or not are suggested by a series of numerical simulations, using geotechnical analysis software package. It is obtained that the alarm should be issued if the x-direction displacement of sensor node is greater than 20mili-meters and the inclination of sensor node is greater than 3 degrees. It is expected that the landslide detection method using wireless senor network can provide early warning where landslides are prone to occur.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.30 no.6
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• pp.613-626
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• 2022

Guaranteeing the quality and integrity of structural health monitoring (SHM) data is very important for an effective assessment of structural condition. However, sensory system may malfunction due to sensor fault or harsh operational environment, resulting in multiple types of data anomaly existing in the measured data. Efficiently and automatically identifying anomalies from the vast amounts of measured data is significant for assessing the structural conditions and early warning for structural failure in SHM. The major challenges of current automated data anomaly detection methods are the imbalance of dataset categories. In terms of the feature of actual anomalous data, this paper proposes a data anomaly detection method based on data-level and deep learning technique for SHM of civil engineering structures. The proposed method consists of a data balancing phase to prepare a comprehensive training dataset based on data-level technique, and an anomaly detection phase based on a sophisticatedly designed network. The advanced densely connected convolutional network (DenseNet) and Transformer encoder are embedded in the specific network to facilitate extraction of both detail and global features of response data, and to establish the mapping between the highest level of abstractive features and data anomaly class. Numerical studies on a steel frame model are conducted to evaluate the performance and noise immunity of using the proposed network for data anomaly detection. The applicability of the proposed method for data anomaly classification is validated with the measured data of a practical supertall structure. The proposed method presents a remarkable performance on data anomaly detection, which reaches a 95.7% overall accuracy with practical engineering structural monitoring data, which demonstrates the effectiveness of data balancing and the robust classification capability of the proposed network.

• Steel and Composite Structures
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• v.43 no.2
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• pp.165-183
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• 2022

Most transportation departments have recognized and developed procedures to address the ever-increasing weights of trucks traveling on bridges in a service today. Transportation agencies also recognize the issues with overheight vehicles' collisions with bridges, but few stakeholders have definitive countermeasures. Bridges are becoming more vulnerable to collisions from overheight vehicles. The exact response under lateral impact force is difficult to predict. In this paper, nonlinear impact analysis shows that the degree of deformation recorded through the modeling of the unprotected vehicle-girder model provides realistic results compared to the observation from the US-61 bridge overheight vehicle impact. The predicted displacements are 0.229 m, 0.161 m, and 0.271 m in the girder bottom flange (lateral), bottom flange (vertical), and web (lateral) deformations, respectively, due to a truck traveling at 112.65 km/h. With such large deformations, the integrity of an impacted bridge becomes jeopardized, which in most cases requires closing the bridge for safety reasons and a need for rehabilitation. We proposed different sacrificial cushion systems to dissipate the energy of an overheight vehicle impact. The goal was to design and tune a suitable energy absorbing system that can protect the bridge and possibly reduce stresses in the overheight vehicle, minimizing the consequences of an impact. A material representing a Sorbothane high impact rubber was chosen and modeled in ANSYS. Out of three sacrificial schemes, a sandwich system is the best in protecting both the bridge and the overheight vehicle. The mitigation system reduced the lateral deflection in the bottom flange by 89%. The system decreased the stresses in the bridge girder and the top portion of the vehicle by 82% and 25%, respectively. The results reveal the capability of the proposed sacrificial system as an effective mitigation system.

• Proceedings of the Korea Water Resources Association Conference
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• 2022.05a
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• pp.305-305
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• 2022

A better approach for assessing meteorological drought occurrences is increasingly important in mitigating and adapting to the impacts of climate change, as well as strategies for developing early warning systems. The present study defines meteorological droughts as a period with an abnormal precipitation deficit based on monthly precipitation data of 18 gauging stations for the Han River watershed in the past (1974-2015). This study utilizes a Bayesian parameter estimation approach to analyze the effects of climate change on future drought (2025-2065) in the Han River Basin using the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6 (CMIP6) with four bias-corrected general circulation models (GCMs) under the Shared Socioeconomic Pathway (SSP)2-4.5 scenario. Given that drought is defined by several dependent variables, the evaluation of this phenomenon should be based on multivariate analysis. Two main characteristics of drought (severity and duration) were extracted from precipitation anomalies in the past and near-future periods using the copula function. Three parameters of the Archimedean family copulas, Frank, Clayton, and Gumbel copula, were selected to fit with drought severity and duration. The results reveal that the lower parts and middle of the Han River basin have faced severe drought conditions in the near future. Also, the bivariate analysis using copula showed that, according to both indicators, the study area would experience droughts with greater severity and duration in the future as compared with the historical period.

• Proceedings of the Korea Water Resources Association Conference
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• 2022.05a
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• pp.141-141
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• 2022

Drought is a global phenomenon that affects almost all landscapes and causes major damages. Due to non-linear nature of contributing factors, drought occurrence and its severity is characterized as stochastic in nature. Early warning of impending drought can aid in the development of drought mitigation strategies and measures. Thus, drought forecasting is crucial in the planning and management of water resource systems. The primary objective of this study is to make improvement is existing drought forecasting techniques. Therefore, we proposed an improved version of Seasonal Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average (SARIMA) model (MD-SARIMA) for reliable drought forecasting with three years lead time. In this study, we selected four watersheds of Han River basin in South Korea to validate the performance of MD-SARIMA model. The meteorological data from 8 rain gauge stations were collected for the period 1973-2016 and converted into watershed scale using Thiessen's polygon method. The Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI) was employed to represent the meteorological drought at seasonal (3-month) time scale. The performance of MD-SARIMA model was compared with existing models such as Seasonal Naive Bayes (SNB) model, Exponential Smoothing (ES) model, Trigonometric seasonality, Box-Cox transformation, ARMA errors, Trend and Seasonal components (TBATS) model, and SARIMA model. The results showed that all the models were able to forecast drought, but the performance of MD-SARIMA was robust then other statistical models with Wilmott Index (WI) = 0.86, Mean Absolute Error (MAE) = 0.66, and Root mean square error (RMSE) = 0.80 for 36 months lead time forecast. The outcomes of this study indicated that the MD-SARIMA model can be utilized for drought forecasting.

• Proceedings of the Korea Water Resources Association Conference
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• 2022.05a
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• pp.334-334
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• 2022

Improvement of old-fashioned rain gauge systems for automatic, timely, continuous, and accurate precipitation observation is highly essential for weather/climate prediction and natural hazards early warning, since the occurrence frequency and intensity of heavy and extreme precipitation events (especially floods) are recently getting more increase and severe worldwide due to climate change. Although rain gauge accuracy of 0.1 mm is recommended by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), the traditional rain gauges in both weighting and tipping bucket types are often unable to meet that demand due to several existing technical limitations together with higher production and maintenance costs. Therefore, we aim to introduce a newly developed and cost-effective hybrid rain gauge system at 0.1 mm accuracy that combines advantages of weighting and tipping bucket types for continuous, automatic, and accurate precipitation observation, where the errors from long-term load cells and external environmental sources (e.g., winds) can be removed via an automatic drainage system and artificial intelligence-based data quality control procedure. Our rain gauge system consists of an instrument unit for measuring precipitation, a communication unit for transmitting and receiving measured precipitation signals, and a database unit for storing, processing, and analyzing precipitation data. This newly developed rain gauge was designed according to the weather instrument criteria, where precipitation amounts filled into the tipping bucket are measured considering the receiver's diameter, the maximum measurement of precipitation, drainage time, and the conductivity marking. Moreover, it is also designed to transmit the measured precipitation data stored in the PCB through RS232, RS485, and TCP/IP, together with connecting to the data logger to enable data collection and analysis based on user needs. Preliminary results from a comparison with an existing 1.0-mm tipping bucket rain gauge indicated that our developed rain gauge has an excellent performance in continuous precipitation observation with higher measurement accuracy, more correct precipitation days observed (120 days), and a lower error of roughly 27 mm occurred during the measurement period.