Search results for: spiral dynamic algorithm.

Authors: Fatima Z. Cherhabil, Mammar Sedrati, Sonia-Sabrina Bendib‎

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In order to support the continued growth, critical latency of ‎IoT ‎applications and ‎various obstacles of traditional data centers, ‎Mobile Edge ‎Computing (MEC) has ‎emerged as a promising solution that extends the cloud data-processing and decision-making to edge devices. ‎By adopting a MEC structure, IoT applications could be executed ‎locally, on ‎an edge server, different fog nodes or distant cloud ‎data centers. However, we are ‎often ‎faced with wanting to optimize conflicting criteria such as ‎minimizing energy ‎consumption of limited local capabilities (in terms of CPU, RAM, storage, bandwidth) of mobile edge ‎devices and trying to ‎keep ‎high performance (reducing ‎response time, increasing throughput and service availability) ‎at the same ‎time‎. Achieving one goal may affect the other making Task Offloading (TO), ‎Resource Allocation (RA) and Service Placement (SP) complex ‎processes. ‎It is a nontrivial multi-objective optimization ‎problem ‎to study the trade-off between conflicting criteria. ‎The paper provides a survey on different TO, SP and RA recent Multi-‎Objective Optimization (MOO) approaches used in edge computing environments, particularly Artificial Intelligent (AI) ones, to satisfy various objectives, constraints and dynamic conditions related to IoT applications‎.

Keywords: Mobile Edge Computing, Multi-Objective Optimization, Artificial Intelligence ‎Approaches, Task Offloading, Resource Allocation, Service Placement‎.

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Authors: R. Kamali, A. R. Binesh, S. Hossainpour

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To understand working features of a micro combustor, a computer code has been developed to study combustion of hydrogen–air mixture in a series of chambers with same shape aspect ratio but various dimensions from millimeter to micrometer level. The prepared algorithm and the computer code are capable of modeling mixture effects in different fluid flows including chemical reactions, viscous and mass diffusion effects. The effect of various heat transfer conditions at chamber wall, e.g. adiabatic wall, with heat loss and heat conduction within the wall, on the combustion is analyzed. These thermal conditions have strong effects on the combustion especially when the chamber dimension goes smaller and the ratio of surface area to volume becomes larger. Both factors, such as larger heat loss through the chamber wall and smaller chamber dimension size, may lead to the thermal quenching of micro-scale combustion. Through such systematic numerical analysis, a proper operation space for the micro-combustor is suggested, which may be used as the guideline for microcombustor design. In addition, the results reported in this paper illustrate that the numerical simulation can be one of the most powerful and beneficial tools for the micro-combustor design, optimization and performance analysis.

Keywords: Numerical simulation, Micro-combustion, MEMS, CFD, Chemical reaction.

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Authors: H. Iranmanesh, M. R. Skandari, M. Allahverdiloo

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Project managers are the ultimate responsible for the overall characteristics of a project, i.e. they should deliver the project on time with minimum cost and with maximum quality. It is vital for any manager to decide a trade-off between these conflicting objectives and they will be benefited of any scientific decision support tool. Our work will try to determine optimal solutions (rather than a single optimal solution) from which the project manager will select his desirable choice to run the project. In this paper, the problem in project scheduling notated as (1,T|cpm,disc,mu|curve:quality,time,cost) will be studied. The problem is multi-objective and the purpose is finding the Pareto optimal front of time, cost and quality of a project (curve:quality,time,cost), whose activities belong to a start to finish activity relationship network (cpm) and they can be done in different possible modes (mu) which are non-continuous or discrete (disc), and each mode has a different cost, time and quality . The project is constrained to a non-renewable resource i.e. money (1,T). Because the problem is NP-Hard, to solve the problem, a meta-heuristic is developed based on a version of genetic algorithm specially adapted to solve multi-objective problems namely FastPGA. A sample project with 30 activities is generated and then solved by the proposed method.

Keywords: FastPGA, Multi-Execution Activity Mode, Pareto Optimality, Project Scheduling, Time-Cost-Quality Trade-Off.

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Authors: Kwok W. Mui, Ling T. Wong, F. Xiao, Chin T. Cheung, Ho C. Yu

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This study addresses a concept of the Sustainable Building Environmental Model (SBEM) developed to optimize energy consumption in air conditioning and ventilation (ACV) systems without any deterioration of indoor environmental quality (IEQ). The SBEM incorporates two main components: an adaptive comfort temperature control module (ACT) and a new carbon dioxide demand control module (nDCV). These two modules take an innovative approach to maintain satisfaction of the Indoor Environmental Quality (IEQ) with optimum energy consumption; they provide a rational basis of effective control. A total of 2133 sets of measurement data of indoor air temperature (Ta), relative humidity (Rh) and carbon dioxide concentration (CO2) were conducted in some Hong Kong offices to investigate the potential of integrating the SBEM. A simulation was used to evaluate the dynamic performance of the energy and air conditioning system with the integration of the SBEM in an air-conditioned building. It allows us make a clear picture of the control strategies and performed any pre-tuned of controllers before utilized in real systems. With the integration of SBEM, it was able to save up to 12.3% in simulation of overall electricity consumption, and maintain the average carbon dioxide concentration within 1000ppm and occupant dissatisfaction in 20%. 

Keywords: —Sustainable building environmental model (SBEM), adaptive comfort temperature (ACT), new demand control ventilation (nDCV), energy saving.

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Authors: G. La Scalia, M. Enea, R. Micale, O. Corona, L. Settanni

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The quality and condition of perishable products delivered to the market and their subsequent selling prices are directly affected by the care taken during harvesting and handling. Mechanical injury, in fact, occurs at all stages, from pre-harvest operations through post-harvest handling, packing and transport to the market. The main implications of this damage are the reduction of the product’s quality and economical losses related to the shelf life diminution. For most perishable products, the shelf life is relatively short and it is typically dictated by microbial growth related to the application of dynamic and static loads during transportation. This paper presents the correlation between vibration levels and microbiological growth on strawberries and woodland strawberries and detects the presence of volatile organic compounds (VOC) in order to develop an intelligent logistic unit capable of monitoring VOCs using a specific sensor system. Fresh fruits were exposed to vibrations by means of a vibrating table in a temperature-controlled environment. Microbiological analyses were conducted on samples, taken at different positions along the column of the crates. The values obtained were compared with control samples not exposed to vibrations and the results show that different positions along the column influence the development of bacteria, yeasts and filamentous fungi.

Keywords: Microbiological analysis, shelf life, transport damage, volatile organic compounds.

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Authors: Erika Pigliapoco, Valerio Freschi, Alessandro Bogliolo

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This work presents a new phonetic transcription system based on a tree of hierarchical pronunciation rules expressed as context-specific grapheme-phoneme correspondences. The tree is automatically inferred from a phonetic dictionary by incrementally analyzing deeper context levels, eventually representing a minimum set of exhaustive rules that pronounce without errors all the words in the training dictionary and that can be applied to out-of-vocabulary words. The proposed approach improves upon existing rule-tree-based techniques in that it makes use of graphemes, rather than letters, as elementary orthographic units. A new linear algorithm for the segmentation of a word in graphemes is introduced to enable outof- vocabulary grapheme-based phonetic transcription. Exhaustive rule trees provide a canonical representation of the pronunciation rules of a language that can be used not only to pronounce out-of-vocabulary words, but also to analyze and compare the pronunciation rules inferred from different dictionaries. The proposed approach has been implemented in C and tested on Oxford British English and Basic English. Experimental results show that grapheme-based rule trees represent phonetically sound rules and provide better performance than letter-based rule trees.

Keywords: Automatic phonetic transcription, pronunciation rules, hierarchical tree inference.

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Authors: W. T. A. Mohammed, M. Eltaeb, R. Kashani

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The first bending modes of tall asymmetric structures in the two lateral X and Y-directions have two different natural frequencies. To add tuned damping to these bending modes, one needs to either a) use two pendulum-tuned mass dampers (PTMDs) with one tuning frequency, each PTMD targeting one of the bending modes, or b) use one PTMD with two tuning frequencies (one in each lateral directions). Option (a), being more massive, requiring more space, and being more expensive, is less attractive than option (b). Considering that the tuning frequency of a pendulum depends mainly on the pendulum length, one way of realizing option (b) is by constraining the swinging length of the pendulum in one direction but not in the other; such PTMD is dubbed passive Bi-PTMD. Alternatively, option (b) can be realized by actively setting the tuning frequencies of the PTMD in the two directions. In this work, accurate physical models of passive Bi-PTMD and active PTMD are developed and incorporated into the numerical model of a tall asymmetric structure. The model of PTMDs plus structure is used for a) synthesizing such PTMDs for particular applications and b) evaluating their damping effectiveness in mitigating the dynamic lateral responses of their target asymmetric structures, perturbed by wind load in X and Y-directions. Depending on how elaborate the control scheme is, the active PTMD can either be made to yield the same damping effectiveness as the passive Bi-PTMD of the same size or the passive Bi-TMD twice as massive as the active PTMD.

Keywords: Active tuned mass damper, high-rise building, multi-frequency tuning, vibration control.

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Authors: Ngoc Trung Ngo, Buddhima Indraratna, Cholachat Rujikiathmakjornr

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For several hundred years, the design of railway tracks has practically remained unchanged. Traditionally, rail tracks are placed on a ballast layer due to several reasons, including economy, rapid drainage, and high load bearing capacity. The primary function of ballast is to distributing dynamic track loads to sub-ballast and subgrade layers, while also providing lateral resistance and allowing for rapid drainage. Upon repeated trainloads, the ballast becomes fouled due to ballast degradation and the intrusion of fines which adversely affects the strength and deformation behaviour of ballast. This paper presents the use of three-dimensional discrete element method (DEM) in studying the shear behaviour of the fouled ballast subjected to direct shear loading. Irregularly shaped particles of ballast were modelled by grouping many spherical balls together in appropriate sizes to simulate representative ballast aggregates. Fouled ballast was modelled by injecting a specified number of miniature spherical particles into the void spaces. The DEM simulation highlights that the peak shear stress of the ballast assembly decreases and the dilation of fouled ballast increases with an increase level of fouling. Additionally, the distributions of contact force chain and particle displacement vectors were captured during shearing progress, explaining the formation of shear band and the evolutions of volumetric change of fouled ballast.

Keywords: Railway ballast, coal fouling, discrete element modelling, discrete element method.

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Authors: Nuawi M. Z., Lamin F., Ismail A. R., Abdullah S., Wahid Z.

Abstract:

A filter is used to remove undesirable frequency information from a dynamic signal. This paper shows that the Znotch filter filtering technique can be applied to remove the noise nuisance from a machining signal. In machining, the noise components were identified from the sound produced by the operation of machine components itself such as hydraulic system, motor, machine environment and etc. By correlating the noise components with the measured machining signal, the interested components of the measured machining signal which was less interfered by the noise, can be extracted. Thus, the filtered signal is more reliable to be analysed in terms of noise content compared to the unfiltered signal. Significantly, the I-kaz method i.e. comprises of three dimensional graphical representation and I-kaz coefficient, Z∞ could differentiate between the filtered and the unfiltered signal. The bigger space of scattering and the higher value of Z∞ demonstrated that the signal was highly interrupted by noise. This method can be utilised as a proactive tool in evaluating the noise content in a signal. The evaluation of noise content is very important as well as the elimination especially for machining operation fault diagnosis purpose. The Z-notch filtering technique was reliable in extracting noise component from the measured machining signal with high efficiency. Even though the measured signal was exposed to high noise disruption, the signal generated from the interaction between cutting tool and work piece still can be acquired. Therefore, the interruption of noise that could change the original signal feature and consequently can deteriorate the useful sensory information can be eliminated.

Keywords: Digital signal filtering, I-kaz method, Machiningmonitoring, Noise Cancelling, Sound

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Authors: Andra Blumberga, Armands Gravelsins, Haralds Vigants, Dagnija Blumberga

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The paper discovers biotechonomy development analysis by use of system dynamics modelling. The research is connected with investigations of biomass application for production of bioproducts with higher added value. The most popular bioresource is wood, and therefore, the main question today is about future development and eco-design of products. The paper emphasizes and evaluates energy sector which is open for use of wood logs, wood chips, wood pellets and so on. The main aim for this research study was to build a framework to analyse development perspectives for wood pellet production. To reach the goal, a system dynamics model of energy wood supplies, processing, and consumption is built. Production capacity, energy consumption, changes in energy and technology efficiency, required labour source, prices of wood, energy and labour are taken into account. Validation and verification tests with available data and information have been carried out and indicate that the model constitutes the dynamic hypothesis. It is found that the more is invested into pellets production, the higher the specific profit per production unit compared to wood logs and wood chips. As a result, wood chips production is decreasing dramatically and is replaced by wood pellets. The limiting factor for pellet industry growth is availability of wood sources. This is governed by felling limit set by the government based on sustainable forestry principles.

Keywords: Bioenergy, biotechonomy, system dynamics modelling, wood pellets.

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Authors: Farhad Kolahan, A. Hamid Khajavi

Abstract:

Abrasive waterjet is a novel machining process capable of processing wide range of hard-to-machine materials. This research addresses modeling and optimization of the process parameters for this machining technique. To model the process a set of experimental data has been used to evaluate the effects of various parameter settings in cutting 6063-T6 aluminum alloy. The process variables considered here include nozzle diameter, jet traverse rate, jet pressure and abrasive flow rate. Depth of cut, as one of the most important output characteristics, has been evaluated based on different parameter settings. The Taguchi method and regression modeling are used in order to establish the relationships between input and output parameters. The adequacy of the model is evaluated using analysis of variance (ANOVA) technique. The pairwise effects of process parameters settings on process response outputs are also shown graphically. The proposed model is then embedded into a Simulated Annealing algorithm to optimize the process parameters. The optimization is carried out for any desired values of depth of cut. The objective is to determine proper levels of process parameters in order to obtain a certain level of depth of cut. Computational results demonstrate that the proposed solution procedure is quite effective in solving such multi-variable problems.

Keywords: AWJ cutting, Mathematical modeling, Simulated Annealing, Optimization

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Authors: R.V Pawar, P.P.Kajave, S.N.Mali

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The speech signal conveys information about the identity of the speaker. The area of speaker identification is concerned with extracting the identity of the person speaking the utterance. As speech interaction with computers becomes more pervasive in activities such as the telephone, financial transactions and information retrieval from speech databases, the utility of automatically identifying a speaker is based solely on vocal characteristic. This paper emphasizes on text dependent speaker identification, which deals with detecting a particular speaker from a known population. The system prompts the user to provide speech utterance. System identifies the user by comparing the codebook of speech utterance with those of the stored in the database and lists, which contain the most likely speakers, could have given that speech utterance. The speech signal is recorded for N speakers further the features are extracted. Feature extraction is done by means of LPC coefficients, calculating AMDF, and DFT. The neural network is trained by applying these features as input parameters. The features are stored in templates for further comparison. The features for the speaker who has to be identified are extracted and compared with the stored templates using Back Propogation Algorithm. Here, the trained network corresponds to the output; the input is the extracted features of the speaker to be identified. The network does the weight adjustment and the best match is found to identify the speaker. The number of epochs required to get the target decides the network performance.

Keywords: Average Mean Distance function, Backpropogation, Linear Predictive Coding, MultilayeredPerceptron,

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Authors: A. K. Al-Othman, Nabil A. Ahmed, A. M. Al-Kandari, H. K. Ebraheem

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Selective harmonic elimination-pulse width modulation techniques offer a tight control of the harmonic spectrum of a given voltage waveform generated by a power electronic converter along with a low number of switching transitions. Traditional optimization methods suffer from various drawbacks, such as prolonged and tedious computational steps and convergence to local optima; thus, the more the number of harmonics to be eliminated, the larger the computational complexity and time. This paper presents a novel method for output voltage harmonic elimination and voltage control of PWM AC/AC voltage converters using the principle of hybrid Real-Coded Genetic Algorithm-Pattern Search (RGA-PS) method. RGA is the primary optimizer exploiting its global search capabilities, PS is then employed to fine tune the best solution provided by RGA in each evolution. The proposed method enables linear control of the fundamental component of the output voltage and complete elimination of its harmonic contents up to a specified order. Theoretical studies have been carried out to show the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed method of selective harmonic elimination. Theoretical results are validated through simulation studies using PSIM software package.

Keywords: PWM, AC/AC voltage converters, selectiveharmonic elimination, direct search method, pattern search method, Real-coded Genetic algorithms, evolutionary algorithms andoptimization.

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Authors: Faizal A. Samman, Thomas Hollstein, Manfred Glesner

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A synchronous network-on-chip using wormhole packet switching and supporting guaranteed-completion best-effort with low-priority (LP) and high-priority (HP) wormhole packet delivery service is presented in this paper. Both our proposed LP and HP message services deliver a good quality of service in term of lossless packet completion and in-order message data delivery. However, the LP message service does not guarantee minimal completion bound. The HP packets will absolutely use 100% bandwidth of their reserved links if the HP packets are injected from the source node with maximum injection. Hence, the service are suitable for small size messages (less than hundred bytes). Otherwise the other HP and LP messages, which require also the links, will experience relatively high latency depending on the size of the HP message. The LP packets are routed using a minimal adaptive routing, while the HP packets are routed using a non-minimal adaptive routing algorithm. Therefore, an additional 3-bit field, identifying the packet type, is introduced in their packet headers to classify and to determine the type of service committed to the packet. Our NoC prototypes have been also synthesized using a 180-nm CMOS standard-cell technology to evaluate the cost of implementing the combination of both services.

Keywords: Network-on-Chip, Parallel Pipeline Router Architecture, Wormhole Switching, Two-Level Priority Service.

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Authors: Erika Martinez Ramirez, Rene V. Mayorga

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In our modern world, more physical transactions are being substituted by electronic transactions (i.e. banking, shopping, and payments), many businesses and companies are performing most of their operations through the internet. Instead of having a physical commerce, internet visitors are now adapting to electronic commerce (e-Commerce). The ability of web users to reach products worldwide can be greatly benefited by creating friendly and personalized online business portals. Internet visitors will return to a particular website when they can find the information they need or want easily. Dealing with this human conceptualization brings the incorporation of Artificial/Computational Intelligence techniques in the creation of customized portals. From these techniques, Fuzzy-Set technologies can make many useful contributions to the development of such a human-centered endeavor as e-Commerce. The main objective of this paper is the implementation of a Paradigm for the Intelligent Design and Operation of Human-Computer interfaces. In particular, the paradigm is quite appropriate for the intelligent design and operation of software modules that display information (such Web Pages, graphic user interfaces GUIs, Multimedia modules) on a computer screen. The human conceptualization of the user personal information is analyzed throughout a Cascaded Fuzzy Inference (decision-making) System to generate the User Ascribe Qualities, which identify the user and that can be used to customize portals with proper Web links.

Keywords: Fuzzy Logic, Internet, Electronic Commerce, Intelligent Portals, Electronic Shopping.

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Authors: Talal Alshammari, Nasser Alshammari, Mohamed Sedky, Chris Howard

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With the widespread adoption of the Internet-connected devices, and with the prevalence of the Internet of Things (IoT) applications, there is an increased interest in machine learning techniques that can provide useful and interesting services in the smart home domain. The areas that machine learning techniques can help advance are varied and ever-evolving. Classifying smart home inhabitants’ Activities of Daily Living (ADLs), is one prominent example. The ability of machine learning technique to find meaningful spatio-temporal relations of high-dimensional data is an important requirement as well. This paper presents a comparative evaluation of state-of-the-art machine learning techniques to classify ADLs in the smart home domain. Forty-two synthetic datasets and two real-world datasets with multiple inhabitants are used to evaluate and compare the performance of the identified machine learning techniques. Our results show significant performance differences between the evaluated techniques. Such as AdaBoost, Cortical Learning Algorithm (CLA), Decision Trees, Hidden Markov Model (HMM), Multi-layer Perceptron (MLP), Structured Perceptron and Support Vector Machines (SVM). Overall, neural network based techniques have shown superiority over the other tested techniques.

Keywords: Activities of daily living, classification, internet of things, machine learning, smart home.

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Authors: Farhad Alizadeh, Alireza Faregh Gharamaleki, Mojtaba Jalilzadeh, Houshang Gholami, Ali Akhoundzadeh

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This study presented hybrid pre-processing approach along with a conceptual model to enhance the accuracy of river discharge prediction. In order to achieve this goal, Ensemble Empirical Mode Decomposition algorithm (EEMD), Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) and Mutual Information (MI) were employed as a hybrid pre-processing approach conjugated to Least Square Support Vector Machine (LSSVM). A conceptual strategy namely multi-station model was developed to forecast the Souris River discharge more accurately. The strategy used herein was capable of covering uncertainties and complexities of river discharge modeling. DWT and EEMD was coupled, and the feature selection was performed for decomposed sub-series using MI to be employed in multi-station model. In the proposed feature selection method, some useless sub-series were omitted to achieve better performance. Results approved efficiency of the proposed DWT-EEMD-MI approach to improve accuracy of multi-station modeling strategies.

Keywords: River stage-discharge process, LSSVM, discrete wavelet transform (DWT), ensemble empirical decomposition mode (EEMD), multi-station modeling.

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Authors: Cameron Hamilton, Walter Potter, Gerrit Hoogenboom, Ronald McClendon, Will Hobbs

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A model was constructed to predict the amount of solar radiation that will make contact with the surface of the earth in a given location an hour into the future. This project was supported by the Southern Company to determine at what specific times during a given day of the year solar panels could be relied upon to produce energy in sufficient quantities. Due to their ability as universal function approximators, an artificial neural network was used to estimate the nonlinear pattern of solar radiation, which utilized measurements of weather conditions collected at the Griffin, Georgia weather station as inputs. A number of network configurations and training strategies were utilized, though a multilayer perceptron with a variety of hidden nodes trained with the resilient propagation algorithm consistently yielded the most accurate predictions. In addition, a modeled direct normal irradiance field and adjacent weather station data were used to bolster prediction accuracy. In later trials, the solar radiation field was preprocessed with a discrete wavelet transform with the aim of removing noise from the measurements. The current model provides predictions of solar radiation with a mean square error of 0.0042, though ongoing efforts are being made to further improve the model’s accuracy.

Keywords: Artificial Neural Networks, Resilient Propagation, Solar Radiation, Time Series Forecasting.

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Authors: Teuku Rihayat, Suryani

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Polyurethanes (PURs) are very versatile polymeric materials with a wide range of physical and chemical properties. PURs have desirable properties such as high abrasion resistance, tear strength, shock absorption, flexibility and elasticity. Although they have relatively poor thermal stability, this can be improved by using treated clay. Polyurethane/clay nanocomposites have been synthesized from renewable sources. A polyol for the production of polyurethane by reaction with an isocyanate was obtained by the synthesis of palm oil-based oleic acid with glycerol. Dodecylbenzene sulfonic acid (DBSA) was used as catalyst and emulsifier. The unmodified clay (kunipia-F) was treated with cetyltrimethyl ammonium bromide (CTAB-mont) and octadodecylamine (ODAmont). The d-spacing in CTAB-mont and ODA-mont were 1.571 nm and 1.798 nm respectively and larger than that of the pure-mont (1.142 nm). The organoclay was completely intercalated in the polyurethane, as confirmed by a wide angle x-ray diffraction (WAXD) pattern. The results showed that adding clay demonstrated better thermal stability in comparison with the virgin polyurethane. Onset degradation of pure PU is at 200oC, and is lower than that of the CTAB-mont PU and ODA-mont PU which takes place at about 318oC and 330oC, respectively. The mechanical properties (including the dynamic mechanical properties) of pure polyurethane (PU) and PU/clay nanocomposites, were measured. The modified organoclay had a remarkably beneficial effect on the strength and elongation at break of the nanocomposites, which both increased with increasing clay content with the increase of the tensile strength of more than 214% and 267% by the addition of only 5 wt% of the montmorillonite CTAB-mont PU and ODA-mont PU, respectively.

Keywords: Polyurethane, Clay nanocomposites, Biobase

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Authors: J.V.R.Ravindra, M.B.Srinivas,

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Accurate modeling of high speed RLC interconnects has become a necessity to address signal integrity issues in current VLSI design. To accurately model a dispersive system of interconnects at higher frequencies; a full-wave analysis is required. However, conventional circuit simulation of interconnects with full wave models is extremely CPU expensive. We present an algorithm for reducing large VLSI circuits to much smaller ones with similar input-output behavior. A key feature of our method, called Frequency Shift Technique, is that it is capable of reducing linear time-varying systems. This enables it to capture frequency-translation and sampling behavior, important in communication subsystems such as mixers, RF components and switched-capacitor filters. Reduction is obtained by projecting the original system described by linear differential equations into a lower dimension. Experiments have been carried out using Cadence Design Simulator cwhich indicates that the proposed technique achieves more % reduction with less CPU time than the other model order reduction techniques existing in literature. We also present applications to RF circuit subsystems, obtaining size reductions and evaluation speedups of orders of magnitude with insignificant loss of accuracy.

Keywords: Model order Reduction, RLC, crosstalk

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Authors: Hussain Jiffry, Kypros Pilakoutas, Reyes Garcia

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This study examines analytically the effect of tsunami loads on reinforced concrete (RC) frame buildings. The impact of tsunami wave loads and waterborne objects are analyzed using a typical substandard full-scale two-story RC frame building tested as part of the EU-funded Ecoleader project. The building was subjected to shake table tests in bare condition, and subsequently strengthened using Carbon Fiber Reinforced Polymers (CFRP) composites and retested. Numerical models of the building in both bare and CFRP-strengthened conditions are calibrated in DRAIN-3DX software to match the test results. To investigate the response of wave loads and impact forces, the numerical models are subjected to nonlinear dynamic analyses using force time-history input records. The analytical results are compared in terms of displacements at the floors and at the “impact point” of a boat. The results show that the roof displacement of the CFRP-strengthened building reduced by 63% when compared to the bare building. The results also indicate that strengthening only the mid-height of the impact column using CFRP is more effective at reducing damage when compared to strengthening other parts of the column. Alternative solutions to mitigate damage due to tsunami loads are suggested.

Keywords: Tsunami loads, hydrodynamic load, impact load, waterborne objects, RC buildings.

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Authors: Nicolò Vaiana, Giorgio Serino

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In this paper, an advanced Nonlinear Exponential Model (NEM), able to simulate the uniaxial dynamic behavior of seismic isolators having a continuously decreasing tangent stiffness with increasing displacement in the relatively large displacements range and a hardening or softening behavior at large displacements, is presented. The mathematical model is validated by comparing the experimental force-displacement hysteresis loops obtained during cyclic tests, conducted on a helical wire rope isolator and a recycled rubber-fiber reinforced bearing, with those predicted analytically. Good agreement between the experimental and simulated results shows that the proposed model can be an effective numerical tool to predict the force-displacement relationship of seismic isolation devices within the large displacements range. Compared to the widely used Bouc-Wen model, unable to simulate the response of seismic isolators at large displacements, the proposed one allows to avoid the numerical solution of a first order nonlinear ordinary differential equation for each time step of a nonlinear time history analysis, thus reducing the computation effort. Furthermore, the proposed model can simulate the smooth transition of the hysteresis loops from small to large displacements by adopting only one set of five parameters determined from the experimental hysteresis loops having the largest amplitude.

Keywords: Base isolation, hardening behavior, nonlinear exponential model, seismic isolators, softening behavior.

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Authors: I. Abuiziah, A. Oulhaj, K. Sebari, D. Ouazar

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This paper presents the problem of modeling and simulating of transient phenomena in conveying pipeline systems based on the rigid column and full elastic methods. Transient analysis is important and one of the more challenging and complicated flow problem in the design and the operation of water pipeline systems. Transient can produce large pressure forces and rapid fluid acceleration into a water pipeline system, these disturbances may result in device failures, system fatigue or pipe ruptures, and even the dirty water intrusion. Several methods have been introduced and used to analyze transient flow, an accurate analysis and suitable protection devices should be used to protect water pipeline systems. The fourth-order Runge-Kutta method has been used to solve the dynamic and continuity equations in the rigid column method, while the characteristics method used to solve these equations in the full elastic method. The results obtained provide that the model is an efficient tool for flow transient analysis and provide approximately identical results by using these two methods. Moreover; using the simple surge tank ”open surge tank” reduces the unfavorable effects of transients.

Keywords: Elastic method, Flow transient, Open surge tank, Pipeline, Protection devices, Numerical model, Rigid column method.

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Authors: Carlos H. Cuadra

Abstract:

Seismic isolation can be used as a retrofit method for historical buildings with the advantage that minimum intervention on super-structure is required. However, selection of isolation devices depends on weight and stiffness of upper structure. In this study, two buildings are considered for analyses to evaluate the applicability of this retrofitting methodology. Both buildings are located at Akita prefecture in the north part of Japan. One building is a wooden structure that corresponds to the old council meeting hall of Noshiro city. The second building is a brick masonry structure that was used as house of a foreign mining engineer and it is located at Ani town. Ambient vibration measurements were performed on both buildings to estimate their dynamic characteristics. Then, target period of vibration of isolated systems is selected as 3 seconds is selected to estimate required stiffness of isolation devices. For wooden structure, which is a light construction, it was found that natural rubber isolators in combination with friction bearings are suitable for seismic isolation. In case of masonry building elastomeric isolator can be used for its seismic isolation. Lumped mass systems are used for seismic response analysis and it is verified in both cases that seismic isolation can be used as retrofitting method of historical construction. However, in the case of the light building, most of the weight corresponds to the reinforced concrete slab that is required to install isolation devices.

Keywords: Historical building, finite element method, masonry structure, seismic isolation, wooden structure.

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Authors: Adrienne Kline, Jaydip Desai

Abstract:

Electroencephalogram (EEG) is a noninvasive technique that registers signals originating from the firing of neurons in the brain. The Emotiv EEG Neuroheadset is a consumer product comprised of 14 EEG channels and was used to record the reactions of the neurons within the brain to two forms of stimuli in 10 participants. These stimuli consisted of auditory and visual formats that provided directions of ‘right’ or ‘left.’ Participants were instructed to raise their right or left arm in accordance with the instruction given. A scenario in OpenViBE was generated to both stimulate the participants while recording their data. In OpenViBE, the Graz Motor BCI Stimulator algorithm was configured to govern the duration and number of visual stimuli. Utilizing EEGLAB under the cross platform MATLAB®, the electrodes most stimulated during the study were defined. Data outputs from EEGLAB were analyzed using IBM SPSS Statistics® Version 20. This aided in determining the electrodes to use in the development of a brain-machine interface (BMI) using real-time EEG signals from the Emotiv EEG Neuroheadset. Signal processing and feature extraction were accomplished via the Simulink® signal processing toolbox. An Arduino™ Duemilanove microcontroller was used to link the Emotiv EEG Neuroheadset and the right and left Mecha TE™ Hands.

Keywords: Brain-machine interface, EEGLAB, emotiv EEG neuroheadset, openViBE, simulink.

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Authors: Yao-Hong Tsai

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Due to the sensor technology, video surveillance has become the main way for security control in every big city in the world. Surveillance is usually used by governments for intelligence gathering, the prevention of crime, the protection of a process, person, group or object, or the investigation of crime. Many surveillance systems based on computer vision technology have been developed in recent years. Moving target tracking is the most common task for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) to find and track objects of interest in mobile aerial surveillance for civilian applications. The paper is focused on vision-based collision avoidance for UAVs by recurrent neural networks. First, images from cameras on UAV were fused based on deep convolutional neural network. Then, a recurrent neural network was constructed to obtain high-level image features for object tracking and extracting low-level image features for noise reducing. The system distributed the calculation of the whole system to local and cloud platform to efficiently perform object detection, tracking and collision avoidance based on multiple UAVs. The experiments on several challenging datasets showed that the proposed algorithm outperforms the state-of-the-art methods.

Keywords: Unmanned aerial vehicle, object tracking, deep learning, collision avoidance.

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Authors: S. Panda, J. S. Yadav, N. P. Patidar, C. Ardil

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Recently, genetic algorithms (GA) and particle swarm optimization (PSO) technique have attracted considerable attention among various modern heuristic optimization techniques. The GA has been popular in academia and the industry mainly because of its intuitiveness, ease of implementation, and the ability to effectively solve highly non-linear, mixed integer optimization problems that are typical of complex engineering systems. PSO technique is a relatively recent heuristic search method whose mechanics are inspired by the swarming or collaborative behavior of biological populations. In this paper both PSO and GA optimization are employed for finding stable reduced order models of single-input- single-output large-scale linear systems. Both the techniques guarantee stability of reduced order model if the original high order model is stable. PSO method is based on the minimization of the Integral Squared Error (ISE) between the transient responses of original higher order model and the reduced order model pertaining to a unit step input. Both the methods are illustrated through numerical example from literature and the results are compared with recently published conventional model reduction technique.

Keywords: Genetic Algorithm, Particle Swarm Optimization, Order Reduction, Stability, Transfer Function, Integral Squared Error.

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Authors: Sidhartha Panda, N. P. Padhy

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Recently, genetic algorithms (GA) and particle swarm optimization (PSO) technique have attracted considerable attention among various modern heuristic optimization techniques. Since the two approaches are supposed to find a solution to a given objective function but employ different strategies and computational effort, it is appropriate to compare their performance. This paper presents the application and performance comparison of PSO and GA optimization techniques, for Thyristor Controlled Series Compensator (TCSC)-based controller design. The design objective is to enhance the power system stability. The design problem of the FACTS-based controller is formulated as an optimization problem and both the PSO and GA optimization techniques are employed to search for optimal controller parameters. The performance of both optimization techniques in terms of computational time and convergence rate is compared. Further, the optimized controllers are tested on a weakly connected power system subjected to different disturbances, and their performance is compared with the conventional power system stabilizer (CPSS). The eigenvalue analysis and non-linear simulation results are presented and compared to show the effectiveness of both the techniques in designing a TCSC-based controller, to enhance power system stability.

Keywords: Thyristor Controlled Series Compensator, geneticalgorithm; particle swarm optimization; Phillips-Heffron model;power system stability.

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Authors: Alena Zemanová, Jan Zeman, Michal Šejnoha

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The polymer foil used for manufacturing of laminated glass members behaves in a viscoelastic manner with temperature dependance. This contribution aims at incorporating the time/temperature-dependent behavior of interlayer to our earlier elastic finite element model for laminated glass beams. The model is based on a refined beam theory: each layer behaves according to the finite-strain shear deformable formulation by Reissner and the adjacent layers are connected via the Lagrange multipliers ensuring the inter-layer compatibility of a laminated unit. The time/temperature-dependent behavior of the interlayer is accounted for by the generalized Maxwell model and by the time-temperature superposition principle due to the Williams, Landel, and Ferry. The resulting system is solved by the Newton method with consistent linearization and the viscoelastic response is determined incrementally by the exponential algorithm. By comparing the model predictions against available experimental data, we demonstrate that the proposed formulation is reliable and accurately reproduces the behavior of the laminated glass units.

Keywords: Laminated glass, finite element method, finite-strain Reissner model, Lagrange multipliers, generalized Maxwell model, Williams-Landel-Ferry equation, Newton method.

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Authors: J. Gu, W.B. Lee, C.F. Cheung, E. Tsui, W.M. Wang

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Knowledge of an organization does not merely reside in structured form of information and data; it is also embedded in unstructured form. The discovery of such knowledge is particularly difficult as the characteristic is dynamic, scattered, massive and multiplying at high speed. Conventional methods of managing unstructured information are considered too resource demanding and time consuming to cope with the rapid information growth. In this paper, a Multi-faceted and Automatic Knowledge Elicitation System (MAKES) is introduced for the purpose of discovery and capture of organizational knowledge. A trial implementation has been conducted in a public organization to achieve the objective of decision capture and navigation from a number of meeting minutes which are autonomously organized, classified and presented in a multi-faceted taxonomy map in both document and content level. Key concepts such as critical decision made, key knowledge workers, knowledge flow and the relationship among them are elicited and displayed in predefined knowledge model and maps. Hence, the structured knowledge can be retained, shared and reused. Conducting Knowledge Management with MAKES reduces work in searching and retrieving the target decision, saves a great deal of time and manpower, and also enables an organization to keep pace with the knowledge life cycle. This is particularly important when the amount of unstructured information and data grows extremely quickly. This system approach of knowledge management can accelerate value extraction and creation cycles of organizations.

Keywords: Knowledge-Based System, Knowledge Elicitation, Knowledge Management, Taxonomy, Unstructured Information Management

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