The largest number of business establishments in Malaysia is micro and small businesses. Although micro and small businesses make a great contribution to the country’s economic development, they are vulnerable and easily affected by any changes occurring within the business environment. Therefore, to ensure the survival of micro and small businesses in Malaysia, various business support programmes have been introduced by the government. It is believed that a conducive intervention programme is significant in ensuring the survival, competitiveness and growth of micro and small businesses. However, the effectiveness of business support programmes in facilitating the business survival of micro and small businesses have been debated. With the emergence of the current COVID-19 crisis, the issue of the effectiveness of the programmes become more critical. Based on a literature review, this study explores the issues and challenges concerning the access to, utilisation and delivery of micro and small business support programmes. The reviewed literature shows that the ineffectiveness of business support programmes is related to issues and challenges in the implementation of the programmes.

Understanding the tanker driver hazard awareness on chemical exposure is important to ensure that they are fortified with the appropriate information regarding the risk of their occupation. This present study was conducted to determine the awareness of the petrol tanker driver on the chemical exposure during transportation petroleum product. The assessment on hazardous awareness of the petrol tank driver was conducted through questionnaire survey. Wherein, the questionnaire was designed with considering the variables of age of the driver, working experience, working hours in a day and knowledge on chemical hazard presence in the petroleum oil. A reliability test of Cronbach's Alpha was performed to validate the questionnaire and the Chi-Square test was conducted to determine the correlation among the studied variables. The findings of the present study revealed that the drivers who are frequently come into direct contact with petrol cannot identify the spillage had occurred during working. The study identified that there is an urgency to conduct training on safe handling of petroleum oil in order to eliminate the risk of chemical hazards exposure to the tanker driver.

Control chart is a tool for detecting an out-of-control signal in statistical process control (SPC). It is widely used in process monitoring in order to detect changes in process mean or process dispersion. This study aims to illustrate the application of multivariate control charts in monitoring water quality at one of the water treatments plants in Kota Kinabalu, Sabah. The tested water quality variables in this study are turbidity, pH value, dissolved oxygen (DO) and concentration of ferum. Two multivariate control charts, Hotelling’sT2 and MCUSUM control charts are constructed under the violation of the multivariate normality assumption. The purpose is to study the effect of non-normal data upon the monitoring process using the selected multivariate control charts. By comparing the monitoring process between the two types of control charts, the consistency of the results is studied. All the univariate and multivariate control charts produced out-of-control signals from different points, hence inconclusive results obtained. Keywords: Water quality; multivariate control chart; univariate control chart; Hotelling’s T2; MCUSUM

In this paper, we deal with the application of Successive Over-Relaxation (SOR) iterative method for solving fuzzy Fredholm integral equations of the second kind (FFIE-2). In addition to that, we apply the trapezoidal rule to derive the approximate solution of FFIE-2 which consists of a system of integral equations. Next, the approximate equation is used to develop a system of linear equations. Then, we consider SOR iterative method to solve the generated system of linear equations. Next, SOR iterative method is implemented on some numerical examples. Finally, the numerical results is discussed in details by comparing the number of iterations, the computational time, and the Hausdorff distance to analyze the performance of proposed method. Based on the numerical results obtained from all the numerical examples by using Gauss-Seidel (GS) and SOR methods, it can be pointed out that SOR method is more efficient than the GS method.

In this study, we propose Alternating Group Explicit (AGE) iterative method to solve the problem of linear fuzzy Fredholm integral equations of the second kind (FFIE-2) based on Trapezoidal quadrature rule. First, we generate a system of linear equations by using approximation equations. Next, we use AGE iterative method to solve the generated linear system of FFIE-2. Then, we illustrate the applicability of AGE iterative method on some numerical examples. Finally, we do the comparison to test the efficiency of AGE with Jacobi and Gauss-Seidel (GS) iterative method based on three parameters: number of iterations, execution time and Hausdorff distance. From our findings, we found that AGE is a better iterative method compared with Jacobi and GS to solve FFIE-2.