Search results for: architecture of multi-agent systems

Authors: Taurai T. Chikotie, Bruce W. Watson

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The manifestation of ‘new’ infectious diseases and the re-emergence of ‘old’ infectious diseases now present global problems and Southern Africa has not been spared from such calamity. Although having an organized public health system, countries in this region have failed to leverage on the proliferation in use of Information and Communication Technologies to promote effective disease surveillance. Objective: The objective of this study was to critically review and analyse the crucial variables to consider in the development and implementation of electronic disease surveillance systems in public health within the context of Southern Africa. Methodology: A critical review of literature published in English using, Google Scholar, EBSCOHOST, Science Direct, databases from the Centre for Disease Control (CDC and articles from the World Health Organisation (WHO) was undertaken. Manual reference and grey literature searches were also conducted. Results: Little has been done towards harnessing the potential of information technologies towards disease surveillance and this has been due to several challenges that include, lack of funding, lack of health informatics experts, poor supporting infrastructure, an unstable socio-political and socio-economic ecosystem in the region and archaic policies towards integration of information technologies in public health governance. Conclusion: The Southern African region stands to achieve better health outcomes if they adopt the use of e-disease surveillance systems in public health. However, the dynamics and complexities of the socio-economic, socio-political and technical variables would need addressing to ensure the successful development and implementation of e-disease surveillance systems in the region.

Keywords: critical review, disease surveillance, public health informatics, Southern Africa

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Authors: Wei-Jong Yang, Yu-Siang Su, Pau-Choo Chung, Jar-Ferr Yang

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Moving object detection (MOD) is an important issue in advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS). There are two important moving objects, pedestrians and scooters in ADAS. In real-world systems, there exist two important challenges for MOD, including the computational complexity and the detection accuracy. The histogram of oriented gradient (HOG) features can easily detect the edge of object without invariance to changes in illumination and shadowing. However, to reduce the execution time for real-time systems, the image size should be down sampled which would lead the outlier influence to increase. For this reason, we propose the histogram of uniformly-oriented gradient (HUG) features to get better accurate description of the contour of human body. In the testing phase, the support vector machine (SVM) with linear kernel function is involved. Experimental results show the correctness and effectiveness of the proposed method. With SVM classifiers, the real testing results show the proposed HUG features achieve better than classification performance than the HOG ones.

Keywords: moving object detection, histogram of oriented gradient, histogram of uniformly-oriented gradient, linear support vector machine

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Authors: Farbod Behnaminia, Saeed Samet

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The COVID-19 pandemic has paralyzed many lives until a vaccine was available, which caused the so-called “new normal.” According to the World Health Organization (WHO), COVID-19 is an infectious disease. It can cause significant illness or death in anyone. Governments and health officials tried to impose rules and regulations to avoid and slow down transmission. Therefore, software engineers worldwide developed applications to trace and track patients’ movements and notify others, mainly using Bluetooth. In this way, everyone could be informed whether they come in close contact with someone who has COVID-19 and takes proper safety precautions. Because most of the applications use technologies that can potentially reveal the user’s identity and location, researchers have debated privacy preservation and how to improve user privacy during such pandemics. Thanks to Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT), there have been some proposed methods to develop privacy-preserving Patient Tracking Systems in the last two years. As an instance of the DLT, Blockchain is like a decentralized peer-to-peer database that maintains a record of transactions. Transactions are immutable, transparent, and anonymous in this system. We conducted a comprehensive evaluation of the literature by looking for papers in the relevant field and dividing them into pre- and post-pandemic systems. Additionally, we discussed the many uses of blockchain technology in pandemic control. We found that two major obstacles facing blockchain implementation across many healthcare systems are scalability and privacy. The Polkadot platform is presented, along with a review of its efficacy in tackling current concerns. A more scalable healthcare system is achievable in the near future using Polkadot as well as a much more privacy-preserving environment.

Keywords: blockchain, electronic record management, EHR, privacy-preserving, patient tracking, COVID-19, trust and confidence, Polkadot

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Authors: Qianjia Cheng, Hongquan Jiang

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Crowdsourcing solves the problems that computers can't handle by integrating computers and the Internet. Its extensive knowledge sources, high efficiency, and high quality have made crowdsourcing attract wide attention in industry and academia in recent years. The development of online crowdsourcing platforms such as Clickworker, Amazon Mechanical Turk(Mturk) tends to mature gradually. This paper sorts out the concept of crowdsourcing, sorts out the workflow of competitive crowdsourcing, summarizes the related technologies of crowdsourcing based on workflow, quality control, cost control, and delay control, and introduces the typical crowdsourcing platform. Finally, we highlight some open problems of the current crowdsourcing and present some future research directions in this area.

Keywords: application, crowdsourcing, crowdsourcing platform, system architecture

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Authors: Parul Khanna, Pavol Zavarsky, Dale Lindskog

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Doxing is a term derived from documents, and hence consists of collecting information on an organization or individual through social media websites, search engines, password cracking methods, social engineering tools and other sources of publicly displayed information. The main purpose of doxing attacks is to threaten, embarrass, harass and humiliate the organization or individual. Various tools are used to perform doxing. Tools such as Maltego visualize organization’s architecture which helps in determining weak links within the organization. This paper discusses limitations of Maltego Chlorine CE 3.6.0 and suggests measures as to how organizations can use these tools to protect themselves from doxing attacks.

Keywords: advanced persistent threat, FOCA, OSINT, PII

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Authors: Athanasios A. Tountas, Geoffrey A. Ozin, Mohini M. Sain

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Renewable hydrogen (H₂) carriers such as methanol (MeOH), dimethyl ether (DME), oxymethylene dimethyl ethers (OMEs), and conceivably ammonia (NH₃) can be reformed back into H₂ and are fundamental chemical conversions for the long-term viability of the H₂ economy due to their higher densities and ease of transportability compared to H₂. MeOH is an especially important carrier as it is a simple C1 chemical that can be produced from green solar-PV-generated H₂ and direct-air-captured CO₂ with a current commercially practical solar-to-fuel efficiency of 10% from renewable solar energy. MeOH steam reforming (MSR) in stationary systems next to H₂ fuel-cell filling stations can eliminate the need for onboard mobile reformers, and the former systems can be more robust in terms of attaining strict H₂ product specifications, and MeOH is a safe, lossless, and compact medium for long-term H₂ storage. Both thermal- and photo-catalysts are viable options for achieving the stable, long-term performance of stationary MSR systems.

Keywords: fuel-cell vehicle filling stations, methanol steam reforming, hydrogen transport and storage, stationary reformer, liquid hydrogen carriers

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Authors: Karim S. Hassan, Hisham M. Hamed, Yassmine A. Fahmy, Ahmed F. Shalash

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The mismatch between in-phase and quadrature signals in Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems, such as DVB-T2, results in a severe degradation in performance. Several general solutions have been proposed in the past, but these are largely computationally intensive, leading to complex implementations. In this paper, we propose a relatively simple iterative solution, which provides good results in relatively few iterations, using fixed precision arithmetic. An additional advantage is that complex digital blocks, such as dividers and square root, are not required. Thus, the proposed solution may be implemented in relatively simple hardware.

Keywords: OFDM, DVB-T2, I/Q imbalance, I/Q mismatch, iterative method, fixed point, reduced complexity

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Authors: Vadim Kulikov

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The classical Stroop effect is the phenomenon that it takes more time to name the ink color of a printed word if the word denotes a conflicting color than if it denotes the same color. Over the last 80 years, there have been many variations of the experiment revealing various mechanisms behind semantic, attentional, behavioral and perceptual processing. The Stroop task is known to exhibit asymmetry. Reading the words out loud is hardly dependent on the ink color, but naming the ink color is significantly influenced by the incongruent words. This asymmetry is reversed, if instead of naming the color, one has to point at a corresponding color patch. Another debated aspects are the notions of automaticity and how much of the effect is due to semantic and how much due to response stage interference. Is automaticity a continuous or an all-or-none phenomenon? There are many models and theories in the literature tackling these questions which will be discussed in the presentation. None of them, however, seems to capture all the findings at once. A computational model is proposed which is based on the philosophical idea developed by the author that the mind operates as a collection of different information processing modalities such as different sensory and descriptive modalities, which produce emergent phenomena through mutual interaction and coherence. This is the framework theory where ‘framework’ attempts to generalize the concepts of modality, perspective and ‘point of view’. The architecture of this computational model consists of blocks of neurons, each block corresponding to one framework. In the simplest case there are four: visual color processing, text reading, speech production and attention selection modalities. In experiments where button pressing or pointing is required, a corresponding block is added. In the beginning, the weights of the neural connections are mostly set to zero. The network is trained using Hebbian learning to establish connections (corresponding to ‘coherence’ in framework theory) between these different modalities. The amount of data fed into the network is supposed to mimic the amount of practice a human encounters, in particular it is assumed that converting written text into spoken words is a more practiced skill than converting visually perceived colors to spoken color-names. After the training, the network performs the Stroop task. The RT’s are measured in a canonical way, as these are continuous time recurrent neural networks (CTRNN). The above-described aspects of the Stroop phenomenon along with many others are replicated. The model is similar to some existing connectionist models but as will be discussed in the presentation, has many advantages: it predicts more data, the architecture is simpler and biologically more plausible.

Keywords: connectionism, Hebbian learning, artificial neural networks, philosophy of mind, Stroop

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Authors: Issam Alnader, Aboubaker Lasebae, Rand Raheem

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Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are distributed network systems used in a wide range of applications, including safety-critical systems. The latter provide critical services, often concerned with human life or assets. Therefore, ensuring the dependability requirements of Safety critical systems is of paramount importance. The purpose of this paper is to utilize the Hidden Markov Model (HMM) to elongate the service availability of WSNs by increasing the time it takes a node to become obsolete via optimal load balancing. We propose an HMM algorithm that, given a WSN, analyses and predicts undesirable situations, notably, nodes dying unexpectedly or prematurely. We apply this technique to improve on C. Lius’ algorithm, a scheduling-based algorithm which has served to improve the lifetime of WSNs. Our experiments show that our HMM technique improves the lifetime of the network, achieved by detecting nodes that die early and rebalancing their load. Our technique can also be used for diagnosis and provide maintenance warnings to WSN system administrators. Finally, our technique can be used to improve algorithms other than C. Liu’s.

Keywords: wireless sensor networks, IoT, dependability of safety WSNs, energy conservation, sleep awake schedule

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Authors: Attallah Bilal, Hendel Fatiha

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This paper proposes the bimodal biometrics system for identity verification iris and fingerprint, at matching score level architecture using weighted sum of score technique. The features are extracted from the pre processed images of iris and fingerprint. These features of a query image are compared with those of a database image to obtain matching scores. The individual scores generated after matching are passed to the fusion module. This module consists of three major steps i.e., normalization, generation of similarity score and fusion of weighted scores. The final score is then used to declare the person as genuine or an impostor. The system is tested on CASIA database and gives an overall accuracy of 91.04% with FAR of 2.58% and FRR of 8.34%.

Keywords: iris, fingerprint, sum rule, fusion

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Authors: Patrik Johansson, Selina Mardh

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The present study proposes a usability test method, Atmosphere, to assess the fitness of components and interaction patterns of design systems. The method covers the user’s perception of the components of the system, the efficiency of the logic of the interaction patterns, perceived ease of use as well as the user’s understanding of the intended outcome of interactions. These aspects are assessed by combining measures of first impression, visual affordance and expectancy. The method was applied to a design system developed for the design of an electronic health record system. The study was conducted involving 15 healthcare personnel. It could be concluded that the Atmosphere method provides tangible data that enable human-computer interaction practitioners to analyze and categorize components and patterns based on perceived usability, success rate of identifying interactive components and success rate of understanding components and interaction patterns intended outcome.

Keywords: atomic design, atmosphere methodology, design system, expectancy testing, first impression testing, usability testing, visual affordance testing

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Authors: T. Wanyama, B. Far

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Automatic irrigation systems usually conveniently protect landscape investment. While conventional irrigation systems are known to be inefficient, automated ones have the potential to optimize water usage. In fact, there is a new generation of irrigation systems that are smart in the sense that they monitor the weather, soil conditions, evaporation and plant water use, and automatically adjust the irrigation schedule. In this paper, we present an agent based smart irrigation system. The agents are built using a mix of commercial off the shelf software, including MATLAB, Microsoft Excel and KEPServer Ex5 OPC server, and custom written code. The Irrigation Scheduler Agent uses fuzzy logic to integrate the information that affect the irrigation schedule. In addition, the Multi-Agent system uses Open Platform Connectivity (OPC) technology to share data. OPC technology enables the Irrigation Scheduler Agent to communicate over the Internet, making the system scalable to a municipal or regional agent based water monitoring, management, and optimization system. Finally, this paper presents simulation and pilot installation test result that show the operational effectiveness of our system.

Keywords: community water usage, fuzzy logic, irrigation, multi-agent system

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Authors: Ana Paula Esteves, Diego S. Caetano, Louise L. B. Lomardo

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This paper presents an approach to the performance of the natural lighting, when the use of appropriated solar lighting systems on the roof is applied in cultural buildings such as museums and foundations. The roofs, as a part of contact between the building and the external environment, require special attention in projects that aim at energy efficiency, being an important element for the capture of natural light in greater quantity, but also for being the most important point of generation of photovoltaic solar energy, even semitransparent, allowing the partial passage of light. Transparent elements in roofs, as well as superior protection of the building, can also play other roles, such as: meeting the needs of natural light for the accomplishment of the internal tasks, attending to the visual comfort; to bring benefits to the human perception and about the interior experience in a building. When these resources are well dimensioned, they also contribute to the energy efficiency and consequent character of sustainability of the building. Therefore, when properly designed and executed, a roof light system can bring higher quality natural light to the interior of the building, which is related to the human health and well-being dimension. Furthermore, it can meet the technologic, economic and environmental yearnings, making possible the more efficient use of that primordial resource, which is the light of the Sun. The article presents the analysis of buildings that used zenith light systems in search of better lighting performance in museums and foundations: the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in the United States, the Iberê Camargo Foundation in Brazil, the Museum of Fine Arts in Castellón in Spain and the Pinacoteca of São Paulo.

Keywords: natural lighting, roof lighting systems, natural lighting in museums, comfort lighting

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Authors: Kanya L. Khatri, Ashfaque A. Memon, Rod J. Smith, Shamas Bilal

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The viability and sustainability of crop production is currently threatened by increasing water scarcity. Water scarcity problems can be addressed through improved water productivity and the options usually presumed in this context are efficient water use and conversion of surface irrigation to pressurized systems. By replacing furrow irrigation with drip or centre pivot systems, the water efficiency can be improved by up to 30 to 45%. However, the installation and application of pumps and pipes, and the associated fuels needed for these alternatives increase energy consumption and cause significant greenhouse gas emissions. Hence, a balance between the improvement in water use and the potential increase in energy consumption is required keeping in view adverse impact of increased carbon emissions on the environment. When surface water is used, pressurized systems increase energy consumption substantially, by between 65% to 75%, and produce greenhouse gas emissions around 1.75 times higher than that of gravity based irrigation. With gravity based surface irrigation methods the energy consumption is assumed to be negligible. This study has shown that a novel real-time infiltration model REIP has enabled implementation of real-time optimization and control of surface irrigation and surface irrigation with real-time optimization has potential to bring significant improvements in irrigation performance along with substantial water savings of 2.92 ML/ha which is almost equivalent to that given by pressurized systems. Thus real-time optimization and control offers a modern, environment friendly and water efficient system with close to zero increase in energy consumption and minimal greenhouse gas emissions.

Keywords: pressurised irrigation, carbon emissions, real-time, environmentally-friendly, REIP

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Authors: Vladimir Simovic, Matija Varga, Tonco Marusic

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This research paper shows matrix technology models and examples of information systems in education (in the Republic of Croatia and in the Germany) in support of business, education (when learning and teaching) and e-learning. Here we researched and described the aims and objectives of the main process in education and technology, with main matrix classes of data. In this paper, we have example of matrix technology with detailed description of processes related to specific data classes in the processes of education and an example module that is support for the process: ‘Filling in the directory and the diary of work’ and ‘evaluation’. Also, on the lower level of the processes, we researched and described all activities which take place within the lower process in education. We researched and described the characteristics and functioning of modules: ‘Fill the directory and the diary of work’ and ‘evaluation’. For the analysis of the affinity between the aforementioned processes and/or sub-process we used our application model created in Visual Basic, which was based on the algorithm for analyzing the affinity between the observed processes and/or sub-processes.

Keywords: designing, education management, information systems, matrix technology, process affinity

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Authors: Mintu Philip, Renumol V. G.

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An introductory programming course is a major challenge faced in Computing Education. Many of the introductory programming courses fail because student concentrate mainly on writing programs using a programming language rather than involving in problem solving. Computational thinking is a general approach to solve problems. This paper proposes a new preliminary course that aims to develop computational thinking skills in students, which may help them to become good programmers. The proposed course is designed based on the four basic components of computational thinking - abstract thinking, logical thinking, modeling thinking and constructive thinking. In this course, students are engaged in hands-on problem solving activities using a new problem solving model proposed in this paper.

Keywords: computational thinking, computing education, abstraction, constructive thinking, modelling thinking

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Authors: S. Abeysekera, M. Bazghaleh, M. P. L. Ooi, Y. C. Kuang, V. Kalavally

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Smart LED-based lighting systems have significant advantages over traditional lighting systems due to their capability of producing tunable light spectrums on demand. The main challenge in the design of smart lighting systems is to produce sufficient luminous flux and uniformly accurate output spectrum for sufficiently broad area. This paper outlines the programmable LED lighting system design principles of design to achieve the two aims. In this paper, a seven-channel design using low-cost discrete LEDs is presented. Optimization algorithms are used to calculate the number of required LEDs, LEDs arrangements and optimum LED separation distance. The results show the illumination uniformity for each channel. The results also show that the maximum color error is below 0.0808 on the CIE1976 chromaticity scale. In conclusion, this paper considered the simulation and design of a seven-channel programmable lighting system using low-cost discrete LEDs to produce sufficient luminous flux and uniformly accurate output spectrum for sufficiently broad area.

Keywords: light spectrum control, LEDs, smart lighting, programmable LED lighting system

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Authors: Richard Joseph, Nerey Mvungi

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An electric power system includes a generating, a transmission, a distribution and consumers subsystems. An electrical power network in Tanzania keeps growing larger by the day and become more complex so that, most utilities have long wished for real-time monitoring and remote control of electrical power system elements such as substations, intelligent devices, power lines, capacitor banks, feeder switches, fault analyzers and other physical facilities. In this paper, the concept of automation of management of power systems from generation level to end user levels was determined by using Power System Simulator for Engineering (PSS/E) version 30.3.2.

Keywords: automation, distribution subsystem, generating subsystem, PSS/E, TANESCO, transmission subsystem

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Authors: Afroze Ibrahim Baqapuri, Ilya Trofimov

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Sponsored search is a multi-billion dollar industry and makes up a major source of revenue for search engines (SE). Click-through-rate (CTR) estimation plays a crucial role for ads selection, and greatly affects the SE revenue, advertiser traffic and user experience. We propose a novel architecture of solving CTR prediction problem by combining artificial neural networks (ANN) with decision trees. First, we compare ANN with respect to other popular machine learning models being used for this task. Then we go on to combine ANN with MatrixNet (proprietary implementation of boosted trees) and evaluate the performance of the system as a whole. The results show that our approach provides a significant improvement over existing models.

Keywords: neural networks, sponsored search, web advertisement, click prediction, click-through rate

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Authors: Varun Singh, Mainak Bandyopadhyay, Maharana Pratap Singh

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The shortest path (SP) problem concerns with finding the shortest path from a specific origin to a specified destination in a given network while minimizing the total cost associated with the path. This problem has widespread applications. Important applications of the SP problem include vehicle routing in transportation systems particularly in the field of in-vehicle Route Guidance System (RGS) and traffic assignment problem (in transportation planning). Well known applications of evolutionary methods like Genetic Algorithms (GA), Ant Colony Optimization, Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) have come up to solve complex optimization problems to overcome the shortcomings of existing shortest path analysis methods. It has been reported by various researchers that PSO performs better than other evolutionary optimization algorithms in terms of success rate and solution quality. Further Geographic Information Systems (GIS) have emerged as key information systems for geospatial data analysis and visualization. This research paper is focused towards the application of PSO for solving the shortest path problem between multiple points of interest (POI) based on spatial data of Allahabad City and traffic speed data collected using GPS. Geovisualization of results of analysis is carried out in GIS.

Keywords: particle swarm optimization, GIS, traffic data, outliers

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Authors: Bekmurza H. Aitchanov, Sholpan K. Aitchanova, Olimzhon A. Baimuratov, Aitkul N. Aldibekova

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This work considers the automated control system (ACS) of milk quality during its magnetic field processing. For achieving high level of quality control methods were applied transformation of complex nonlinear systems in a linearized system with a less complex structure. Presented ACS is adjustable by seven parameters: mass fraction of fat, mass fraction of dry skim milk residues (DSMR), density, mass fraction of added water, temperature, mass fraction of protein, acidity.

Keywords: fluids magnetization, nuclear magnetic resonance, automated control system, dynamic pulse-frequency modulator, PFM, nonlinear systems, structural model

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Authors: Alicja Starczewska, Aleksander Nawrat, Krzysztof Daniec, Jarosław Homa, Kacper Hołda

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Border Gateway Protocol is the main routing protocol that enables routing establishment between all autonomous systems, which are the basic administrative units of the internet. Due to the poor protection of BGP, it is important to use additional BGP security systems. Many solutions to this problem have been proposed over the years, but none of them have been implemented on a global scale. This article describes a system capable of building images of real-time BGP network topology in order to detect BGP anomalies. Our proposal performs a detailed analysis of BGP messages that come into local network cards supplemented by information collected by remote collectors in different localizations.

Keywords: BGP, BGP hijacking, cybersecurity, detection

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Authors: Yasemin Filiz-Kuruel, Emine Koseoglu

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This study aims to evaluate Haskoy district of Beyoglu town of Istanbul. Haskoy is located in Halic region, between Kasimpasa district and Kagithane district. After the conquest of Istanbul, Fatih Sultan Mehmet (the Conqueror) set up his tent here. Therefore, the area gets its name as Haskoy, 'imperial village' that means a village which is special for Sultan. Today, there are shipyard and ateliers in variable sizes in Haskoy. In this study, the legibility of Haskoy streets is investigated comparatively. As a research method, semantic differential scale is used. The photos of the streets, which contain specific criteria, are chosen. The questionnaire is directed to first and third grade architecture students. The spatial evaluation of Haskoy streets is done through the survey.

Keywords: Haskoy, legibility, semantic differential scale, urban streets

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Authors: David Krejci, Tony Schönherr, Quirin Koch, Valentin Hugonnaud, Lou Grimaud, Alexander Reissner, Bernhard Seifert

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In 2018 the NANO thruster became the first Field Emission Electric Propulsion (FEEP) system ever to be verified in space in an In-Orbit Demonstration mission conducted together with Fotec. Since then, 160 additional ENPULSION NANO propulsion systems have been deployed in orbit on 73 different spacecraft across multiple customers and missions. These missions included a variety of different satellite bus sizes ranging from 3U Cubesats to >100kg buses, and different orbits in Low Earth Orbit and Geostationary Earth orbit, providing an abundance of on orbit data for statistical analysis. This large-scale industrialization and flight heritage allows for a holistic way of gathering data from testing, integration and operational phases, deriving lessons learnt over a variety of different mission types, operator approaches, use cases and environments. Based on these lessons learnt a new generation of propulsion systems is developed, addressing key findings from the large NANO heritage and adding new capabilities, including increased resilience, thrust vector steering and increased power and thrust level. Some of these successor products have already been validated in orbit, including the MICRO R3 and the NANO AR3. While the MICRO R3 features increased power and thrust level, the NANO AR3 is a successor of the heritage NANO thruster with added thrust vectoring capability. 5 NANO AR3 have been launched to date on two different spacecraft. This work presents flight telemetry data of ENPULSION NANO systems and onorbit statistical data of the ENPULSION NANO as well as lessons learnt during onorbit operations, customer assembly, integration and testing support and ground test campaigns conducted at different facilities. We discuss how transfer of lessons learnt and operational improvement across independent missions across customers has been accomplished. Building on these learnings and exhaustive heritage, we present the design of the new generation of propulsion systems that increase the power and thrust level of FEEP systems to address larger spacecraft buses.

Keywords: FEEP, field emission electric propulsion, electric propulsion, flight heritage

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Authors: Ivan Stanev, Maria Koleva

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A common platform for automated programming (CPAP) is defined in details. Two versions of CPAP are described: Cloud-based (including the set of components for classic programming, and the set of components for combined programming) and KBASE based (including the set of components for automated programming, and the set of components for ontology programming). Four KBASE products (module for automated programming of robots, intelligent product manual, intelligent document display, and intelligent form generator) are analyzed and CPAP contributions to automated programming are presented.

Keywords: automated programming, cloud computing, knowledge based software engineering, service oriented architecture

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Authors: Nabil A. Ahmed

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DC-DC converters are necessary to interface low-voltage fuel cell power generation systems to a higher voltage DC bus system. A system and method for generating a regulated output power from fuel cell power generation systems is proposed in this paper, this includes a soft-switching isolated DC-DC converter to reduce the idling and circulating currents. The system incorporates a high-frequency center tap transformer link DC-DC converter using secondary-side soft switching control. Snubber capacitors including the parasitic capacitance of the switching devices and the transformer leakage inductance are utilized to achieve zero-voltage switching (ZVS) in the primary side of the high-frequency transformer. Therefore, no extra resonant components are required for ZVS. The inherent soft-switching capability allows high power density, efficient power conversion, and compact packaging. A prototype rated at 6.5 kW is proposed and simulated. Simulation results confirmed a wide range of soft-switching operation and consequently high conversion efficiency will be achieved.

Keywords: secondary-side, phase-shift, high-frequency transformer, zero voltage, zero current, soft switching operation, switching losses

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Authors: A. Rong, P. B. Luh, R. Lahdelma

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High penetration of intermittent renewable energy sources (RES) such as solar power and wind power into the energy system has caused temporal and spatial imbalance between electric power supply and demand for some countries and regions. This brings about the critical need for coordinating power production and power exchange for different regions. As compared with the power-only systems, the combined heat and power (CHP) systems can provide additional flexibility of utilizing RES by exploiting the interdependence of power and heat production in the CHP plant. In the CHP system, power production can be influenced by adjusting heat production level and electric power can be used to satisfy heat demand by electric boiler or heat pump in conjunction with heat storage, which is much cheaper than electric storage. This paper addresses multi-site CHP systems without considering RES, which lay foundation for handling penetration of RES. The problem under study is the unit commitment (UC) of the transmission-constrained multi-site CHP systems. We solve the problem by combining linear relaxation of ON/OFF states and sequential dynamic programming (DP) techniques, where relaxed states are used to reduce the dimension of the UC problem and DP for improving the solution quality. Numerical results for daily scheduling with realistic models and data show that DP-based algorithm is from a few to a few hundred times faster than CPLEX (standard commercial optimization software) with good solution accuracy (less than 1% relative gap from the optimal solution on the average).

Keywords: dynamic programming, multi-site combined heat and power system, relaxed states, transmission-constrained generation unit commitment

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Authors: Arjun Kumar Rath, Titus Dhanasingh

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Embedded product development requires software to test hardware functionality during development and finding issues during manufacturing in larger quantities. As the components are getting integrated, the devices are tested for their full functionality using advanced software tools. Benchmarking tools are used to measure and compare the performance of product features. At present, these tests are based on a variety of methods involving varying hardware and software platforms. Typically, these tests are custom built for every product and remain unusable for other variants. A majority of the tests goes undocumented, not updated, unusable when the product is released. To bridge this gap, a solution accelerator in the form of a framework can address these issues for running all these tests from one place, using an off-the-shelf tests library in a continuous integration environment. There are many open-source test frameworks or tools (fuego. LAVA, AutoTest, KernelCI, etc.) designed for testing embedded system devices, with each one having several unique good features, but one single tool and framework may not satisfy all of the testing needs for embedded systems, thus an extensible framework with the multitude of tools. Embedded product testing includes board bring-up testing, test during manufacturing, firmware testing, application testing, and assembly testing. Traditional test methods include developing test libraries and support components for every new hardware platform that belongs to the same domain with identical hardware architecture. This approach will have drawbacks like non-reusability where platform-specific libraries cannot be reused, need to maintain source infrastructure for individual hardware platforms, and most importantly, time is taken to re-develop test cases for new hardware platforms. These limitations create challenges like environment set up for testing, scalability, and maintenance. A desirable strategy is certainly one that is focused on maximizing reusability, continuous integration, and leveraging artifacts across the complete development cycle during phases of testing and across family of products. To get over the stated challenges with the conventional method and offers benefits of embedded testing, an embedded test framework (ETF), a solution accelerator, is designed, which can be deployed in embedded system-related products with minimal customizations and maintenance to accelerate the hardware testing. Embedded test framework supports testing different hardwares including microprocessor and microcontroller. It offers benefits such as (1) Time-to-Market: Accelerates board brings up time with prepacked test suites supporting all necessary peripherals which can speed up the design and development stage(board bring up, manufacturing and device driver) (2) Reusability-framework components isolated from the platform-specific HW initialization and configuration makes the adaptability of test cases across various platform quick and simple (3) Effective build and test infrastructure with multiple test interface options and preintegrated with FUEGO framework (4) Continuos integration - pre-integrated with Jenkins which enabled continuous testing and automated software update feature. Applying the embedded test framework accelerator throughout the design and development phase enables to development of the well-tested systems before functional verification and improves time to market to a large extent.

Keywords: board diagnostics software, embedded system, hardware testing, test frameworks

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Authors: Olufemi M. Alabi, Foluke A. Aderemi, Adebayo A. Adewumi, Banwo O. Alabi

Abstract:

General well-being of animals is of paramount interest in some developed countries and of global importance hence the shift onto alternative housing systems for egg-type chickens as replacement for conventional battery cage system. However, there is paucity of information on the effect of this shift on physiological status of the hens to judge their health via the blood profile. Therefore, investigation was carried out on two strains of hen kept in three different housing systems in humid tropics to evaluate changes in their blood parameters. 108, 17-weeks old super black (SBL) hens and 108, 17-weeks old super brown (SBR) hens were randomly allotted to three different intensive systems Partitioned Conventional Cage (PCC), Extended Conventional Cage (ECC) and Deep Litter System (DLS) in a randomized complete block design with 36 hens per housing system, each with three replicates. The experiment lasted 37 weeks during which blood samples were collected at 18th week of age and bi-weekly thereafter for analyses. Parameters measured are packed cell volume (PCV), hemoglobin concentration (Hb), red blood counts (RBC), white blood counts (WBC) and serum metabolites such as total protein (TP), albumin (Alb), globulin (Glb), glucose, cholesterol, urea, bilirubin, serum cortisol while blood indices such as mean corpuscular hemoglobin (MCH), mean cell volume (MCV) and mean corpuscular hemoglobin concentration (MCHC) were calculated. The hematological values of the hens were not significantly (p>0.05) affected by the housing system and strain, so also the serum metabolites except for the serum cortisol which was significantly (p<0.05) affected by the housing system only. Hens housed on PCC had higher values (20.05 ng/ml for SBL and 20.55 ng/ml for SBR) followed by hens on ECC (18.15ng/ml for SBL and 18.38ng/ml for SBL) while hens on DLS had the lowest value (16.50ng/ml for SBL and 16.00ng/ml for SBR) thereby confirming indication of stress with conventionally caged birds. Alternative housing systems can also be adopted for egg-type chickens in the humid tropics from welfare point of view with the results of this work confirming stress among caged hens.

Keywords: blood, housing, humid-tropics, layers

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Authors: Maria Ahmadnezhad, Seyedgharani Ghoreishi ‎

Abstract:

Electrohydraulic servo system have been used in industry in a wide ‎number of applications. Its ‎dynamics are highly nonlinear and also ‎have large extent of model uncertainties and external ‎disturbances. ‎In this thesis, a robust back-stepping control (RBSC) scheme is ‎proposed to overcome ‎the problem of disturbances and system ‎uncertainties effectively and to improve the set-point ‎performance ‎of EHS systems. In order to implement the proposed control ‎scheme, the system ‎uncertainties in EHS systems are considered as ‎total leakage coefficient and effective oil volume. In ‎addition, in ‎order to obtain the virtual controls for stabilizing system, the ‎update rule for the ‎system uncertainty term is induced by the ‎Lyapunov control function (LCF). To verify the ‎performance and ‎robustness of the proposed control system, computer simulation of ‎the ‎proposed control system using Matlab/Simulink Software is ‎executed. From the computer ‎simulation, it was found that the ‎RBSC system produces the desired set-point performance and ‎has ‎robustness to the disturbances and system uncertainties of ‎EHS systems.‎

Keywords: electro hydraulic servo system, back-stepping control, robust back-‎stepping control, Lyapunov redesign‎

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