Taiwan opened up international competitive bidding for its first public private partnership (PPP) project in Oct. 1996, the western corridor High Speed Rail (THSR) project, and the contract was signed in July 1998, which was the largest Build-Operate-Transfer (BOT) project in the world at the time. Then, other PPP projects were launched for improving Taiwan’s infrastructure. Based on the statistics provided by Taiwan Ministry of Finance (TMOF), Taiwan then conducted a total of 1217 PPP projects between 2002 and 2014. Many PPP projects are successful. However, studies on the critical success factors for Taiwan’s PPP Projects are scant. The purpose of this paper is to present the findings which resulted from a study which aimed to identify & prioritize those factors critically contributing to the success of PPP infrastructure projects in Taiwan and to demonstrate the methodologies used. Four principal groups were extracted via factor analysis. They are: supportive legal frameworks, a favorable investment environment, selection of appropriate PPP projects and public support. Hopefully, the findings and the associated methodologies illustrated in this study can serve as references for successfully conducting PPP infrastructure projects in the future.

Construction has long been seen as a high-risk industry. Many studies conduct risk management by controlling construction risk indicators, but few studies associate risk indicators with time and space to propose long-term risk management methods. Therefore, this study proposes a dynamic analysis and visual tracking method based on behavior-based safety (BBS). This study establishes a BBS observation checklist and records workers’ unsafe behavior. The risk level of unsafe behavior is then determined by grey clustering model. When a high risk occurs, an improved grey correlation model is used to track key indicators that affect risk. In order to achieve visual risk management, this study develops semantic logic to predefine the relationship between components and space. In schedule simulation of BIM, the key indicators of BBS are transformed into an executable visual inspection between work items, components, and space through ARC. This method makes it easier for construction managers to combine time and space to manage safety risk and to adopt appropriate strategies in a timely manner to improve the efficiency of safety management.

With the global increase in demand for energy, energy conservation of research and development buildings has become of primary importance for building owners. Knowledge based on the patterns in energy consumption of previous years could be used to predict the near-future energy usage of buildings, to optimize and facilitate more effective energy consumption. Hence, this research aimed to develop a generic model for predicting energy consumption. Air-conditioning was used to exemplify the generic model for electricity consumption, as it is the process that often consumes the most energy in a public building. The purpose of this paper is to present this model and the related findings. After causative factors were determined, the methods of linear regression and various machine learning techniques—including the earlier machine learning techniques of support vector machine, random forest, and multilayer perceptron, and the later machine learning techniques of deep neural network, recurrent neural network, long short-term memory, and gated recurrent unit—were applied for prediction. Among them, the prediction of random forest resulted in an R² of 88% ahead of the first month and 81% ahead of the third month. These experimental results demonstrate that the prediction model is reliable and significantly accurate. Building owners could further enrich the model for energy conservation and management.

A robust trajectory tracking control scheme for quadrotor unmanned aircraft vehicles under uncertainties is proposed herein. A tracking controller combined with the sliding mode and integral backstepping is performed for position and attitude tracking. The stability of the trajectory tracking controller of the quadrotor is investigated via Lyapunov stability analysis. By incorporating force and torque disturbances into numerical simulations, the results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed quadrotor trajectory controller. Finally, the experiments validate the feasibility of the proposed controller.

Electromagnetic interference is a serious and increasing form of environmental pollution, creating many issues in the areas of health care and industrial manufacturing. The performance of high-precision measurement equipment used in health care and the manufacturing industry is sensitive to electromagnetic interference. However, extremely low-frequency magnetic fields (ELFMF), with a frequency range from 3 to 30 Hz, generated by high-power lines have become the main interference source in high-tech foundries. This paper presents a magnetic cancelling system that works by combining active cancelling technology and passive cancelling technology to reduce the ELFMF around high-precision measurement equipment. The simulation and experimental results show the validity and feasibility of the proposed system.

This study proposes an analysis of the physics-based TCAD (Technology Computer-Aided Design) simulation procedure for GaN/AlGaN/GaN HEMT (High Electron Mobility Transistor) device structures grown on Si (111) substrate which is calibrated against measurement data. The presence of traps and activation energies in the device structure will impact the performance of a device, the source of traps and position of traps in the device remains as a complex exercise until today. The key parameters for the precise tuning of threshold voltage (V_th) in GaN transistors are the control of the positive fixed charges −5 × 10¹² cm⁻², donor-like traps −3 × 10¹³ cm⁻² at the nitride/GaN interfaces, the energy of the donor-like traps 1.42 eV below the conduction band and the acceptor traps activation energy in the AlGaN layer and buffer regions with 0.59 eV below the conduction band. Hence in this paper, the sensitivity of the trap mechanisms in GaN/AlGaN/GaN HEMT transistors, understanding the absolute vertical electric field distribution, electron density and the physical characteristics of the device has been investigated and the results are in good agreement with GaN experimental data.