Application of Generalized Stochastic Petri Nets(GSPN) in Modeling and Evaluating a Resource Sharing Flexible Manufacturing System

In most study fields, a phenomenon may not be studied directly but it will be examined indirectly by phenomenon model. Making an accurate model of system, there is attained new information from modeled phenomenon without any charge, danger, etc... there have been developed more solutions for describing and analyzing the recent complicated systems but few of them have analyzed the performance in the range of system description. Petri nets are of limited solutions which may make such union. Petri nets are being applied in problems related to modeling and designing the systems. Theory of Petri nets allow a system to model mathematically by a Petri net and analyzing the Petri net can then determine main information of modeled system-s structure and dynamic. This information can be used for assessing the performance of systems and suggesting corrections in the system. In this paper, beside the introduction of Petri nets, a real case study will be studied in order to show the application of generalized stochastic Petri nets in modeling a resource sharing production system and evaluating the efficiency of its machines and robots. The modeling tool used here is SHARP software which calculates specific indicators helping to make decision.

Urban Water Management at the Time of Natural Disaster

since in natural accidents, facilities that relate to this vita element are underground so, it is difficult to find quickly some right, exact and definite information about water utilities. There fore, this article has done operationally in Boukan city in Western Azarbaijan of Iran and it tries to represent operation and capabilities of Geographical Information system (GIS) in urban water management at the time of natural accidents. Structure of this article is that firstly it has established a comprehensive data base related to water utilities by collecting, entering, saving and data management, then by modeling water utilities we have practically considered its operational aspects related to water utility problems in urban regions.

Challenges of Implementing Urban Master Plans: The Lahore Experience

Master plan is a tool to guide and manage the growth of cities in a planned manner. The soul of a master plan lies in its implementation framework. If not implemented, people are trapped in a mess of urban problems and laissez-faire development having serious long term repercussions. Unfortunately, Master Plans prepared for several major cities of Pakistan could not be fully implemented due to host of reasons and Lahore is no exception. Being the second largest city of Pakistan with a population of over 7 million people, Lahore holds the distinction that the first ever Master Plan in the country was prepared for this city in 1966. Recently in 2004, a new plan titled `Integrated Master Plan for Lahore-2021- has been approved for implementation. This paper provides a comprehensive account of the weaknesses and constraints in the plan preparation process and implementation strategies of Master Plans prepared for Lahore. It also critically reviews the new Master Plan particularly with respect to the proposed implementation framework. The paper discusses the prospects and pre-conditions for successful implementation of the new Plan in the light of historic analysis, interviews with stakeholders and the new institutional context under the devolution plan.

Modeling the Influence of Socioeconomic and Land-Use Factors on Mode Choice: A Comparison of Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and Melbourne, Australia

Metropolitan areas have suffered from traffic problems, which have steadily increased in many monocentric cities. Urban expansion, population growth, and road network development have resulted in a structural shift toward urban sprawl, increasing commuters’ dependence on private modes of transport. This paper aims to model the influence of socioeconomic and land-use factors on mode choice using a multinomial and nested logit model. Land-use patterns—such as residential, commercial, retail, educational and employment related—affect the choice of mode and destination in the short and medium term. Socioeconomic factors—such as age, gender, income, household size, and house type—also affect choice, while residential location is affected in the long term. Riyadh in Saudi Arabia and Melbourne in Australia were chosen as case studies. Riyadh is a car-dependent city with limited public transport, whereas Melbourne has good public transport but an increase in car dependence. Aggregate level land-use data and disaggregate level individual, household, and journey-to-work data are used to determine the effects of land use and socioeconomic factors on mode choice. The model results determined that urban sprawl is the main factor that affects mode choice, income, and house type.

The Knowledge Representation of the Genetic Regulatory Networks Based on Ontology

The understanding of the system level of biological behavior and phenomenon variously needs some elements such as gene sequence, protein structure, gene functions and metabolic pathways. Challenging problems are representing, learning and reasoning about these biochemical reactions, gene and protein structure, genotype and relation between the phenotype, and expression system on those interactions. The goal of our work is to understand the behaviors of the interactions networks and to model their evolution in time and in space. We propose in this study an ontological meta-model for the knowledge representation of the genetic regulatory networks. Ontology in artificial intelligence means the fundamental categories and relations that provide a framework for knowledge models. Domain ontology's are now commonly used to enable heterogeneous information resources, such as knowledge-based systems, to communicate with each other. The interest of our model is to represent the spatial, temporal and spatio-temporal knowledge. We validated our propositions in the genetic regulatory network of the Aarbidosis thaliana flower

Generation of Sets of Synthetic Classifiers for the Evaluation of Abstract-Level Combination Methods

This paper presents a new technique for generating sets of synthetic classifiers to evaluate abstract-level combination methods. The sets differ in terms of both recognition rates of the individual classifiers and degree of similarity. For this purpose, each abstract-level classifier is considered as a random variable producing one class label as the output for an input pattern. From the initial set of classifiers, new slightly different sets are generated by applying specific operators, which are defined at the purpose. Finally, the sets of synthetic classifiers have been used to estimate the performance of combination methods for abstract-level classifiers. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

High Impedance Fault Detection using LVQ Neural Networks

This paper presents a new method to detect high impedance faults in radial distribution systems. Magnitudes of third and fifth harmonic components of voltages and currents are used as a feature vector for fault discrimination. The proposed methodology uses a learning vector quantization (LVQ) neural network as a classifier for identifying high impedance arc-type faults. The network learns from the data obtained from simulation of a simple radial system under different fault and system conditions. Compared to a feed-forward neural network, a properly tuned LVQ network gives quicker response.

Unit Commitment Solution Methods

An effort to develop a unit commitment approach capable of handling large power systems consisting of both thermal and hydro generating units offers a large profitable return. In order to be feasible, the method to be developed must be flexible, efficient and reliable. In this paper, various proposed methods have been described along with their strengths and weaknesses. As all of these methods have some sort of weaknesses, a comprehensive algorithm that combines the strengths of different methods and overcomes each other-s weaknesses would be a suitable approach for solving industry-grade unit commitment problem.

The Effects of Media Campaigns on Different Cultures

The paper examines the Most public relations spots and advertisements dealing with drugs. For this reason, public service advertisements show Americans in activities with drugs and alcohol. The way that the advertisements are produced, viewers from the Middle East say these ads are not for them. They recognize the ads as strictly for Americans trying to overcome their problems with drugs and alcohol. Also, this paper explores the development of the advertisements which are ineffective in other cultures like the Islamic because the limited scope of the message does not have a major effect on the Islamic beliefs and practices.

A Black-box Approach for Response Quality Evaluation of Conversational Agent Systems

The evaluation of conversational agents or chatterbots question answering systems is a major research area that needs much attention. Before the rise of domain-oriented conversational agents based on natural language understanding and reasoning, evaluation is never a problem as information retrieval-based metrics are readily available for use. However, when chatterbots began to become more domain specific, evaluation becomes a real issue. This is especially true when understanding and reasoning is required to cater for a wider variety of questions and at the same time to achieve high quality responses. This paper discusses the inappropriateness of the existing measures for response quality evaluation and the call for new standard measures and related considerations are brought forward. As a short-term solution for evaluating response quality of conversational agents, and to demonstrate the challenges in evaluating systems of different nature, this research proposes a blackbox approach using observation, classification scheme and a scoring mechanism to assess and rank three example systems, AnswerBus, START and AINI.

Multi-Agent Systems for Intelligent Clustering

Intelligent systems are required in order to quickly and accurately analyze enormous quantities of data in the Internet environment. In intelligent systems, information extracting processes can be divided into supervised learning and unsupervised learning. This paper investigates intelligent clustering by unsupervised learning. Intelligent clustering is the clustering system which determines the clustering model for data analysis and evaluates results by itself. This system can make a clustering model more rapidly, objectively and accurately than an analyzer. The methodology for the automatic clustering intelligent system is a multi-agent system that comprises a clustering agent and a cluster performance evaluation agent. An agent exchanges information about clusters with another agent and the system determines the optimal cluster number through this information. Experiments using data sets in the UCI Machine Repository are performed in order to prove the validity of the system.

Observer Based Control of a Class of Nonlinear Fractional Order Systems using LMI

Design of an observer based controller for a class of fractional order systems has been done. Fractional order mathematics is used to express the system and the proposed observer. Fractional order Lyapunov theorem is used to derive the closed-loop asymptotic stability. The gains of the observer and observer based controller are derived systematically using the linear matrix inequality approach. Finally, the simulation results demonstrate validity and effectiveness of the proposed observer based controller.

Extending Global Full Orthogonalization method for Solving the Matrix Equation AXB=F

In the present work, we propose a new method for solving the matrix equation AXB=F . The new method can be considered as a generalized form of the well-known global full orthogonalization method (Gl-FOM) for solving multiple linear systems. Hence, the method will be called extended Gl-FOM (EGl- FOM). For implementing EGl-FOM, generalized forms of block Krylov subspace and global Arnoldi process are presented. Finally, some numerical experiments are given to illustrate the efficiency of our new method.

Automatic Generation Control of Multi-Area Electric Energy Systems Using Modified GA

A modified Genetic Algorithm (GA) based optimal selection of parameters for Automatic Generation Control (AGC) of multi-area electric energy systems is proposed in this paper. Simulations on multi-area reheat thermal system with and without consideration of nonlinearity like governor dead band followed by 1% step load perturbation is performed to exemplify the optimum parameter search. In this proposed method, a modified Genetic Algorithm is proposed where one point crossover with modification is employed. Positional dependency in respect of crossing site helps to maintain diversity of search point as well as exploitation of already known optimum value. This makes a trade-off between exploration and exploitation of search space to find global optimum in less number of generations. The proposed GA along with decomposition technique as developed has been used to obtain the optimum megawatt frequency control of multi-area electric energy systems. Time-domain simulations are conducted with trapezoidal integration along with decomposition technique. The superiority of the proposed method over existing one is verified from simulations and comparisons.

Seed-Based Region Growing (SBRG) vs Adaptive Network-Based Inference System (ANFIS) vs Fuzzyc-Means (FCM): Brain Abnormalities Segmentation

Segmentation of Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) images is the most challenging problems in medical imaging. This paper compares the performances of Seed-Based Region Growing (SBRG), Adaptive Network-Based Fuzzy Inference System (ANFIS) and Fuzzy c-Means (FCM) in brain abnormalities segmentation. Controlled experimental data is used, which designed in such a way that prior knowledge of the size of the abnormalities are known. This is done by cutting various sizes of abnormalities and pasting it onto normal brain tissues. The normal tissues or the background are divided into three different categories. The segmentation is done with fifty seven data of each category. The knowledge of the size of the abnormalities by the number of pixels are then compared with segmentation results of three techniques proposed. It was proven that the ANFIS returns the best segmentation performances in light abnormalities, whereas the SBRG on the other hand performed well in dark abnormalities segmentation.

A Constructive Proof of the General Brouwer Fixed Point Theorem and Related Computational Results in General Non-Convex sets

In this paper, by introducing twice continuously differentiable mappings, we develop an interior path following following method, which enables us to give a constructive proof of the general Brouwer fixed point theorem and thus to solve fixed point problems in a class of non-convex sets. Under suitable conditions, a smooth path can be proven to exist. This can lead to an implementable globally convergent algorithm. Several numerical examples are given to illustrate the results of this paper.

Evaluating Spectral Relationships between Signals by Removing the Contribution of a Common, Periodic Source A Partial Coherence-based Approach

Partial coherence between two signals removing the contribution of a periodic, deterministic signal is proposed for evaluating the interrelationship in multivariate systems. The estimator expression was derived and shown to be independent of such periodic signal. Simulations were used for obtaining its critical value, which were found to be the same as those for Gaussian signals, as well as for evaluating the technique. An Illustration with eletroencephalografic (EEG) signals during photic stimulation is also provided. The application of the proposed technique in both simulation and real EEG data indicate that it seems to be very specific in removing the contribution of periodic sources. The estimate independence of the periodic signal may widen partial coherence application to signal analysis, since it could be used together with simple coherence to test for contamination in signals by a common, periodic noise source.

Optimal Data Compression and Filtering: The Case of Infinite Signal Sets

We present a theory for optimal filtering of infinite sets of random signals. There are several new distinctive features of the proposed approach. First, we provide a single optimal filter for processing any signal from a given infinite signal set. Second, the filter is presented in the special form of a sum with p terms where each term is represented as a combination of three operations. Each operation is a special stage of the filtering aimed at facilitating the associated numerical work. Third, an iterative scheme is implemented into the filter structure to provide an improvement in the filter performance at each step of the scheme. The final step of the concerns signal compression and decompression. This step is based on the solution of a new rank-constrained matrix approximation problem. The solution to the matrix problem is described in this paper. A rigorous error analysis is given for the new filter.

The Development of Taiwanese Electronic Medical Record Systems Evaluation Instrument

This study used Item Analysis, Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) and Reliability Analysis (Cronbach-s α value) to exam the Questions which selected by the Delphi method based on the issue of “Socio-technical system (STS)" and user-centered perspective. A structure questionnaire with seventy-four questions which could be categorized into nine dimensions (healthcare environment, organization behaviour, system quality, medical data quality, service quality, safety quality, user usage, user satisfaction, and organization net benefits) was provided to evaluate EMR of the Taiwanese healthcare environment.