Browsing by Author "Herath, S"

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    PublicationOpen Access
    Hybrid neural network methods to model the external wind pressure on a low-rise flat-roofed building in an irregularly shaped urban environment
    (Elsevier Ltd, 2025-06-23) Sajindra, H; Dharmawansha, S; Wijesundara, H; Herath, S; Rathnayake, U; Meddage D.P.P
    The present study used hybrid artificial neural networks to model the wind pressure (mean and fluctuating) on a flat-roofed, low-rise building in an irregularly shaped urban environment. Four neural networks, each combined with an artificial bee colony (ABC), genetic algorithm (GA), particle swarm optimisation (PSO), and independent component analysis (ICA), along with an individual artificial neural network (ANN) model and a convolutional neural network (CNN), were used for the wind pressure predictions. The data was obtained from Tokyo Polytechnic University’s boundary layer wind tunnel and was used to train the neural network models. The results revealed that all models accurately captured the wind pressure on the low-rise building in a dense urban environment. Specifically, the genetic algorithm-artificial neural network (GA-ANN) model outperformed the remaining models, achieving good prediction accuracy for test data (coefficient of determination (R²) = 0.96 for mean pressure R² = 0.84 for fluctuation pressure). The use of machine learning explainability methods confirmed the consistency of GA-ANN with the fundamentals of wind engineering. Notably, the GA-ANN approach accurately modeled the special flow features on the building surface, such as flow separation, vortex formation, and pressure gradients, to a greater extent compared to the wind tunnel results. Therefore, the authors propose this method as an complementary approach for predicting wind pressure on low-rise buildings in complex urban environments
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    PublicationOpen Access
    Mini Market: Information Technology Based Support Tool for Small and Medium Scale Enterprises in Sri Lanka
    (ICRD Publicatio, 2019-07) Thilakarathne, S; Herath, S; Rajapaksha, A; Karunasena, A
    Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) play a crucial role in developing countries such as Sri Lanka in growth of an economy. Recently online platforms are being extensively used by SMEs for both marketing and selling items. In a context of keen competition among the online selling platforms, sellers are increasingly feeling the pressure for improving their sales and marketing strategies. When investigating existing problems of SMEs, we were able to find they do not have proper guidance to improve their own business. Simply, the SMEs cannot identify their own marketing level among the other competitors, they haven't any suitable guidelines to identify how they can improve their own market and they have to use manual reports to get their own sales details for visualizing their marketing level where they waste their valuable time and money for visualizing sales market outcomes. In consideration of this, we propose a web system, that examines the effects of three categories in this system, i.e. Seller trustworthiness, analyze customer's emotions, feelings, thoughts, and opinions through Social media (Facebook) and sales prediction component. This system facilitates a multiple seller platform, where they can dynamically manage virtual shop inside this platform. It increases their stability and it will provide directions to overcome economic and unemployment barriers in our country. The results support our research hypotheses partially. The findings of this study are expected to provide some suggestions for sellers on promote and improve of their sales
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    PublicationOpen Access
    Predicting Bulk Average Velocity with Rigid Vegetation in Open Channels Using Tree-Based Machine Learning: A Novel Approach Using Explainable Artificial Intelligence
    (MDPI, 2022-06-10) Meddage, D. P. P; Ekanayake, I. U; Herath, S; Gobirahavan, R; Muttil, N; Rathnayake, U
    Predicting the bulk-average velocity (UB) in open channels with rigid vegetation is complicated due to the non-linear nature of the parameters. Despite their higher accuracy, existing regression models fail to highlight the feature importance or causality of the respective predictions. Therefore, we propose a method to predict UB and the friction factor in the surface layer (fS) using tree-based machine learning (ML) models (decision tree, extra tree, and XGBoost). Further, Shapley Additive exPlanation (SHAP) was used to interpret the ML predictions. The comparison emphasized that the XGBoost model is superior in predicting UB (R = 0.984) and fS (R = 0.92) relative to the existing regression models. SHAP revealed the underlying reasoning behind predictions, the dependence of predictions, and feature importance. Interestingly, SHAP adheres to what is generally observed in complex flow behavior, thus, improving trust in predictions