Object Allocation with Replication in Distributed Systems

The design of distributed systems involves dividing the system into partitions (or components) and then allocating these partitions to physical nodes. There have been several techniques proposed for both the partitioning and allocation processes. These existing techniques suffer from a number of limitations including lack of support for replication. Replication is difficult to use effectively but has the potential to greatly improve the performance of a distributed system. This paper presents a new technique technique for allocating objects in order to improve performance in a distributed system that supports replication. The performance of the proposed technique is demonstrated and tested on an example system. The performance of the new technique is compared with the performance of an existing technique in order to demonstrate both the validity and superiority of the new technique when developing a distributed system that can utilise object replication.

Design of PID Controller for Higher Order Continuous Systems using MPSO based Model Formulation Technique

This paper proposes a new algebraic scheme to design a PID controller for higher order linear time invariant continuous systems. Modified PSO (MPSO) based model order formulation techniques have applied to obtain the effective formulated second order system. A controller is tuned to meet the desired performance specification by using pole-zero cancellation method. Proposed PID controller is attached with both higher order system and formulated second order system. The closed loop response is observed for stabilization process and compared with general PSO based formulated second order system. The proposed method is illustrated through numerical example from literature.

Reduction of Power Losses in Distribution Systems

Losses reduction initiatives in distribution systems have been activated due to the increasing cost of supplying electricity, the shortage in fuel with ever-increasing cost to produce more power, and the global warming concerns. These initiatives have been introduced to the utilities in shape of incentives and penalties. Recently, the electricity distribution companies in Oman have been incentivized to reduce the distribution technical and non-technical losses with an equal annual reduction rate for 6 years. In this paper, different techniques for losses reduction in Mazoon Electricity Company (MZEC) are addressed. In this company, high numbers of substation and feeders were found to be non-compliant with the Distribution System Security Standard (DSSS). Therefore, 33 projects have been suggested to bring non-complying 29 substations and 28 feeders to meet the planed criteria and to comply with the DSSS. The largest part of MZEC-s network (South Batinah region) was modeled by ETAP software package. The model has been extended to implement the proposed projects and to examine their effects on losses reduction. Simulation results have shown that the implementation of these projects leads to a significant improvement in voltage profile, and reduction in the active and the reactive power losses. Finally, the economical analysis has revealed that the implementation of the proposed projects in MZEC leads to an annual saving of about US$ 5 million.

A Robust Data Hiding Technique based on LSB Matching

Many researchers are working on information hiding techniques using different ideas and areas to hide their secrete data. This paper introduces a robust technique of hiding secret data in image based on LSB insertion and RSA encryption technique. The key of the proposed technique is to encrypt the secret data. Then the encrypted data will be converted into a bit stream and divided it into number of segments. However, the cover image will also be divided into the same number of segments. Each segment of data will be compared with each segment of image to find the best match segment, in order to create a new random sequence of segments to be inserted then in a cover image. Experimental results show that the proposed technique has a high security level and produced better stego-image quality.

Preparation of Computer Model of the Aircraft for Numerical Aeroelasticity Tests – Flutter

Article presents the geometry and structure reconstruction procedure of the aircraft model for flatter research (based on the I22-IRYDA aircraft). For reconstruction the Reverse Engineering techniques and advanced surface modeling CAD tools are used. Authors discuss all stages of data acquisition process, computation and analysis of measured data. For acquisition the three dimensional structured light scanner was used. In the further sections, details of reconstruction process are present. Geometry reconstruction procedure transform measured input data (points cloud) into the three dimensional parametric computer model (NURBS solid model) which is compatible with CAD systems. Parallel to the geometry of the aircraft, the internal structure (structural model) are extracted and modeled. In last chapter the evaluation of obtained models are discussed.

MAP-Based Image Super-resolution Reconstruction

From a set of shifted, blurred, and decimated image , super-resolution image reconstruction can get a high-resolution image. So it has become an active research branch in the field of image restoration. In general, super-resolution image restoration is an ill-posed problem. Prior knowledge about the image can be combined to make the problem well-posed, which contributes to some regularization methods. In the regularization methods at present, however, regularization parameter was selected by experience in some cases and other techniques have too heavy computation cost for computing the parameter. In this paper, we construct a new super-resolution algorithm by transforming the solving of the System stem Є=An into the solving of the equations X+A*X-1A=I , and propose an inverse iterative method.

Multiobjective Optimal Power Flow Using Hybrid Evolutionary Algorithm

This paper solves the environmental/ economic dispatch power system problem using the Non-dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm-II (NSGA-II) and its hybrid with a Convergence Accelerator Operator (CAO), called the NSGA-II/CAO. These multiobjective evolutionary algorithms were applied to the standard IEEE 30-bus six-generator test system. Several optimization runs were carried out on different cases of problem complexity. Different quality measure which compare the performance of the two solution techniques were considered. The results demonstrated that the inclusion of the CAO in the original NSGA-II improves its convergence while preserving the diversity properties of the solution set.

Laboratory Experimentation for Supporting Collaborative Working in Engineering Education over the Internet

Collaborative working environments for distance education can be considered as a more generic form of contemporary remote labs. At present, the majority of existing real laboratories are not constructed to allow the involved participants to collaborate in real time. To make this revolutionary learning environment possible we must allow the different users to carry out an experiment simultaneously. In recent times, multi-user environments are successfully applied in many applications such as air traffic control systems, team-oriented military systems, chat-text tools, multi-player games etc. Thus, understanding the ideas and techniques behind these systems could be of great importance in the contribution of ideas to our e-learning environment for collaborative working. In this investigation, collaborative working environments from theoretical and practical perspectives are considered in order to build an effective collaborative real laboratory, which allows two students or more to conduct remote experiments at the same time as a team. In order to achieve this goal, we have implemented distributed system architecture, enabling students to obtain an automated help by either a human tutor or a rule-based e-tutor.

An Advanced Time-Frequency Domain Method for PD Extraction with Non-Intrusive Measurement

Partial discharge (PD) detection is an important method to evaluate the insulation condition of metal-clad apparatus. Non-intrusive sensors which are easy to install and have no interruptions on operation are preferred in onsite PD detection. However, it often lacks of accuracy due to the interferences in PD signals. In this paper a novel PD extraction method that uses frequency analysis and entropy based time-frequency (TF) analysis is introduced. The repetitive pulses from convertor are first removed via frequency analysis. Then, the relative entropy and relative peak-frequency of each pulse (i.e. time-indexed vector TF spectrum) are calculated and all pulses with similar parameters are grouped. According to the characteristics of non-intrusive sensor and the frequency distribution of PDs, the pulses of PD and interferences are separated. Finally the PD signal and interferences are recovered via inverse TF transform. The de-noised result of noisy PD data demonstrates that the combination of frequency and time-frequency techniques can discriminate PDs from interferences with various frequency distributions.

Comparison between Higher-Order SVD and Third-order Orthogonal Tensor Product Expansion

In digital signal processing it is important to approximate multi-dimensional data by the method called rank reduction, in which we reduce the rank of multi-dimensional data from higher to lower. For 2-dimennsional data, singular value decomposition (SVD) is one of the most known rank reduction techniques. Additional, outer product expansion expanded from SVD was proposed and implemented for multi-dimensional data, which has been widely applied to image processing and pattern recognition. However, the multi-dimensional outer product expansion has behavior of great computation complex and has not orthogonally between the expansion terms. Therefore we have proposed an alterative method, Third-order Orthogonal Tensor Product Expansion short for 3-OTPE. 3-OTPE uses the power method instead of nonlinear optimization method for decreasing at computing time. At the same time the group of B. D. Lathauwer proposed Higher-Order SVD (HOSVD) that is also developed with SVD extensions for multi-dimensional data. 3-OTPE and HOSVD are similarly on the rank reduction of multi-dimensional data. Using these two methods we can obtain computation results respectively, some ones are the same while some ones are slight different. In this paper, we compare 3-OTPE to HOSVD in accuracy of calculation and computing time of resolution, and clarify the difference between these two methods.

Using PFA in Feature Analysis and Selection for H.264 Adaptation

Classification of video sequences based on their contents is a vital process for adaptation techniques. It helps decide which adaptation technique best fits the resource reduction requested by the client. In this paper we used the principal feature analysis algorithm to select a reduced subset of video features. The main idea is to select only one feature from each class based on the similarities between the features within that class. Our results showed that using this feature reduction technique the source video features can be completely omitted from future classification of video sequences.

Web Page Watermarking: XML files using Synonyms and Acronyms

Advent enhancements in the field of computing have increased massive use of web based electronic documents. Current Copyright protection laws are inadequate to prove the ownership for electronic documents and do not provide strong features against copying and manipulating information from the web. This has opened many channels for securing information and significant evolutions have been made in the area of information security. Digital Watermarking has developed into a very dynamic area of research and has addressed challenging issues for digital content. Watermarking can be visible (logos or signatures) and invisible (encoding and decoding). Many visible watermarking techniques have been studied for text documents but there are very few for web based text. XML files are used to trade information on the internet and contain important information. In this paper, two invisible watermarking techniques using Synonyms and Acronyms are proposed for XML files to prove the intellectual ownership and to achieve the security. Analysis is made for different attacks and amount of capacity to be embedded in the XML file is also noticed. A comparative analysis for capacity is also made for both methods. The system has been implemented using C# language and all tests are made practically to get the results.

An Effective Islanding Detection and Classification Method Using Neuro-Phase Space Technique

The purpose of planned islanding is to construct a power island during system disturbances which are commonly formed for maintenance purpose. However, in most of the cases island mode operation is not allowed. Therefore distributed generators (DGs) must sense the unplanned disconnection from the main grid. Passive technique is the most commonly used method for this purpose. However, it needs improvement in order to identify the islanding condition. In this paper an effective method for identification of islanding condition based on phase space and neural network techniques has been developed. The captured voltage waveforms at the coupling points of DGs are processed to extract the required features. For this purposed a method known as the phase space techniques is used. Based on extracted features, two neural network configuration namely radial basis function and probabilistic neural networks are trained to recognize the waveform class. According to the test result, the investigated technique can provide satisfactory identification of the islanding condition in the distribution system.

Analysis of Heart Beat Dynamics through Singularity Spectrum

The analysis to detect arrhythmias and life-threatening conditions are highly essential in today world and this analysis can be accomplished by advanced non-linear processing methods for accurate analysis of the complex signals of heartbeat dynamics. In this perspective, recent developments in the field of multiscale information content have lead to the Microcanonical Multiscale Formalism (MMF). We show that such framework provides several signal analysis techniques that are especially adapted to the study of heartbeat dynamics. In this paper, we just show first hand results of whether the considered heartbeat dynamics signals have the multiscale properties by computing local preticability exponents (LPEs) and the Unpredictable Points Manifold (UPM), and thereby computing the singularity spectrum.

PZ: A Z-based Formalism for Modeling Probabilistic Behavior

Probabilistic techniques in computer programs are becoming more and more widely used. Therefore, there is a big interest in the formal specification, verification, and development of probabilistic programs. In our work-in-progress project, we are attempting to make a constructive framework for developing probabilistic programs formally. The main contribution of this paper is to introduce an intermediate artifact of our work, a Z-based formalism called PZ, by which one can build set theoretical models of probabilistic programs. We propose to use a constructive set theory, called CZ set theory, to interpret the specifications written in PZ. Since CZ has an interpretation in Martin-L¨of-s theory of types, this idea enables us to derive probabilistic programs from correctness proofs of their PZ specifications.

Tidal Data Analysis using ANN

The design of a complete expansion that allows for compact representation of certain relevant classes of signals is a central problem in signal processing applications. Achieving such a representation means knowing the signal features for the purpose of denoising, classification, interpolation and forecasting. Multilayer Neural Networks are relatively a new class of techniques that are mathematically proven to approximate any continuous function arbitrarily well. Radial Basis Function Networks, which make use of Gaussian activation function, are also shown to be a universal approximator. In this age of ever-increasing digitization in the storage, processing, analysis and communication of information, there are numerous examples of applications where one needs to construct a continuously defined function or numerical algorithm to approximate, represent and reconstruct the given discrete data of a signal. Many a times one wishes to manipulate the data in a way that requires information not included explicitly in the data, which is done through interpolation and/or extrapolation. Tidal data are a very perfect example of time series and many statistical techniques have been applied for tidal data analysis and representation. ANN is recent addition to such techniques. In the present paper we describe the time series representation capabilities of a special type of ANN- Radial Basis Function networks and present the results of tidal data representation using RBF. Tidal data analysis & representation is one of the important requirements in marine science for forecasting.

Predictions Using Data Mining and Case-based Reasoning: A Case Study for Retinopathy

Diabetes is one of the high prevalence diseases worldwide with increased number of complications, with retinopathy as one of the most common one. This paper describes how data mining and case-based reasoning were integrated to predict retinopathy prevalence among diabetes patients in Malaysia. The knowledge base required was built after literature reviews and interviews with medical experts. A total of 140 diabetes patients- data were used to train the prediction system. A voting mechanism selects the best prediction results from the two techniques used. It has been successfully proven that both data mining and case-based reasoning can be used for retinopathy prediction with an improved accuracy of 85%.

Design and Control Strategy of Diffused Air Aeration System

During the past decade, pond aeration systems have been developed which will sustain large quantities of fish and invertebrate biomass. Dissolved Oxygen (DO) is considered to be among the most important water quality parameters in fish culture. Fishponds in aquaculture farms are usually located in remote areas where grid lines are at far distance. Aeration of ponds is required to prevent mortality and to intensify production, especially when feeding is practical, and in warm regions. To increase pond production it is necessary to control dissolved oxygen. Artificial intelligence (AI) techniques are becoming useful as alternate approaches to conventional techniques or as components of integrated systems. They have been used to solve complicated practical problems in various areas and are becoming more and more popular nowadays. This paper presents a new design of diffused aeration system using fuel cell as a power source. Also fuzzy logic control Technique (FLC) is used for controlling the speed of air flow rate from the blower to air piping connected to the pond by adjusting blower speed. MATLAB SIMULINK results show high performance of fuzzy logic control (FLC).

Fuzzy Logic Speed Controller with Reduced Rule Base for Dual PMSM Drives

Dual motor drives fed by single inverter is purposely designed to reduced size and cost with respect to single motor drives fed by single inverter. Previous researches on dual motor drives only focus on the modulation and the averaging techniques. Only a few of them, study the performance of the drives based on different speed controller other than Proportional and Integrator (PI) controller. This paper presents a detailed comparative study on fuzzy rule-base in Fuzzy Logic speed Controller (FLC) for Dual Permanent Magnet Synchronous Motor (PMSM) drives. Two fuzzy speed controllers which are standard and simplified fuzzy speed controllers are designed and the results are compared and evaluated. The standard fuzzy controller consists of 49 rules while the proposed controller consists of 9 rules determined by selecting the most dominant rules only. Both designs are compared for wide range of speed and the robustness of both controllers over load disturbance changes is tested to demonstrate the effectiveness of the simplified/reduced rulebase.

Detecting Remote Protein Evolutionary Relationships via String Scoring Method

The amount of the information being churned out by the field of biology has jumped manifold and now requires the extensive use of computer techniques for the management of this information. The predominance of biological information such as protein sequence similarity in the biological information sea is key information for detecting protein evolutionary relationship. Protein sequence similarity typically implies homology, which in turn may imply structural and functional similarities. In this work, we propose, a learning method for detecting remote protein homology. The proposed method uses a transformation that converts protein sequence into fixed-dimensional representative feature vectors. Each feature vector records the sensitivity of a protein sequence to a set of amino acids substrings generated from the protein sequences of interest. These features are then used in conjunction with support vector machines for the detection of the protein remote homology. The proposed method is tested and evaluated on two different benchmark protein datasets and it-s able to deliver improvements over most of the existing homology detection methods.